School of Prayer and Study
(ForThe Anglican Church in Greece and the Anglican Diocese of Cameroon
An Introduction to the liturgy and practices of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter
Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan
Senior Chaplain of the Anglican Church in Greece; Apokrisiarios of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece; Canon Theologian of the Diocese of Cameroon.
This short booklet is intended to help the reader to have a greater understanding of the richness of this season; its liturgies and practices; to give a brief overview, not a detailed and exhaustive history. The hope is that it will enhance your worship, and maybe explain a little more about why we do certain things. It certainly is intended to encourage the reader to engage with and experience as much of this season as possible. The whole season revolves around the mystery of Christ’s passion and resurrection, but there are liturgical ways in which we express this, and the booklet seeks to describe some of this.
Liturgical Developments
It is only in the last 50 or so years that the Church of England has been developing its liturgies for parish use. Up until Common Worship in the year 2000 the Book of Common Prayer determined official liturgical use. Those who were more exotic in their taste turned to Roman manuals for other material. Rich in its language and much loved in English culture, nonetheless BCP was restricted – restricted by the very thing that makes it beautiful, namely its old English, but also by the efforts of the Reformation itself to eradicate certain practices that were unacceptable at the time.
The Army chaplains of the First World War were the first to realize how inflexible the Prayer Book was as they ministered to dying men in the trenches of Northern Europe. More contemporary language was needed; pastoral flexibility in extremis was desirable. 1928 saw the first real attempt to revise the book that had determined how the Church of England worshipped. This failed to get approval in Parliament. The 1950’s saw the Parish Communion movement emerge, and there was need for different ways to express both the shape and structure of our worship, and the finer details of liturgical seasons.
With Vatican II coming along there was also greater co-operation between the Roman Catholic and Anglican (along with Methodists and URC) liturgical scholars, and the Church of England was becoming a more ‘liturgical beast’ wishing to rediscover things in the different seasons of the church’s year, especially the seasons that revolve most tightly around our Lord’s life, namely the Incarnation and the Resurrection (known better to us as Christmas and Easter). We were encouraged to think of seasons, or cycles, and not individual feasts. So there emerged the ‘incarnation cycle’ comprising Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany (with all its wonderful themes of manifestation of God’s glory in Jesus, unity, mission.) The other great cycle is that of the resurrection, including Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and the Great Fifty Days that embrace Ascension and Pentecost.
For the development of the way we celebrated the Eucharist along came Series 1, 2 and 3; Then the ASB (1980), and ultimately Common Worship (2000). Accompanying developments in shape and text for the eucharist and other important services in the life of the church ‘resource books’ were published, principally The Promise of his Glory, Lent Holy Week and Easter, Celebrating Festivals, and Patterns for Worship. The publication Times and Seasons has brought together much of the material in these other books
READ MORE
