Methodism and Liturgy
Goulding, Stuart D.
METHODISM AND LITURGY By STUART D. GOULDING A MORE significant movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church is difficult to imagine than that inaugurated by the last general conference when it...
...John Wesley drew up a formal order of worship based on the Book of Common Prayer, and it was adopted by the Methodists in America four years before the Protestant Episcopal Church adopted its liturgy...
...The churches which hold their congregations from generation to generation are those in which the service is the central thing...
...Hymn...
...Offertory...
...True, the spread of Methodism throughout the United States in those early years was little short of marvelous...
...METHODISM AND LITURGY By STUART D. GOULDING A MORE significant movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church is difficult to imagine than that inaugurated by the last general conference when it authorized the appointment of a commission to revise and prepare a new order of worship and music for use in formal service...
...The authority of the Bible having been lessened for many Protestants by the scientific attack upon it, they have turned increasingly toward their ministers...
...Call to Prayer...
...But between superstition and irreverence, I say give me superstition, for at least there exists in the superstitious the feeling of respect for God...
...Anthem, which may be the Venite or Te Deum...
...Of recent years the Methodist Church has felt severely, as have all other Protestant denominations, a lessening of the influence of the Bible...
...When the Methodist Church came into being, having divorced itself from the Church of England, it was without liturgy...
...Speaking on this phase at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, not long ago, Bishop Thirkield deplored such methods and cited one extreme instance in which the minister advertised in the press that he would preach one night without his coat, the next without his collar and the third night in his bathing suit...
...Silent Prayer—Benediction—Choral Response...
...The Mass, music, symbolism in painting and statues, color, everything that would remind the dissenters of the elder faith from which they had seceded, was destroyed or put away...
...The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy that followed the scientific negations of the last half-century has had a tremendous and none too happy influence on the congregations...
...Although they must all of them be gratified at their power to attract listeners, most of them are big enough to realize that it is at the expense of their less fortunate though none the less deserving colleagues...
...The second order of worship is very impressive and borrows freely from the Book of Common Prayer...
...I have worked forty years in the ministry and much of that time has been spent among the lowly in Mexico and other places...
...Prayer (the people kneeling or bowing down...
...in most of them less formal methods than Wesley advocated were in use...
...For one thing it has converted many of them into sceptics, and for another it has made them more and more dependent on their teachers...
...Already four orders have been proposed by the great committee working under the leadership of the venerable Bishop Wilbur P. Thirkield of Chattanooga, any one of which will mean the beginning of a new era in the numerically greatest Protestant denomination in America...
...Postlude...
...The appeal was to the soul through the ear alone, and that method continues to the present day in the majority of Protestant churches...
...He would use the lecturn as the Episcopalians use it, as a repository for the Bible placed in an exalted position...
...Finally, the trend toward liturgy is an effort to keep the churches from becoming mere social centres: The spirit of competition enters where the social ideal is held up...
...That the institution of a liturgy may be defeated by those within the church content with "the old-time religion" is still possible...
...The Christian Advocate says: These orders of service offer enrichment in the hour of worship without that hard, dry formalism which is so foreign to the Methodist temper...
...Nevertheless the pulpit and the Bible continued to occupy dominant positions in the church...
...They point the way to better things...
...Certainly its adoption would enrich the Methodist Church and would bring to it some of the finer things it has missed these hundred and more years since its inception...
...Presentation of offerings...
...Responsive reading...
...The appointment of the commission on worship and music has resulted from the growing wish to make God's house a sanctuary...
...Prelude...
...The Lord's Prayer, to be said by all...
...Often I wish that I might hold before the people the crucifix to preach in silence its powerful message," he has declared...
...Sermon...
...I have seen superstition and irreverence...
...The rich and the poor, the skilled and the unskilled, cannot meet on an equal plane where there is competition...
...But there is a danger in this, since it makes for disloyalty to the serrice...
...When the great western plains were still practically closed to the Catholic missionary, Methodism with its tuneful hymns, its fiery revivals and its great preachers, already had a grip on the scattered pioneers and frontiersmen...
...The leaders, however, want the change, and for the reasons above indicated...
...Gloria Patri...
...It held an evangelical and emotional appeal that gripped and fired the religious fervor of those earlier settlers whose lives without such occasional religious revivals and meetings would have been colorless indeed...
