All Things Seen & Unseen

For All Your Blessings, O Lord The Great Thanksgiving is preceded by the sharing of peace and the bringing of the gifts of the people to the Lord's Table at the front of the church building. The offering reminds us that we are one body who are called to be a forgiving body of Christ-believers and in the offering, the onus is on any who are out of fellowship with another in the congregation to make peace before taking Holy Communion (see Matt 5.23). The present 1995, Prayer Book ( A Prayer Book for Australia -APBA) has five different forms of The Great Thanksgiving. Some priests use them by rotation each week, using the fifth one when there are five Sundays in a particular month; others use Thanksgiving 1 predominantly which is the one with which I am most familiar; however, each one of the different forms brings out a different emphasis found in the Scriptures. Again what is noticeable is the call-response structure of this Thanksgiving and the number of allusions to or direct qu...

Eleven small (numbered) 'subsections' make up the first section of the Holy Communion Service, titled Gathering in God's Name . The opening four subsections: §1. A hymn § 2. An Invocation--the Name of God is invoked § 3. The Greeting § 4. Prayer of Preparation (Collect of Purity) were referred to in an earlier post. Then follows subsections § 5-7 which is concluded with the Absolution for sin. § 5. The Two Great Commandments , the Ten Commandments or other suitable passages are used As soon as we hear these commandments being said, we are all reminded of one of the purposes of the Law (Rom 7.7). The law makes us aware of sin: of our deep inclination to wander away from God and seek out other gods. Each Sunday Anglicans are made aware of their sinful state before God and of their continual need for divine forgiveness. Thus the hearing of the commandments leads on to a time of silence and then to a § 6. Confession of Sin The confession is prefaced with the words, 'L...

Worship should not be rushed; we are all here worshipping the One who has made us, redeemed us through the death of His Son and resides in us in the power of the Holy Spirit. Os Guinness, I think, used the phrase about preaching to the audience of One and the same applies to worship. We have no audience but God: Father, Son and Spirit. Whatever tradition we are in only the audience of the One matters. Anglican worship typically begins with a lay reader's announcement of the opening hymn which is then sung while a group of leaders 'process' into the church with the 'crucifer'--a person appointed to carry a cross--coming first. Everyone in the procession follows the cross as a general rule both in and out of the church worship area. The priest (word derived from 'presbyter', elder) or if a bishop is present comes last. Procession members stand before the altar rail and acknowledge the altar.* Responsive Worship Anglican worship is responsive worship wit...

"A Prayer Book for Australia" Anglican worship is typically ordered by the use of a prayer book. In fact, Anglicanism may be said to be recognisably Anglican because of its use of set forms of worship based on a prayer book usually found in the pew for worshippers to use. In Australia, Anglicans used the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) (1662) until 1978 when the first modernised An Australian Prayer Book (AAPB) was produced.  The Prayer Book was again revised in 1995 to make its language more inclusive; hence A Prayer Book for Australia (APBA) is now commonly used in most parishes using a prayer book today. (The BCP is still in use in some Australian parishes and is still part of Church practice by church law in the Anglican Church of Australia.) Though some still call the Anglican Church of Australia 'The Church of England', the Anglican Church of Australia was constituted in 1981. However, the history of the English church is relevant to Australia because of the fact ...

The Book of Common Prayer (BCP)--'common' means 'public' in this context--came out of the fires of the English Reformation and its words have found their way into the English language and into the liturgies of other denominations. We speak of 'the world, the flesh and the devil' which we might imagine is a Biblical phrase but no, it's found in the prayer book during the time of Edward VI (1549) composed by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Archbishop: Thomas Cranmer Cranmer was a genius without doubt, a learned scholar and not a combatant but he was used to translate the former Roman Catholic liturgical forms from Latin into English and purge them from their Romish errors. However, he was no mere translator but an active shaper of the religious consciousness of the English people. He was responsible for the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552 ). The definitive BCP of the period was appointed for use in the Church of England in 1662. I've...