The Sunday Service of the People Called Methodists (original) (raw)
Related papers
The British Methodist Worship Book
Studia Liturgica
I. Background The British Methodist Conference authorized The Methodist Worship Book for use from the Spring of 1999. It has a number of distinguished predecessors. In 1784 John Wesley made a fairly conservative revision the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which was published in North America and then in Britain as The Sunday Service of the Methodists. In the nineteenth century most of the divisions of British Methodism published their own service books. The bulk of these British traditions came together in 1932 to form The Methodist Church and in 1936 the newly united church published The Book of Offices. This book was succeeded in 1975 by a "you" language collection of services in The Methodist Service Book, which in its initiation rites and in its main eucharistic order reflected the ecumenical and scholarly insights of the liturgical movement. In many ways it was a parallel to the Church of England's 1980 Alternative Service Book. The Methodist Conference of 1990 directed its Faith and Order Committee to start work on a successor to the 1975 book. The principal directives were to take into account the issue of inclusive language and to provide a richer variety of eucharistic material. The new liturgical subcommittee met for the first time in Oxford in November 1990. The 1991 Methodist Conference gave permission for its Faith and Order Committee to publish draft services drawn up by the liturgical subcommittee. These camera-ready originals could be copied without further permission to allow experiment and wide circulation. The Liturgical Subcommittee met thirty times in eight years for a total of seventy-one days. Over 20,000 originals of the draft services were ordered from the Faith and Order office. In response to a request for comments, the Faith and Order Convener received over 1,000 letters.
Wesley and Methodist Studies, volumes 1 to 15/2
Wesley and Methodist Studies
Wesley and Methodist Studies (WMS) publishes peer-reviewed essays that examine the life and work of John and Charles Wesley, their contemporaries (proponents or opponents) in the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival, their historical and theological antecedents, their successors in the Wesleyan tradition, and studies of the Wesleyan and Evangelical traditions today. Its primary historical scope is the eighteenth century to the present; however, WMS will publish essays that explore the historical and theological antecedents of the Wesleys (including work on Samuel and Susanna Wesley), Methodism, and the Evangelical Revival. WMS has a dual and broad focus on both history and theology. Its aim is to present significant scholarly contributions that shed light on historical and theological understandings of Methodism broadly conceived. Essays within the thematic scope of WMS from the disciplinary perspectives of literature, philosophy, education and cognate disciplines are welcome. WMS is a collaborative project of the Manchester Wesley Research Centre and The Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, Oxford Brookes University and is published biannually by Penn State University Press.
2007
The words resemble one another. Singing is something the human being does, it is an extension of speech. 1 Signs, we are taught by Augustine are "those things…which are used in order to signify something else." 2 An example is that bread and wine are potent signs of Jesus Christ. Yet singing is also a sign. Its tones fill words and words are symbolic. Singing with others may be deemed a sign, a sign of an eschatological community, that of the church whose end is to offer ourselves in the harmony of the Spirit. Singing and signs, this is the topic of the following dissertation. A discussion develops which explores the relationship between hymnody and ritual. Singing and ritual, music and sacrifice, song and meals, have long been connected. Prior to Christianity, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo, a contemporary of the gospel writers, described the banquets of the Therapeutae as joyous occasions where discourse, food, prayers and hymns would be shared. After the discourse, prayers, and feast the lyrical hymns would sum up the evening: After the meal they hold the sacred vigil, which is celebrated in the following manner. They all rise up in a body and at the center of the refectory they first form two choirs, one of men, the other of women, the leader and precentor chosen for each being the most highly esteemed among them and the most musical. They then sing hymns to God composed in many meters and melodies, now chanting together, now moving hands and feet in concordant harmony, and full of inspiration they sometimes chant processional odes, and sometimes the lyrics of a chorus in standing position as well as executing the strophe and antistrophe of the choral dance. 3
2007
This study examines the historical context, theological relevance and ecumenical potential of a body of theological poetry, hymn lyrics about the central Christian ritual, the Eucharist. The research is undertaken in the interest of the Roman Catholic-Methodist dialogue, a decades long conversation in which these 166 hymns have gained mutual recognition. There are three inter-connected areas explored: history, textual formation and the theological shape of lyrical poetry about the Lord\u27s Supper. These three dimensions are brought to bear on the question of Methodist ecclesial identity and ecumenical dialogue. The study explores the significance of the relationships derived from the synthesis of the evangelical and sacramental thrust of Methodist ecclesiology. The general categories of manifestation (Catholicism) and proclamation (Protestantism) provide theoretical markers through which ecumenical understanding might develop. Lyrical poetry is construed as a bridge between these d...
