Christmas Midnight Eucharist at Norwich Cathedral

Norwich Cathedral: Romanesque and Gothic

The liturgy at Norwich Cathedral for the Xmas midnight service is, in my opinion, inspiring. It picks out all the positive aspects of the faith which we associate with Xmas and explains why Christmas brings light, hope and faith to millions of souls who have otherwise lost their way or are oppressed by darkness. Below I reproduce a few of the highlights from the order of service:

Prayers of penitence before the crib

Deacon: Christ the light of the world has come to dispel the darkness of our hearts. Let us turn to the light and confess our sins.

All: Amen

Deacon: God our father you sent your Son full of grace and truth; forgive our failure to receive him.

All: Amen

Deacon: Jesus our saviour you were born in poverty and laid in a manger; forgive our greed and rejection of your ways.

All: Amen

The Collect:

Bishop: Eternal God who made this most holy night to shine with the brightness or your true light..bring us, who have known the revelation of that light on Earth, to see the radiance of your heavenly glory; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

All: Amen.

A Christmas proclamation

Choir: God is with us. Hear ye people. Even to the uttermost end of the earth. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. The people that dwell in the shadow of death, upon them the light has shined. For unto us a child is born! For unto us a son is given! And the government shall be upon his shoulder; And his name shall be called Wonderful! Counsellor! The Mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of peace. Hear ye people. Even to the uttermost end of the earth. God is with us. Christ is born!

Hymn: It came upon a midnight clear

All: For lo! the days are hastening on,

By prophet bards foretold,
When, with the ever-circling years,
Shall come the Age of Gold;
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And all the world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.

Prayers of intercession

Bishop: Father, in this holy night angels and shepherds worshiped at the manger throne. Receive the worship we offer in fellowship with Mary, Joseph and all the saints through him who is your Word made flesh, our saviour Jesus Christ. 

All: Amen.

The distribution

Bishop: Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Blessed are those who are called to his supper.

All: Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.

My Comment

A humble stable, a helpless new born, a manger throne, worshiping ouctast shepherds, gentile astrologers, a mother of humble birth,... and above all the lamb of God who was to give himself to the uttermost.....who would have thought that these were to be the means by which in these last days God has spoken. Whoever, except from a divine perspective, would be able to say of those who viewed such an apparently prosiac scene: The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light!

The stable throne isn't the natural revelatory expectations of guilt and angst ridden human religion, religion which likely majors in one or more of: high and mighty patriarchal rulers, power, authoritarianism, sectarianism. judgement, condemnation, rule driven salvation, punishment by torture, vengeance, fear, hell and hamnation for the infidel, gnosticism for the spiritual elite etc....... this clustered complex fills the heads of those who have yet to see a vision of the God of grace for themselves or who think the gospel is only for their very bespoke religious community with its proprietary practices and beliefs.  

In the above liturgy, however, we see divine self-revelation. In all its facets the Gospel is beyond human creative spiritual thought; the evidence of that is seen in the fact that just about every doctrinaire religious sectarian I have met, I have found they do all they can to de-legitimize and undermine the means by which the liturgy above is commended to one's heart, namely, the Spirit of Adoption which cries out "Abba, Father!"

In humble circumstances we find The Unexpected Revelation

Seventy Years Ago

The following picture is a scan taken from the post-VE day edition of St Mary's Baptist Church's magazine, The Messenger,  dated June 1945. The scan shows the lead article written by the then minister Gilbert Laws. It takes the view that God was clearly on the side of the British. There is some justification for that view: For a militarily ill prepared country things hung in the balance for a while and when against the odds victory came about such evil was uncovered  that it seemed impossible for God to have been on the side of the enemy. One other thing which comes out is that St Mary's Baptist Church clearly felt very much part of the British establishment Christian scene; an ironic fact considering their origins in a strongly dissenting out-on-a-limb nonconformity (See my NCBC History walk for more details)

(Click to enlarge)

Ten Years Ago, Sixty Years Ago & Eighty Years Ago

Our Oldest Church Magazine: August 1922

St Mary's Baptist Church (Now  called "Norwich Central Baptist Church") used to have a monthly church magazine called "The Messenger".  Copies of the magazine going back to 1922 exist in the church records and form a valuable historical resource. But The Messenger was axed at a church meeting circa 2005 after well over eighty years of distribution; the reasons for this were probably to do with a combination of a lack of interest, support and resources. 

