A great debate raged among participants in the Associated Parishes Council e-list (as distinct from the members e-list) just prior to our annual meeting this spring at the Sorrento Centre in British Columbia. Should we do an in-depth review of the texts of past AP statements in order to be true to what we have stood for over the years? Or should we take stock instead of our passion and the church’s challenge now? After all, said one Council member, “If our markers are the 1979 BCP and the AP statements for the past 25 years, we may close off some significant parts of our conversation.” Well, the agenda setters opted for both/and–let’s review our past statements, and let’s bring our current passions and interests to bear, and then let’s look toward the future where they point us. As one who was feeling some malaise about the confusion and fuzziness in recent Council discussions, I volunteered to review and comment on the fifteen past statements issued by the AP Council since 1969. What a task that was!
My first encounter with “Associated Parishes” was at a conference on “The Deacon” that I attended at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, in 1981. At the time I had my infant son with me. He has grown up and matured since that time, and so, in its own way, has “AP.”
It was at that conference that I discovered the so-called “Wewoka Statement” issued by AP Council in 1977:
The AP Council is committed to the renewal of the order of deacon as a full, normal ministry in the church, alongside the priesthood. . . . We feel that candidates for the priesthood should be ordained directly to that order. Deacons should be eligible to be elected as bishop and ordained directly to that order.
I had never heard of “Wewoka” before, and initially the title made more of an impression on me than the statement! In the end, however, the text of that statement and of the subsequent “Waverly Statement” [1981], also on deacons, provided some of the clarity and direction I was looking for in my vocational journey, and this had a great deal to do with my decision to remain a deacon rather than seek ordination to the priesthood. I suspect AP’s ideas and statements have influenced many other people in ways we could only guess.
That same infant son that I brought to South Bend, Indiana, in 1981 received his first communion at age two and a half. Without prompting on my part, he simply put out his hands for the bread one Sunday and became a communicant. The next summer, while on vacation and away from home, he was refused communion by a priest “of the old school” and was grief stricken. “I want the wound bwead!” he cried, wrapping his fat little fingers around the brass communion rail. “I want the bwead of heaven!” Fifteen years earlier, AP had foreseen such a problem and had led the way by insisting that children should be admitted to communion after baptism: “We believe our children should not be able to remember when they had not received communion. When they were baptized they were admitted to the koinonia, and the koinonia expresses its commonness in the eucharistic meal.” [1969 statement on the admission of children to communion]
As one Council member pointed out, sometimes our statements have been timely and effective, sometimes avant-garde, and usually well written. They have at times led the church in the right direction. We don’t draft and issue statements unless there is a clear or emergent consensus, and meetings without a statement are by no means fruitless.
Behind many of AP’s pronouncements lies a vision of the centrality of baptism. Baptism is full initiation into the Christian communion. Therefore, children should be admitted directly to communion after baptism [1969]. Therefore, the church should ordain persons directly to the order to which they have been called: “The only sacramental prerequisite for ordaining a bishop, priest or deacon is baptism. All members of the church should be eligible for ordination directly to any of the three orders.” [1992 Toronto Statement on direct ordination]
I would later learn that “AP” was started by a group of clergy who, in despair over Matins at the 11:00 a.m. Sunday service, sought to restore the eucharist as the main Sunday service and to introduce a Book of Common Prayer that reflected the core principles of the liturgical movement. Upon review, the first wave of statements from the AP Council following the appearance of the “new” BCP in the Episcopal Church in the USA seemed to be about cleaning up the cosmic crud that had accumulated in Anglican liturgy:
There should be one prayer book, for “in our oneness of book and church we have unity without uniformity; we have order without rigidity.” [1977 Prayer Book Statement]
The filioque clause should be removed from the Nicene Creed, as an “intrusion” that is and has been “a scandal to all Christians of the eastern church” and “a source of embarrassment to some in our own church.” [1978 New Orleans Statement]
There should be no more confusion relating to Christian initiation and the reception of holy communion. [1982 Resolution on baptism]
There was an elegant simplicity to this vision of the church’s life and mission, which in turn opened up space for greater variety in language about God and people and for richer liturgical expression.
The AP Council’s next project was to tackle the language of worship. The 1986 Lone Mountain Statement on inclusive language prescribed that:
- Language which applies to human beings should “indisputably refer to human beings, rather than males or females.”
- Language which applies to God should “employ feminine as well as masculine symbols and images” and should not “depersonalize” God.
- At the same time, the Church’s understanding of God as Trinity in unity should be maintained and respected, and the traditional formula for baptism, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” should be kept.
- Finally, the language of the Nicene Creed should be unambiguous about God’s full and free participation in human nature and about Mary’s active participation in the Incarnation, and should avoid the masculine pronoun for the Holy Spirit.
