Planning the Church Year. Leonel L. Mitchell

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СКАЧАТЬ responsibility to supervise and train lay people for their ministries, in the liturgy and in the world. But neither priest nor deacon are to do the job for them. The best model I can hold up for the Church is the Boy and Girl Scouts. They have professional leadership, but most of the grass-roots work is done by volunteers whom the professionals train.

      Everything needs to be brought to the altar at the parish eucharist, and from the altar, the power of God goes forth into all these activities of Christians in the Church and in the world. All we really need to do the liturgy of the Church is a priest to preside, a leader of song, and a community that wants to worship. Yet the whole parish can be involved in the planning and the doing of it.

      Clergy should not be afraid to use their own skills or to make way for others to use theirs. Ordained ministers are not diminished by someone who does things better than they do, unless they try to prevent them from doing it.

      The committee should be set up initially by the parish priest, who should appoint the first members. The committee can then decide to increase its own membership by adding those it comes to see that it needs. Its scope of authority should also be spelled out clearly at the beginning. It can be an advisory committee to the rector or vicar, presenting its conclusions to the priest for canonical approval, or it can be a decision-making body to which the priest delegates the planning responsibility. It is important that the committee understand which it is.

      In addition to this sort of overall planning for worship, the liturgy committee needs to look each year at the liturgical year and other parish calendars (when church school starts, public school vacations, etc.) and decide the shape of the entire year’s worship. They need to decide what the congregation will do this year to mark off Advent, Lent, and Easter, the major liturgical seasons, and what will be done to distinguish festivals from ordinary Sundays. They need to integrate into the liturgical calendar local parish celebrations (and anticipate problems that might interfere with church attendance on particular days). The point is that unless these things are decided for the whole year, or at least for a liturgical season, there will be perceived discontinuity from Sunday to Sunday.

      To plan a specific service, the celebrant, preacher, and music director would be the minimum planning group. To this minimum it helps to add the deacon (if there is one), readers, leader of the Prayers of the People, an usher, and representative singers and congregation members. Sometimes parish liturgy committees find it convenient to divide into subcommittees, which may involve additional people not members of the main committee, to plan the individual services, each subcommittee serving for a liturgical season.

      Often planning can be well done by ad hoc planning groups. Ideally, these are created by the parish worship committee. They are effective means of planning special services, such as the Easter Vigil, the bishop’s visitation, or a service commemorating those with AIDS. People with special interests who are unwilling or unable to serve on the parish committee will be active members of these ad hoc groups.

      3.

      Getting Started on Planning

      Once the parish liturgy committee has dealt with the major issues of environment, style, rite, and seasonal variations, it becomes the task of that committee, or some subcommittee, to plan for individual services. In the following chapters, we shall consider the requirements of the different liturgical seasons, but we shall begin by planning a generic Sunday eucharist, since this is material that we shall need to use for planning almost all services.

      Start with the Readings

      Begin by asking if there is a specific given “theme” for the day. On Christmas or Palm Sunday the answer is obviously yes, but on many Sundays there is no clear theme, and one should not be manufactured. If there is one, however, it needs to be stated by the planners and consciously used. Then look at the liturgical readings. If there are options among them, decide which will actually be read. Three lessons are normatively used on Sundays and two on weekdays that are not major holy days. They need to be clearly and intelligibly read by lay people. The lectors should be selected as soon as possible, and, if they are not already members of the planning group, it is helpful if they become part of it for the service at which they will read. The Gospel is read (or sung) by the deacon, if there is one. If there is no deacon, an assisting priest or the celebrant reads the Gospel. It may be read from the lectern, the pulpit, or the center aisle. The procession to the place where it is read may include processional torches, and incense may be carried before the Gospel book, which symbolizes the presence of Christ, the living Word.

      Options for the Psalm

      Consider the options for the psalm and how it will be done. The Prayer Book suggests several traditional methods of psalmody (BCP, 582ff). Any of these methods may be used either to recite or sing the psalms. The psalms are, of course, ancient hymns and were intended to be sung. Congregational psalm singing has a distinguished history in Jewish and Christian worship, and churches of many denominations are rediscovering the joy of singing the psalms. Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Roman Catholics, for example, have included music and suggestions for singing the psalms in their new service books or hymnals, all intended to enable the congregation to join in these biblical hymns. Reciting hymns, no matter how beautiful the words, is, after all, not the same as singing them.

      Three ways of singing the psalms are readily available to the average congregation. The appendix to the Hymnal contains a number of simplified Anglican chants (S 408-S 416) that can be used to sing the psalm either by the entire congregation in unison or antiphonally between the sides of the congregation, the congregation and choir, or men and women. This method can be effectively used even by quite small congregations. The use of the same simple chant every week with the appointed psalm portions tends to overcome people’s feeling of not knowing the tune, and many small rural congregations without professional musicians are regularly singing the psalm at the Sunday liturgy.

      Church Hymnal Corporation publishes Gradual Psalms, containing simple plainsong settings to the eucharistic psalms with refrains. Permission is given to reproduce either the refrain or the entire psalm for congregational use. In this method, the psalm verses are sung either by a cantor or by the choir with the congregation joining in the refrain. It is one of the most ancient and the simplest methods of psalm singing, since the congregation sings only a single repeated refrain.

      The third method is to sing metrical psalms. This tradition, which comes from the Reformed Church of Geneva, has a long and honorable history in Anglicanism. There are many metrical psalms, and hymns based on psalms in the Hymnal. A numerical index of these is in the appendix on page 679. There are also many collections of metrical psalms, including A New Metrical Psalter (Church Hymnal Corp.) arranged for singing the psalms appointed in the lectionary to be used between the lessons. Even if the congregation has never sung the psalms, it is worth trying, at least occasionally. Certainly every congregation can sing a metrical psalm to a familiar tune.

      Sermon Theme

      Next ask the preacher for the theme of the sermon. It should flow out of the readings, and the other choices need to be related to it.

      Beginning the Service

      Now you are ready to go back to the beginning of the service. A number of decisions will have already been made as a part of your overall planning. Usually the Rite One/Rite Two decision will have been made, but if not, it should be made next. Whether СКАЧАТЬ