The Daily Office in the American Prayer-Book Tradition
and English Prayer-Books published starting in 1549. Throughout these editions the basic twofold regimen of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer has remained at the core the Prayer-Book tradition. However, the way in which these services are understood in relation to the other offices contained in the Prayer-Book, its structure, its content, and its purpose has changed over the Episcopal Church's existence in order to meet the changing needs and evolving interests of Anglicans in the American context. Indeed, throughout the church's history, texts supplementing or abbreviating the Offices have appeared in order increase their effectiveness in leading the faithful to the worship of God and in Christian formation. These texts seek to resolve the tension between the idea of the Daily Office as means of hallowing time through seasonally and thematically based prayer and the idea of the Daily Office as a means of systematically reading through the canon scripture and the Psalter on a regular basis. Differing parties in the church's history have often emphasized one role over the other and within the several revisions of the American Prayer-Book these influences can be seen. The Daily Office, as expressed in the Anglican tradition, is a basically a Protestant and Reformed adaptation of the medieval Catholic liturgy of hours. The medieval pattern expressed in the continental and English liturgies consisted of a daily cycle of seven hours: Matins, Prime, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. Biblical warrant for this daily scheme of prayer can be seen in Psalm 119, where the speaker of psalm says, "Seven times a day do I praise thee Comment [k1]: Good observation Comment [k2]: Essentially lectionary versus lectio continua Radzik, David,2 because of thy righteous dealings." 1 The tradition of reciting or singing the Psalms seven times a day grew out of the monastic tradition. The Rule of St. Benedict, which was written in the 8th century C.E., for instance, lays out a specific scheme for reciting the entire psalter on a weekly basis, broken up into seven sections daily. As time went on, however, the services were expanded with increasing complexity, reflecting both the seasons of the Church year and the individual observances of feasts and fasts. In addition to the Psalms and the selected pericopes, were hymns, antiphons, and collects proper to either the season, feast, or feria. Other intricacies developed as a result of two calendrical systems: one based around moveable feasts based date of Easter (Lent, Easter, Pentecost, etc) and the other which consisted of immoveable feasts set on the same date year after year. Inevitably, this led to the possible overlapping of feasts which was handled in the church by an elaborate system of ranking feasts in order to determine which should be celebrated. The convoluted nature of this scheme led the author of Concerning the Services of the Church in the 1662 Prayer-Book to remark, "that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out." 2 This led to a series of services that were not only difficult for the clergy to follow but especially daunting to even the educated layperson of the time. Thomas Cranmer, who was influenced by the Protestant Reformers, wished to revise the liturgy of the English Church in such a way that would promote lay participation and comprehension, while at the same time would keep the liturgy rooted in the medieval practices of daily prayer and the observance of the Christian year. His revision of the Daily Office collapsed five of the seven hours of the day into the two offices of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer,
"Give Me Thine Hand": Catholicity in the Wesleyan-Methodist Tradition
Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies, 2020
This article considers John Wesley's understanding of catholicity in the context of early Methodism's relationship to the Church of England and relates the findings to the present-day conflict in the United Methodist Church. Some contemporary United Methodists often claim that Wesley's view of catholicity involved doctrinal indifference and is best understood in terms of a "think and let think" attitude. I argue that such a view is mistaken and argue instead that Wesleyan catholicity requires essential doctrinal commitments that unite the people called Methodists to the Great Tradition.