Editorial: “Crisis”
The editor reports that the journal is losing money and exhorts readers to recruit new members to the Church Service Society.
Volume 08, Number 01 May 1978
Worship and Evangelism, Praise or Encounter with God?
This is the address given to the Annual Meeting of the Society in May 1977 by the Revd Canon Gianfranco Tellini, Vice-Principal of (the Scottish Episcopal Church) Edinburgh Theological College. The paper finds wanting both Protestant and Catholic understandings of worship in its twin focus on the subjective and the dynamic of human towards divine, with the priesthood of Christ being lost. Its object was ‘to keep the faithful devout’. The paper finds two emphases in the Old Testament: cultic priestly action or a royal priesthood expressed in obedience in everyday life. The New Testament favoured the second: Christ himself is the sacrifice, it is the offering of his life in obedience to God, the Temple to be replaced with people, the sacrifice of their lives, Christ is the prototype of this Temple and its keystone. The teachings of Peter Brunner, Von Allmen and Luther are critiqued. Salvation has three ‘moments’: prophecy and announcement, the ‘fullness of time’, the time of Christ becomes the time of the people of God. When we worship, God reveals self through transformative signs, announcing but bringing individual and humankind to fulfilment. In worship we encounter not propositions but God. The paper proposes that ‘worship is fundamentally transforming encounter with the power of the Word in the power of the Spirit … directed towards making of us … an alter Christus: a concrete sacrifice of praise which is at one and the same time both mission and evangelism’.
George Sprott and the Revival of Worship in Scotland - Part II
This is the second part of the paper of which part one appeared in the Review vol.7 (November 1977), ‘A Sprott Bibliography’. Here, the author outlines the proposals for, and gives account of, publications which would recall to the church of his time the true legacy of the Reformation, undistorted by Brownism and by aspects of English nonconformism. Euchologion was published to make available to the current church the strengths of the Reformed tradition and, beyond that, the links to the wider Catholic traditions of worship. The appearance of a ‘broad church’ movement within the Society, and later of an Anglicising party, and their influences on Euchologion are discussed. Sprott’s influence in making the Church of Scotland in general aware of the theological principles of its own tradition was great.
The New Swiss Old Catholic Eucharistic Liturgy
P G Cobb of Oxford relates the origin of this Church (1870) and its relationship to Anglicanism. He introduces the new service and discusses where it departs from the first Swiss order of 1880 by Bishop Herzog.
Reflection on the Eucharist
David J C Cooper (Toronto) addresses the various understandings of the degree of Christ’s presence in the symbols by reflecting on how we should understand ‘remember’. The Old Testament meaning embraces the subjective and the objective as one and the past is made newly present.
Prayers for a simple celebration of Holy Communion
Hugh Bain, minister at Dunning.
Church Service Society Notes
Contains a report of the 1977 regional conference on Christian festivals in three rural parishes by Kenneth Hughes and information about the 1978 annual conference on ‘Liturgy and Evangelism’, and about the Centenary Lecture (Edinburgh and Aberdeen) on ‘Worship in the Material World’.