Eucharist Experiences Today

Local Ecumenical Projects in England HUGH CROSS

Local ecumenical projects (LEPs), now numbering about 600 in England, offer particularly relevant insights and experience for ecumenical reflections on the sharing of the eucharist.

A local ecumenical project may be said to exist where there is, at the level of the local church, a formal, written agreement affecting the ministry, congregational life and/or buildings of more than one Christian denomination, and where that agreement has been recognized by the appropriate denominational authorities. Episcope for LEPs is usually provided by a sponsoring body comprising people representing the denomi- nations involved, who carry responsibility for decision-making in their own denomina- tion.

Frequently, local ecumenical projects are local united congregations made up of people from two or more denominations and ministered to by ordained people from those churches. An increasing number of LEPs are local covenanrs, consisting of a group of two or more congregations from different denominations, maintaining their own buildings, congregational life and ministry, committed to sharing together in mission in a locality. A number of local ecumenical projects are simply shared buildings for economic or other reasons. The separate congregations use them at different times for denominational worship, and engage in joint non-eucharistic worship from time to time. The congregations may also join together for activities other than worship, for example in outreach to meet social need or for evangelism.

LEPs in England are largely a coming together of Christians from five denomina- tions: Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Roman Catholic and United Reformed. A few include smaller churches, such as house churches or black-led Pentecostal, or Quaker or Salvation Army. Single, united-congregation LEPs are usually permutations of Anglican, Baptist, Methodist and United Reformed. Roman Catholics and the other churches are usually to be found in local covenants or shared buildings. The Greek Orthodox Church shares one Anglican building formally; at present there are no other examples of Orthodox participation in LEPs.

0 The Rev. Hugh Cross, a Baptist minister, was formerly ecumenical officer for England with the British Council of Churches; he is currently ecumenical moderator of the Milton Keynes Christian Council.

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This summary of LEPs in England suggests two particular areas of interest in reflecting on eucharistic experience today: (1) shared, united congregations; (2) local covenants and shared buildings in which the Roman Catholic Church is a participant.

United congregations

Minor matters When Christians from different traditions join together to form a single congrega-

tion, clearly there will be areas of practice in relation to communion on which they will differ. Some of these are less significant than others, and more easily resolved in negotiation, although what to one person is a trivial matter may be an issue of deep importance, if not of principle, to another.

For instance, Anglicans administer the wine from a chalice, while many free churches (Baptist, Methodist, United Reformed) use small glasses or cups. Of greater controversy is what kind of wine is served, alcoholic or non-alcoholic. Many of the free churches still carry with them the marks of the strong temperance movement of the nineteenth century, when non-alcoholic wine was used so as not to encourage alcoholism.

Some quite ingenious ways have been found to deal with both these issues. One LEP, for instance, offers alcoholic wine from the chalice at the altar, while those desiring non-alcoholic wine may receive it by going to the front row of pews, where it will be served to them from glass cups.

Serious issues There are, however, much more serious issues than these. It is in worship that

denominational differences are often most clearly seen. The discussion ranges over many questions. Should there be denominational acts of worship or a mixture of liturgies? How far can one go with new forms of worship without detaching worshippers from the experience of traditional denominational forms of worship? Should an LEP have the freedom to produce its own liturgy for the sacraments, or must it always follow a denominational pattern? No one has yet found answers that satisfy everyone. There is a clear rule, however, that if a local liturgy is drawn up, it must receive the approval of the sponsoring body which represents the parent denomina- tions.

The Church of England’s “Canon B.44 Of Local Ecumenical Projects” is very explicit about Anglican rites including who may preside and how this must be advertised in advance. Interestingly enough, while these prescriptions operate in LEPs where the Church of England is a participating church, in many Anglican parish churches throughout England, rites are used which are not duly authorized canoni- cally. Since these are not in local ecumenical projects, however, the breaking of the law is more readily countenanced!

The Rev. Ron Pitcher, Anglican priest in a local ecumenical project, made the following point in a letter to the writer:

The local church will have a varied diet of worship not only because people differ from each other in temperament but each individual has different moods and so needs differing forms of worship one week to another .... We should not have to choose once and for all a pattern of worship and then have guilt feelings if we indulge in another tradition.