The Messenger gave me an opportunity to contribute and so I wrote a few articles for it (four in all) entitled "Fifty Years Ago" (although one article was actually called "Sixty Years Ago"). In these articles I would quote text taken from a Messenger published fifty years previously but of the same month. I wrote these articles between 2004 and 2005, just before the magazine got axed. Below I reproduce an article I wrote for the April 2005 Messenger which harked back to April 1955. It tells us something very different about the state of the church and the youth work of that day: See if you can spot the difference.

***

From The Messenger of April 2005:

Fifty Years Ago

The Messenger of April 1955 records a membership at St Mary’s Baptist church of 513 and Sunday school with 319 “scholars” served by 63 teachers. And yet, twenty years before this date, the April 1935 Messenger reports a membership of 704, and a Sunday school in 1933 of nearly 700 “scholars” and 137 teachers. If by 1955 they were getting a little worried about decaying numbers they need not have done because the US cavalry were coming over the hill! The April 1955 takes up the story:

The telephones in the pressrooms are ringing impatiently, there is the whirr and click and flash of cameras. Hundreds of people have gathered at the quayside to give him a welcome. Eyes are goggly and mouths are agape. He is not from Hollywood, he is Dr. Billy Graham….. “Phenomenal” is the word for the way in which the secular Press have dealt with his return to this country …..

            …. In conjunction with the Dr Graham relays from Glasgow to Norwich, St. Mary’s is arranging for the training of counselors. The lectures will be available for all committed Christians and will continue on Thursday evenings at 7.30 in the Shakespeare room until 14^th April.

            Now to prayer for all these ventures and a humble trust in God whose harvest we seek to reap.

A year later the tone of the May 1956 Messenger is upbeat. In an article headed “It Grows and Grows” we read:

One of the most encouraging sights on Sunday evening is to look up into the gallery of St. Mary’s to where the young people, the church of the future, are sitting. A few weeks back there was only one vacant seat.

It’s just as well we haven’t got these numbers in youth church – if we did then when the young people go to their classes on Sunday morning, all the teachers would have to go with them, leaving the Rev. James East looking out on ……. an empty church.

***

Church attendance on a national level rallied somewhat during the austere fifties. But the sixties were yet to come and that decade broke many intellectual and social molds, putting church attendance under pressure and helping to create an embattled marginalized community conducive to the growth of fundamentalist attitudes. However, it's probably true to say that many parents of the fifties and early sixties, although still respecting the church as an institution, sent their children to Sunday school just to get a bit of Sunday peace and did not attend church themselves. Hence, the inflated ratio of Sunday school numbers to church membership that we see above. But I don't think anyone was complaining; it was a nice problem to have!

NCBC History Walk Version 5

Norwich started as a cluster of Saxon thatched huts in a river valley; after nearly a 1000 years the cathedral still dominates that valley.

A new version of my Norwich Churches and Belief Communities history walk can be downloaded from here.

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: Unity Service.

