Journals

The sixth Centenary Lecture of the Society, January 1981. The human need to celebrate, to deal with chaos and darkness – prayer as what life may become, and the need for empowerment. The author notes three modes of disintegration that pertain to today: personal, pastoral, congregational. Three consequences are that prayer is seen is neurosis, people turn to other providers such as yoga, and the gospel criticism of society is missing. Exploring the idea of communion with God as Trinity, the author finds that the eucharistic action is celebration of participation in creation, a sign and reminder of God's acts of salvation, an empowering to become salt and light. The loss of a sense of the 'holy day'. The spirituality of Antony (the desert tradition): place of solitude, place of truth, place of vision; this tradition is being recovered in our time. The author advises the occasional recovery of the rite in its traditional form.

Continuing from the last issue, the investigation turns to the introduction of organs and then to orders of service, a debate which involved a return to consideration of the place of the Westminster Directory and Confession. The result was a new Directory.

New Ways to Worship (Saint Andrew Press, 1980) by Ross Mackenzie; A Book of Services (Saint Andrew Press, 1980), by David Beckett; Art in Action, Toward a Christian Aesthetic, Nicholas Wolsterstorff (Eerdmans, 1980), by Gordon Strachan, The Gospel at Infant Baptism, Frederick Levison (Saint Andrew Press, 1980), by Douglas Murray.

The theme is tradition.

Stephen H Brown of North Carolina sets out to show how the earliest reshaping of the liturgy and accompanying analysis on the part of Calvin and others has been appropriated in the USA as filtered through the various traditions that settled there, and the move through the centuries from non-liturgical to liturgical worship in the Reformed denominations. The Presbyterian Worshipbook of 1970 is analysed and assessed and how it has been received is reported.

Graeme Longmuir discusses religious education and how, in his United Reformed congregation, this is approached in a church where Communion is the norm and every Sunday is a family service. He identifies the contradiction between receiving someone into the church at baptism but them refusing them participation at Communion and describes how a service can be designed which welcomes children and allows them to receive the elements.

G M Henderson takes issue with J K S Reid in the previous issue where he refers to the ‘Consecration Prayer’, arguing that this is no mere petition but is itself the Liturgy of the Sacrament. He also criticises the splitting of the epiclesis and comments on the fraction taking place within that sequence.