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It is this varied diet of worship that is so difficult to obtain, while maintaining denominational balance and a link with the denominations. It can even be off-putting when first encountered in an LEP. The Rev. Elizabeth Welch, United Reformed Church minister, describes worship at her church, where holy communion is cele- brated each week:

For those who came from a free-church background, to have a communion service every Sunday was a bit of a shock to the system, while for those who came from an Anglican background, not to have a communion service every Sunday was another kind of shock to the system! On the whole, after people have been coming to us for a few weeks they begin to realize that it is something different for everybody and are therefore prepared to accept what we do on the basis that others are having to accept something different too.

One Anglicanhlethodist united congregation is quite frank about its own practice and the possible consequences. In a discussion paper prepared by the ministers, the question is raised how far the LEP ought to distance itself from its parent churches:

If we are to be faithful to our calling to be an Anglicanhlethodist LEP we cannot act as if [we] are an independent evangelical free church.

Our worship ... is, to say the least, unique! A 1662 Prayer Book has never darkened the door, and even copies of the Alternative Service Book (ASB) evening and morning prayer gather dust in an obscure corner of the bookcase. The only liturgy we use is our communion service, and that is a blend of ASB Rite A and the Methodist communion service ... Although we enjoy the freedom to express our worship in a fairly unstructured way, one of the consequences is that we do not share a common experience of worship with any other Anglican church in the diocese. So we have, to a certain extent, become an isolated worshipping unit, and when [their church] folk visit other Anglican churches they often find very little which is familiar in their services.

If we become too different, and too uninvolved with our parent denominations, we can no longer do our job as an LEP.

So how does one ensure that contact is not lost with denominational forms of worship? Some local ecumenical projects have a system of alternating services, so that one

Sunday the Anglican Alternative Service Book Rite A is used, and the next Sunday a free-church style preaching service is the pattern, with a monthly communion following a free-church order.

In one LEP a four-weekly cycle was evolved. On the first and third Sundays of the month the main service of worship of the united congregation was a full eucharist, using their own rite, which is described below. On the second Sunday there was a “family service” involving the children, with the neighbourhood uniformed organiza- tions parading to church. The fourth Sunday was a service of the word, or preaching service. On a fifth Sunday they were able to have experimental worship in the early days, but lately this, too, has become a preaching service of the free-church pattern. A short form of communion was celebrated at noon (after the first service) on the second, fourth and fifth Sundays, for those to whom it was important to receive communion weekly. The ministers, Anglican and Baptist, alternated between preaching and celebrating the eucharist and were completely interchangeable.

In his little book Anglicans and Worship in Local Ecumenical Projects, Bishop Colin Buchanan comments on the suggestion of alternating Sunday by Sunday between “Anglican and (probably) eucharistic one week, and free church and (prob- ably) non-eucharistic the next”:

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One great problem this pattern sets up is that there is a tendency to hold on to yesterday’s pattern of denominational practice, without realizing that both Anglicans and Methodists may be changing their ways unbekownst to the LEP. There is an element of calculated bargain about the alternating practice which is not easily amenable to a developing pattern within the parent churches.

He helpfully shows that when the LEP is trying to discover how to approach the question of shared worship, some of the first questions will be:

How can we best celebrate the eucharist? How can we best cater for families? How can we best give Christian teaching to all ages? How can we best build up the one church of God here? These are the undefensive ways of expressing a common openness to an ecumenical future, a concern which is above all pastoral and missionary, rather than denominationally conscious.

Another side to this is raised by the Rev. Jim Mein, who is the Scottish Episcopal minister in the Livingston Ecumenical Parish, a fine example of an LEP in Scotland.

In Livingston there are several united worshipping congregations, each serving a particular geographical area of the town, and each served by a minister of one of the denominations sharing in the project (Church of Scotland, Congregational, Methodist, and Scottish Episcopal). The consequence, Mein says, is that in each worshipping community an attempt is made to be “all things to all people”; or at least, to all people who have a right to expect their own tradition to be represented.

Our experience is that while this allows some freedom and some variety, each congregation in fact settles into a regular mode. In particular, liturgical worship is difficult to sustain in a diet of generally “free” worship.