Space and symbols used in worship should be clear and uncluttered. Church spaces for worship should invite focus on the principal symbols of wine, water, the Word and God’s people. Bread should smell and look like bread. Water for baptism should be copious. Vestments and furniture should be made of honest material and be designed for their intended use–altars as tables, fonts as places of abundant water (not as vases or planters!) [1989 Gold Bar Statement on art and architecture]
Later statements show an increasing concern for social justice, care for the environment, and mission, though these themes are by no means absent in earlier statements. They present a point of view that departs radically from an Englishvillage, chaplaincy view of church life that emphasizes individual salvation and personal, private piety.
In Latin America the Anglican churches are developing their own identity. Several of them are moving toward self-determination. This movement stands firmly within Anglican tradition, which includes the right of national churches to develop their own liturgies, pastoral styles, and methods of theological reflection. [1988 Cuernavaca Statement on cultural diversity]. We see evangelism in terms of unselfish spiritual awakening in which we proclaim the good news of God’s love in Christ to a world greatly in need of reconciliation. . . . If we are to answer the call to evangelization, we need to become a people of humility and love, confident in our own standing in God’s grace. That can happen if we become the church which the liturgy proclaims us to be: the people of the baptismal covenant, formed by word and sacrament. [1990 Statement on the Decade of Evangelism]
The first AP Council meeting that I attended was in Rochester, New York, in 1991, when it made, in my opinion, one of the more forgettable statements on Supplemental Liturgical Materials, about which I knew nothing at the time.
In retrospect, I believe the Honey Creek Statement made in 1993 marked a turning point in the life of AP Council. That was the meeting where we wrestled with questions of the environment, the daily office, the service of celebration of a new ministry, non-verbal culture and print culture in the church. Again we were able to tie these disparate issues together by a shared understanding of the centrality of baptism. Baptism is about priesthood and offering the whole of creation to God through Christ. Baptism is about our vocation to treasure the environment and strive for justice. Baptism challenges the practice of ranking one form of ministry over another.
But the early 90s seemed to mark a sea change in more than the life of the church. It was a time when our economic and political worldview began shifting from state governments to transnational corporations, from national and regional economies to globalization, from modernism to postmodernism. The Honey Creek Statement wasn’t just about the centrality of baptism, but about mourning “the loss of old certainties and familiar liturgical forms.” It was a time for affirming “the power of the Holy Spirit, moving over and through chaos, to transform our lives and way of being the church.”
In 1996, we met in Fort Worth, Texas. No statement was issued that year, but we did meet with the Episcopal Women’s Caucus and enjoy an unforgettable celebration of the eucharist using images and language from Julian of Norwich. The homily was a reflection on the passage in John where Jesus taught at the synagogue at Capernaum: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. . . . Whoever eats me will live because of me.” And many of his disciples said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” But those who stayed said, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
The next statement to appear after Honey Creek came eight years later in a quite different tone, emerging out of our 2001 meeting in Santa Fe. At that meeting “our hearts burned within us” as Council members learned about the situation in the Anglican Church of Canada, about its history of embracing and implementing the government’s policy of assimilation of Indigenous peoples in order to further its mission.
Our statement called upon the church “to rethink completely its practice and understanding of mission,” predicated not solely on individual conversion to a relationship with Jesus, but on the “formation of faithful communities as signs of healing and reconciliation,” and “always beginning with God’s purpose for creation and the reign of justice on earth.”
This year, the Sorrento Statement went even further. The context for our reflections was no longer a sense of despair over Morning Prayer as the Sunday service, but a sense of anguish over the events of September 11, 2001, over the escalating conflict in the Middle East, and over the devastating effects on Indigenous peoples of the legacy of colonialism in which the Anglican Church colluded.
Our theological response continues to be one that asserts the centrality of baptism, but with a deeper understanding of what that might mean. “We call upon all faithful people to make the daily and difficult choice for nonviolent and peacemaking action rather than revenge and violence. In the face of the United States government’s reaction to the events of September 11… we call upon our churches to be advocates and agents of justice, respecting the dignity of every human being.”
The reaction among our membership– and beyond–to the Sorrento Statement has been very mixed, and mingled among the voices of dismay, anger or support are the words of the disciples at Capernaum: “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”
AP Council started with The Book of Common Prayer and found in it the words of life. As this ginger group of theologians and liturgists worked north and south of the border on revised books, we realized that the baptismal rite alone demanded a clear rethinking of our practices of initiation, formation, ministry, architecture and music, congregational life and mission.
Our statements have been about declericalizing and diversifying leadership, about widening the circle of our Christian communities, about simplifying and enlivening our liturgy, about deepening our sense of mission and our interaction with culture, and more recently, about changing our assumptions about mission and evangelism altogether. It’s also interesting to note the omissions and biases. There is no statement that speaks clearly about the episcopate. While there is plenty said about baptism, there is little about the eucharist and what it means to achieve reconciliation through communion. There are no statements that comment specifically on the ordination of women to the priesthood or the episcopate, nor on samesex unions. None refers to postmodernism, nor to the emergent perspective of “Generation Xers” and “Millennials.”
