Lex orandi, lex credendi

Historians of the early Church coin the Latin tag lex orandi, lex credendi, meaning the rule or law of prayer and that of belief. The phrase refers to the interface of worship and belief in the life of the Church. What Christians believe about God informs how they pray, and in turn how they worship shapes their beliefs about God. If you want to know what a Christian community believes, then observe how they pray and how they worship. There is theological osmosis at the heart of Christian life.

To this twofold theological cord, perhaps we should add a third strand: lex cantandi? What Christians sing also exercises a formative influence, not least in contemporary charismatic worship where worship songs play a significant role in accompanying teaching. The combination of word and melody is a powerful tool that shapes the faith and spirituality of both individuals and communities, fostering a sense of belonging. In old age familiar words from the liturgy provide reassurance and music can unlock the gates of memory that might otherwise be shut because of dementia. We think of liturgy as ‘things we do’ but do not always recognise that liturgy is doing something to us. It is shaping our discipleship.

I remember Fr George Guiver CR commenting that the way liturgy works is akin to pickling onions. Question: how do you pickle onions? Answer: you leave them in vinegar a long time. Liturgy works through repetition and familiarity which is why it demands our best efforts to get it right. In his book, You Are What You Love, the American theologian James Smith says: ‘Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts’.Footnote ⁵

In the Church of England, the scriptures and the Book of Common Prayer constitute the legal fulcrum around which the ministry of the Church pivots, as the Canons and the Declaration of Assent to which every minister must subscribe make abundantly clear. As every ecclesiastical lawyer knows, kanon, the Greek word for a measuring rod, came to be applied to the rules for the ordering of worship; hence ‘Canon Law’ and the ‘Canons of the Church of England’. But the Greek word also had a liturgical use: it came to be applied to the ‘Canon of the Mass’, the central section of the Eucharistic Prayer, including the Words of Institution. In early liturgical books, where improvisation was permitted, we find the word appearing as a heading, indicating to the priest that the text from this point on was fixed and invariable.

I mention this because liturgy is not a straight-jacket, as some of its detractors suggest, but rather a living tradition of word, gesture and movement within which certain hallowed texts and actions are core and invariable, but others are changeable or optional. The task of the liturgist, therefore, is not only that of a wordsmith, but one of stewardship, identifying the limits of flexibility and permitted improvisation to safeguard doctrine and ensure coherence across the Church. And of course, the task is never done and dusted because language changes. As T S Eliot said:Footnote ⁶

Periodically liturgy needs to re-minted to serve the culture of which it is a part. Its voice needs to be both timeless reflecting the tradition and, as Cranmer would have insisted, contemporary so that it is understood by the people. Furthermore, texts require interpretation, much in the way that a musical score is brought to life by a conductor. In this context, a third task of the liturgist is to craft guidance and performance notes through rubrics and perhaps an accompanying commentary to help ministers in their task of performance.

If this is the respective role of the liturgist and the Church’s ministers, what about oversight? In the case of the Church of England, oversight is exercised through the General Synod and its House of Bishops. Their joint task is one of scrutiny, amendment, approval and supervision – or to use an unpopular word to which I will return later – enforcement. Which brings us to the core of our debate today as we think about current and future liturgical development.

The process of liturgical change and revision

Canon B 1 lays out the forms of service which are authorised for use; namely:

1. i. The Book of Common Prayer;

2. ii. The Shortened forms of Morning and Evening Prayer set out in the Schedule to the Act of Uniformity Amendment Act (1872);

3. iii. The Accession Day services, amended from time to time by Royal Warrant;

4. iv. Any forms of service authorized by the Convocations for their respective provinces, by the Archbishops acting jointly, or by the local Ordinary (under Canon B 4).

The term ‘Forms of Service’ may mean ‘any … matter to be used as part of a service’ as well as explicitly collects, lessons, rubrics and calendars. Canon B 2 makes provision for the General Synod to approve forms of service either for a fixed or an indefinite period, and to extend the period of authorisation or to discontinue it. These decisions require two-thirds majorities in each House.

As recent changes to the State Prayers and the Accession Service following the death of Queen Elizabeth II remind us, the Book of Common Prayer may be amended from time to time by Warrant under the Sovereign’s Sign Manual, but in practice this has not been done except to amend Royal material. That aside, the legal process by which the agreed normative framework of word and action that constitutes the authorised liturgy of the Church of England can be changed is set out in the Canons and Constitution of the General Synod and, in relation to the latter, are Byzantine in their complexity. GS 2346 describes this process (expected to take around two years) in detail:Footnote ⁷

As we look to the future, I want to focus on three thorny but inter-related issues that have come under the spotlight in the wake of the publication of Prayers of Love and Faith: first, the nature of authorisation by a competent person under Canon B 4; secondly, the parameters of the minister’s discretion under Canon B 5; and thirdly, so-called ‘commendation’ by the House of Bishops.