NCBC Unity Service display

Last Sunday evening at Norwich Central Baptist Church a service was held under the rubrick United Service For the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  The Sermon was provided by Father David Paul, dean of Norwich's Roman Catholic cathedral. It was a good sermon emphasizing a Christocentric faith, a Truine God, sin, repentance and forgiveness. Fr David likened the different expressions of faith to the very different building types one finds in Norwich; from the Cathedral to the University of East Anglia and everything in between. The above picture shows a display of tea lights and church names created during the service by representatives of the different fellowships present. I have listed those fellowships below:

Let's start the list with three well established churches taken from the three main English traditions: 

Norwich Cathedral - Church of England

St John the Baptist Cathedral - Roman Catholic 

Norwich Central Baptist Church - non conformist

The Others:

Witard Road Baptist Church

St Andrews and Christchurch, Eaton, (C of E)

Central  Council of Churches Together

St Peter Mancroft, C of E

St Luke's C of E

Norwich Prison Chaplaincy

Silver Road Baptist Church

St Giles C of E

St Matthews C of E

ChapelField road Methodist Church

White Woman Lane Methodist Church

Holy Apostles RC, West Earlham

The list above represents quite a mix of traditions, notably absent, however, are representatives of the more moderate evangelical fellowships of Brethren, Independents and Charismatic churches. But the fact is even some of these evangelical moderates march along the margins of the separatist hard-line sectarian world. Unity of this kind is a very fragile thing and for some an uncomfortable almost spiritually compromising experience. In this connection it is no surprise that Fr. David wasn't going make any mention of such subjects as transubstantiation, purgatory or the status of Mary and the Pope - that could be inviting trouble, needless to say. The ethos of this sort of gathering is that whilst we have differences of opinion on such subjects, we can nevertheless gather around central and essential unifying themes such as were focused on by Fr David.

It's instructive to contrast the above list with the purist sectarian and fundamentalist Christians I have met in my time, some of whom get dishonorable mentions  in my blogs. The list below embraces a variety of both fellowships, para-church organisations and individuals of this type. Unquestionably, they all to a man would thoroughly despise the sort of unity event of Sunday night. But they hardly need a bunch of ecumenically minded Christians as a pretext to hunt down "heresy"; they can find that enough among fellow fundamentalists to satiate the "error" correcting urges of even the most fastidious of fundamentalists. If some of the Christian fundamentalist brands listed below happened to confront one another the exchange would be sharp, irreconcilable and may well end up with mutual accusations of heresy, apostasy and even blasphemy; as Lord Clarke put it in his Civilization series, among fundamentalists there is an implicit belief in the Divine authority of their opinions. The Christians listed below would likely object to being gathered together with the more doctrinally unorthodox groups such as the JWs and Mormons, but in my experience these communities show such similarity in epistemic method, approach, attitude, concept, culture, ethos, and even use of language as to warrant common classification.  The list below is far from exhaustive; as I have said before, under every stone one turns a new version of Christian fundamentalism can be found.

Benny Hinn,

The 2 x 2 sect
Closed Brethren
Mark Driscoll,

Answers in Genesis
The Witness Lee Brotherhood,

Strict and Particular Baptists

Reformation identifying Evangelicals

Reformo-Charismatics

Children of God.

Strict and Traditional Brethren

Jehovah’s witnesses

Mormons

The Christadelphians

Strict and Traditional Evangelicals

Herbert Armstrong and the Plain Truth

The Jesus Army

Restorationists

Gnostic and fideist charismatics

The Snake Handlers sect.
Potters House
The Car Park Sect

Metropolitan tabernacle

Toronto Blessing revival

Barry Smith: Millennium Bug prophet

Gold dust and angel feathers Charismatics

Todd Bentley’s Lakeland revival

The Geocentric Christians

Christian Flat Earthers (Now defunct?)

Real Catholics (Michael Voris)

William Tapley, 2010 end of world prophet 

Harold Camping, 2011 end of world prophet

The people embodied in this list would undoubtedly crow over the flabby state of the church represented by Sunday night's service. But then look at the state of this list of fundamentalists; can you imagine any of them getting together for a united service without the precaution of wearing brickbat proof helmets? Does such a collection of contradictory nasties endear the church to anyone?

Relevant links:
http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-escape-to-arcadia.html
http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/mouth-of-god.html