With some notable exceptions, the statements tend to focus on the structures and politics of parish and synodical life in the Episcopal Church in the USA. Prior to the Santa Fe Statement, the views expressed by the AP Council on mission and evangelism paid little attention to the experience and perspectives of those, in North America and the wider communion, who have been recipients rather than agents of the church’s mission. And while there is fleeting reference to the environment in some statements, there is no mention at all of the economic context in which we live as a western church, nor of the Jubilee 2000 movement and its powerful focus on global debt which seized the imagination of people of faith around the world.
Some would say that such things are not the business of a think tank about liturgy. And of course, there never has been any expectation that AP statements should be comprehensive, regular or even topical. Nevertheless, until last year the “mission” part of our mandate has tended to be an add-on.
What then are the issues and opportunities presented by these statements and by the current interests and passions of Council members? And what do they suggest for the future agenda of “APLM” (a new form of abbreviation reminding us that mission as well as liturgy falls within our mandate)?
One place to start is simply to examine the extent to which our commitments as represented in these statements have taken root. What’s happening in our churches on Sunday mornings? Has the practice and meaning of baptism been transformed as we had hoped, or does baptism essentially continue in the old pattern? What do our spaces look like now? Is there any noticeable trend in the symbols and furniture being used? How well are Christian communities being formed and what new leadership styles–if any–are being developed? Are there any new trends evident in the way we prepare people for the presbyterate? What kind of people are being drawn to the diaconate? Who are we electing as our bishops and how and what are they doing in that office?
While we’re at it, we should probably ask whether our past commitments continue to hold the same kind of importance they once did as we move into a new future. For example, while I personally long for the day when direct ordination will be a natural practice of a church in which baptism is seen as the primary sign of a person’s identity and commitment, I’m not sure it is as high a priority. We should probably be paying less attention to formal structures and ministerial authority, and more attention to effective ways for creating communities of healing, engaging the entire laos, developing and diversifying leadership, discovering anew symbols and rituals that work.
Another direction on which we have already embarked is to deepen our inquiry into the nature of mission and inculturation, and to look for and reinforce the lived connection between liturgy and mission.
Certainly the Council was galvanized in Santa Fe in 2001 by the story of the Anglican Church of Canada as it wrestles with its colonial legacy and seeks to make room for a new relationship–a new agape– with a self-determining church of Indigenous People. What was new, however, was that we took it another step by meeting the next year in the interior of British Columbia, where we visited the site of a residential school, spoke with the Indigenous priest in that community about her work, and attended a Sunday liturgy with a local Indigenous congregation.
On that occasion, we did more than observe some form of “inculturation” in which a distinctive people draw from their culture to shape a distinctive style of worship. There were indeed some culturally unique aspects to the service and the space where it was held–banners with eagle feathers, bannock (traditional Native bread) for eucharistic bread, sweetgrass on the altar, and in the eucharistic prayer, a reference to “ancestors” and to God’s gift of “salmon and clear rivers.” What mattered more, however, is that we were crossing a line, entering unfamiliar territory, and allowing ourselves to see and receive gifts from people not just like us . . . a kind of reverse mission.
I believe this movement toward others beyond and unlike ourselves is an urgent project for us and our respective churches. Our Council statements need to emerge not only from the exchange of ideas, but from relationships with people–the kind of people that Jesus would choose as his companions. By doing so, we will learn that it is impossible to compartmentalize the language and shape of baptism and eucharist from God’s work of constantly overcoming mutual isolation and individualism, of constantly opening up the possibility of new relatedness. We need to do more of this, when we meet and when we go home to our own neighborhoods and communities.
A third focus for the future of APLM, as suggested in the Fall 2001 issue of OPEN, is for us to learn how to be a “practically postmodern church.” We need to find ways of articulating the significance of baptism in a context of radical plurality and fundamental uncertainty about the standards of truth, and indeed we have already begun to do so. And we need to understand and practice liturgy not simply as creating a “worship experience” cut off from life and living, but in its original sense as accomplishing a public work–giving due worth to God and offering forgiveness, healing and reconciliation for the entire human household. And perhaps we should be open to doing this with or without another version of The Book of Common Prayer.
If we are going to become a postmodern church, however, we must go about it reflectively and critically, never losing sight that our worldview is defined and limited by the privilege and power we enjoy as North Americans relative to the rest of the world. We need to see the global market economy that forms the backdrop for postmodernism as an idol that offers a simulated unity and a fake eschatology while effectively increasing social and economic disparity among peoples. We need to be aware that postmodernism is a largely western phenomenon and not assume it is a paradigm shift for all peoples of the world.
My son Richard who came with me to the conference on the diaconate in 1981 is now 21, a student of philosophy at McGill University, standing at the threshold of the years. He is still a faithful Christian and Anglican. The Council of Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission, though some 50 years young, is also standing at the threshold of the years, also still faithful to its Christian and Anglican roots. I wonder what statements it will make in the future, and what stories they will tell?