Authorisation by the competent person under Canon B 4

There is no special process by which the Convocations, the Archbishops, or the Ordinary authorise liturgical material although the material must be ‘in both words and order … in their opinion reverent and seemly and neither contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter’. Here is the nub of the matter: are the Prayers of Love and Faith contrary to or indicative of any ‘departure from the doctrine of the Church of England’? Listening to the opinions of members of Synod, it would seem that ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice’. But there is a second question: if it were conceded that the Prayers do indicate a ‘departure’, are they a departure ‘in any essential matter’? Who defines what is essential?

Throughout Christian history there has been a counterpoint between orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxis (right practice). Together they form the dynamic of Christian discipleship. At the circumference, there have always been periodic skirmishes about boundaries and the extent of our koinonia, our communion, our common life in Christ. What belongs to the essence of Christian discipleship and what is adiaphora – a matter of ‘indifference’ because it is not central and is neither commanded nor forbidden by scripture?

This is territory that the Roman Catholic Church is also navigating, as witnessed by the Pope’s Apostolic Instruction, Fiducia Supplicans. Footnote ⁹ The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued pastoral guidelines that now permit clergy to give a blessing to couples in an ‘irregular’ relationship, including those who are cohabiting or who are divorced and remarried, as well as same-sex couples. The Dicastery insists that the Catholic Church is not changing its doctrine of marriage and it has (wisely) declined to make any public statement about the parameters of sexual intimacy. In contrast to what is being permitted in the Church of England, the new guidance circumscribes the public liturgical expression of this new liberty and seeks to honour the exercise of conscience by faithful Catholics. Whether the Catholic bishops can hold the line over the restriction on public celebration of what the Instruction describes as ‘irregular’ relationships remains to be seen, but it certainly appears that the ‘one size fits all’ approach to moral dilemmas, with no room for nuance or exceptions, is no longer in vogue. Voltaire’s principle that the best should not be made the enemy of the good seems to be the new modus vivendi in Rome.

With regard to Prayers of Love and Faith, there was much discussion about the propriety of either the Archbishops or the Ordinary permitting their use pursuant to Canon B 4. Some people have encouraged the Archbishops to authorise the use of the material on a trial basis. This is certainly what happened 25 years ago when the Liturgical Commission embarked upon the renewal of the Daily Office. It would have been foolhardy to have embarked upon such an ambitious project without trialling new texts, but there was nothing controversial about the venture.

The minister’s discretion under Canon B 5

The Declaration of Assent states that ministers shall only use forms of service authorised or allowed by canon. Canon B 1 also indicates that it is ‘the minister’s responsibility to have a good understanding of the forms of service used and shall endeavour to ensure that the worship offered glorifies God and edifies the people’. With this in mind, Canon B 5 provides for two kinds of discretion in the conduct of public prayer. First, an officiating minister can make ‘variations which are not of substantial importance’ in any authorised form of service. And secondly, the minister with cure of souls can (and the caveat is significant):

In both cases, the restriction on the minister’s discretion is that ‘variations in forms of service and all forms of service used under this Canon shall be reverent and seemly and shall be neither contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter’. For example, under this Canon, the relatively free structure of A Service of the Word (itself an authorised form of service) allows it to be used flexibly and with much local innovation and creativity across the land.

Commendation by the House of Bishops

‘Commendation’ by the House of Bishops is a shorthand for the longer formula that certain liturgical material is ‘commended by the House of Bishops of the General Synod for use by the minister in the exercise of his or her discretion under Canon B 5 of the Canons of the Church of England’. In other words, the bishops warmly invite ministers to use certain liturgical material, without prescribing its use and without insisting that only this material be used for the intended purpose.

Contrary to what some assume, commendation conveys no legal status and does not definitively settle the question whether commended liturgical material is suitable for use, i.e. whether it is in conformity with the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter. It is why ‘commendation’ by the House of Bishops, as the route to promulgate the Prayers of Love and Faith, has recently been challenged,Footnote ¹⁰ lest a minister using the material be subject to a challenge in the courts under the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1963 which would settle the question of the lawfulness of the material. Most are agreed that such a scenario is not an attractive proposition.