...A folksy church for a folksy people," which I have seen in some press advertisements for churches, is not the ideal the Methodist Church seeks to foster...
...He would bring back the cross to the church as a reminder to the people of that sacrifice...
...The more formal churches found their greatest activity in the cities and the more settled regions of the West, but Methodism, and to a lesser extent the Presbyterian and Baptist faiths, reached out to the frontiers and beyond...
...Latterly there has come to be felt in the Methodist Church a need for greater warmth, for more color, for symbolism such as the early Christians used in the catacombs beneath Rome...
...Realization on the part of Protestant denominations that the sermon alone cannot weld has been long in coming...
...The first of the orders, that of John Wesley, is still considered by the Christian Advocate as "never popular among us...
...Finally he would robe the minister in the Genevan robe, not only because it commands the respect of the people but also because it enforces an inward respect upon the part of the wearer...
...As communities became more settled, the need of emotional appeal lessened and was satisfied with the comparatively mild methods of the preachers who held established pastorates...
...Particularly in the cities where transportation is easy, it has been found that congregations instead of remaining in their parish churches follow the better preachers about...
...Declaration of Faith...
...It does seem as though modern conditions are forcing the Methodists toward a new conception, or rather an old conception made new, of divine service...
...Though often possessing other talents equally valuable and laboring even more keenly, he finds himself losing ground to men of great preaching power...
...For many, any liturgy will still smack of "things Popish...
...Words of assurance, by the minister...
...The desire has been to make the church more than just an auditorium...
...As regards liturgy, the commission already has prepared four orders...
...It begins: Let the people kneel or bow in silent prayer upon entering the sanctuary...
...Returning to the move to decentralize the sermon, the bishop has said: The reformers made the sermon the central part of the service in their effort to get away from the Mass...
...Hymn (the people standing...
...The Methodist Church already uses some formal prayers but the trend is toward more and more formal ones, the belief being that prayers which have been said by men through generations, which are rich in feeling and in substance, are worthy of being used in the service and of perpetuation...
...Such changes as the bishop advocates, adopted in their entirety, would mean a radical departure in most Methodist churches...
...The churches became meeting-houses where men and women gathered to hear the Bible read and its doctrines expounded by their ministers...
...so that while a great preacher may fill his church at all services, a less able man may find himself preaching to half-empty pews...
...Nor have the great preachers been happy with such results...
...In the early days the circuit preacher had no time for liturgy...
...In our own day the Methodist Church has witnessed a movement toward better music and more dignified service, but even down to the present the liturgy of John Wesley never has found the favor that might have been expected...
...The sermon alone cannot weld...
...To quote Bishop Thirkield: "So busy had the Methodist Church been expanding over this great country that there was little time for formality...
...Hymn (the people standing...
...He carried the Bible in his saddle-bags and he improvised his prayers...
...In some instances it has caused the less able minister to resort to spectacular methods to fill his church...
...Catholics go to church to worship and pray while Protestants go oftener than not to hear a good sermon...
...Lessons from the Old and New Testament Scriptures...
...General confession, to be said by all...
...Let us exalt the pulpit but let us not permit it to dominate...
...Bishop Thirkield would place the communion table in front of the minister, "that it may be a constant reminder to the people of the sacrifice which it commemorates...
...Prayer—Choral Response...
...That "the sermon alone cannot weld" is a truth at which they have been long in arriving...
...and while in some of them certain formalities always have been observed, there is a feeling, even in the seminaries, that the bishop desires too much...
...Prayer," Bishop Thirkield declares, "is either a mockery or the greatest utterance of man...
...The domination of the pulpit has been regarded with uneasiness by many thoughtful preachers themselves—and indeed it is the preachers who are responsible in no small measure for the trend toward liturgy...
...Such a position obviously is unfair to the latter...
...The other three it hails as very welcome...
...The bishop's comment was this: When people go to church to be entertained, the entertainment soon fails and they lose interest altogether...
...Gloria Tibi...
...In the words of Bishop Thirkield, "the trend toward liturgy in the Methodist Church is an effort to make the worshiper independent of the faults of the minister" by instituting a form of common prayer and service...
...The Reformation brought with it the destruction in the Protestant churches of everything resembling the old order of things...
...Yet no action on the part of the entire church is possible until the next general convention in 1932...
...His congregations were found "wherever two or three gathered together...
...Nevertheless, with the exception of some of the northern and eastern churches, few followed the liturgy...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 12
