Our Worship Today – All Saints Burnaby

Our Worship Today
The Anglican Church of Canada is an offspring of the Church of England and in our worship today we celebrate liturgies whose foundations are left to us by the early Christian community as described in the New Testament. We are the people of the catholic Church, whose faith is based on the works of God as seen through Christ. Each Anglican Church across the country, to the best of its ability, offers up its most beautiful vestments, chalices, linens and actions to honour a living God. Each church is the embodiment of the one undivided body of Christ.

However, there have been times in the Church when what was offered up was not always the best. For example, during the Middle Ages preaching was not always thought to be essential and the reading of Scripture, if read at all, was often read badly. All the services were held in Latin so the majority of the people who attended Church could not understand them. Latin was the language of the educated and it was the laity who were uneducated who attended. During most of the Middle Ages the laity were considered second class citizens.

By the sixteenth century there was a movement to reintroduce the church at the center of the lives of all the lay people. In England, the Bible was translated into English. Thomas Cranmer composed the Book of Common Prayer with an emphasis on the reading of Scripture at its core. Morning and Evening Prayer and the Lord’s Supper was now available to everyone. Books of Sermons were written and available to clergy to assist them in improving their preaching. Unfortunately, soon after the Reformation most churches were celebrating Communion only four or five times a year. There are many reasons for this but one was that it was thought that if one received the Body and Blood of Christ too often it would become meaningless. The leaders of the Reformation were in favour of receiving it at least once a week. The clergy continued to do almost everything liturgical but there is now more lay involvement than before. One only needs to carefully read the service for Holy Communion in the BCP to see how it is a service done almost in its entirety by the clergy. One example of the genius of Cranmer is that we can use either Morning or Evening Prayer as a beginning for the celebration of the Eucharist.

In the church we acknowledge the church is not the clergy or a building but all of the people of God and each has a role to play in the liturgy and in the world.