Given the way that the scrutiny of liturgical material has clogged up the agenda of General Synod in the recent past, since 1985 commendation by the House of Bishops has become the preferred method of promulgating new liturgical material with first the publication of Lent, Holy Week, Easter and subsequently of Prayer and Dedication after Civil Marriage. The latter material has been cited by some as a precedent for finding a way through the current Synodical impasse. Just as 40 years ago Prayer and Dedication after Civil Marriage had been crafted as a pastoral accommodation for the recognition and welcome of divorced persons without changing the Church’s doctrine of holy matrimony, so Prayers of Love and Faith, at least in origin, had similarly been conceived purely in terms of a pastoral accommodation. A tension arose, however, once requests were made in the course of the debate in General Synod to supplement the provision with ‘sample services’ and so-called ‘standalone services’ – not that anyone explained what the new term ‘standalone’ actually meant. At the time of drafting, the guidance to Prayers for Love and Faith endeavours to clarify matters. It states:

The guidance section goes on to explain that:

In the case of non-controversial liturgical material, and in situations where many churches and dioceses have had their own local forms of service, commendation by the House of Bishops has allowed locally developed material to continue to be used.Footnote ¹³ During my time as Chair of the Liturgical Commission, Prayers for Safeguarding, A Time for Creation (the suite of liturgical resources for so-called ‘Creationtide’), Prayers for Use during the Covid Pandemic, and most recently Liturgical Resources for Racial Justice, have all been promulgated in this way. To repeat: commendation rests on the House of Bishops being of the opinion that the material is reverent and seemly and not contrary to or indicative of a departure from doctrine in any essential matter. The question of what constitutes an essential matter is always carefully considered and none of the above was deemed to challenge or undermine the deposit of faith.

Liturgical discipline and enforcement

Finally, a word about liturgical discipline, mindful that the story of liturgical change in the Church of England is as much one of defiance and disobedience, as of renewal and recovery. It is one thing to create and authorise elegant liturgies that are doctrinally ‘sound’ and to agree parameters for their use and/or adaptation by officiating ministers, but how do you supervise their use, not least when the internet is the ‘go to’ first choice of hard-pressed clergy? How do you model good liturgical practice to new generations of clergy for whom the Book of Common Prayer is no longer their mainstay and when the curricula of our TEIs (Theological Education Institutions) are so overloaded? Above all, how do you enforce liturgical conformity in an age that exalts freedom of choice and rebels against all forms of constraint?

In 2010, I was appointed a member of the House of Bishops’ Working Group on ‘Discipline in relation to matters of Doctrine, Ritual and Ceremonial’. The group had been appointed in succession to the so-called Chester Group that had tried unsuccessfully to tackle the fraught matter of enforcement and whose recommendations had been roundly rejected by General Synod in 2004. The question the group was asked to address was straightforward: should the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1963 be retained and updated, or should it be replaced by a new Measure?

Although the 1963 Measure is not unusable, it has not been used for years. Its processes are laborious and cumbersome.Footnote ¹⁴ Most seriously, if a complaint were to be pursued under the 1963 Measure, any appeal would lie with a Commission of Review, a body on which the number of secular judges would exceed the number of bishops and in contemporary Britain such a scenario was thought by the working party to be highly undesirable.

Two key issues had to be addressed by the Working Group. First, are issues of doctrine, ritual and ceremonial justiciable before a court or tribunal? Second, the defeat of the Chester Group’s proposals by Synod seemed to result from the threshold to bring an action under the proposed new disciplinary procedure being thought by some as too low and open to abuse and a recipe for civil war in the Church. What would be a more appropriate threshold for bringing a complaint?

You will not be surprised to know that the Working Group could not come to a common mind on any of this apart from agreeing with the then President of Tribunals, Lord Justice Mummery, that complaints about doctrine could not be included under the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003 (CDM). Furthermore, if a new disciplinary framework were to be proposed in replacement of the 1963 Measure, then it would require a new power to be conferred upon a diocesan bishop to order a licensed minister to desist from promulgating serious departures from the Church’s doctrine and/or committing a serious breach of the rules in relation to authorised services, ritual or ceremonial. Such an order would need to be supplemented by an appellate function administered by a tribunal and any further breach constitute an offence under the CDM. To my knowledge, the report of the Working Party, in a Kafkaesque way, has never seen the light of day and doubtless gathers dust in a file somewhere in Church House.