Referring to his visit to China where Bishop K.H. Ting had spoken of the danger of Anglican and Quaker worship (for instance) being marginalized, not deliberately but by default, Jim Mein continued:

This kind of “death” for fringe worship practices may well be worth it when compared with the gains of a united mission - but my point is that there is a considerable cost and the small generally pay more than the strong. You can’t have liturgical worship three times a year - its whole point is its regular use and familiarity.

The Rev. Canon David Goldie, borough dean of Milton Keynes and Anglican team

How can one minister from a particular tradition adequately serve as an ecumenical minister? Is there not the likelihood of that particular worship centre acquiring the flavour of the denomination of the minister in question?

While noting the dangers which Colin Buchanan points out, the alternating pattern does avoid the “‘death’ of fringe worship” and it might also meet the question raised by David Goldie.

member in the Church of Christ the Cornerstone, raises a related question:

Home-grown liturgies Some local ecumenical projects have evolved their own liturgies, as one response

to this dilemma. The united Anglicaflethodist congregation at Worle has developed its own

“book”. In it there are two “main orders of service”. One is the Church of England’s Alternative Service Book (ASB) Rite A, and the second is the Methodist Sunday

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service, including various options. Its introduction says that it is the product of long consultation and reflection, and that it offers a variety of expressions of worship, traditional rites and spontaneous worship, stillness and exuberance.

The Grove Hill united congregation in Heme1 Hempstead has also evolved its own service book. This is a loose-leaf booklet with the provision of a liturgical structure that can be formal or extemporary. While the skeleton is the Methodist Sunday service, the flesh is partly Anglican Alternative Service Book. There are three “thanksgiving prayers”, the first is ASB Rite A, the second is Scottish Episcopal, and the third is from the Church in The Bowery, New York. It is further helped by using inclusive language.

Trinity Church in Reading (Anglican, Methodist, United Reformed) has a weekly service sheet, which sets out the order for the day, providing for flexibility from week to week, but using on a regular basis the ASB forms of communion.

In another local ecumenical project a book was evolved which put the Anglican and Methodist rites side by side; at the points where they were not identical it was left to the celebrant to make choices, which the congregation could follow easily.

It is interesting to observe that one LEP uses the Church of South India form of communion. In this case a united congregation has turned to a united church for its liturgy, specifically one which brought together the particular denominational variants that are present in the LEP. Another local ecumenical project found support in the way the Church of North India dealt with the need to reconcile two forms of baptism.

Does this suggest another possibility for the difficult issue of ecumenical liturgies, by turning to those united churches where the hard task of finding a commonly acceptable form of the liturgy has already been done? Of course, it may be questioned whether an imported liturgy is ever the right one for the people of God in a particular context.

It is often the practice now, when ecumenical liturgy is required, to use the Lima liturgy, evolved at the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order consultation in Lima, Peru, in 1982. Although somewhat lengthy, it is a good liturgy, meets a number of important ecumenical criteria, and was used successfully at the WCC assembly in Vancouver in 1983. Nevertheless, in my judgment, it is not always appropriate to use it in LEPs. Sometimes it is simply out of place in a local context, having been devised for that particular meeting of the Faith and Order Commission. Secondly, its emphasis is on baptism, eucharist and ministry, and the prayers and other features are directed along those lines. It is not every occasion that celebrates those emphases and not every celebrant or group is capable of making the necessary adjustments.

One of my correspondents spoke of feeling the need to “break out of the strangle- hold of set liturgies, however good”. He confessed that he was not enthusiastic about what is described as “open worship”, where anything happens; he liked worship to be structured, but pleaded that freedom and freshness are vital.

Local covenants and shared buildings In situations of local covenants there often arises a felt-need to share communion.

People suffer hurt when they come up against the rule that there can be no sharing of communion between Catholics and non-Catholics.

The formal position of the Roman Catholic church is well known. The position is challenged, however, even within the Catholic Church itself. On 29 September 1990,

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in The Tablet, there appeared a letter from Fr Michael Simpson, SJ, of St Beuno’s Centre in Wales, making a very strong case for open communion. He questioned what he saw as three related “assumptions underlying the Roman communion’s discipline”: first, the question of who may validly minister the communion being bound up with who may receive it; second, that the eucharist is a symbol of belonging to the particular communion which celebrates it; third, that the eucharist is the expression of unity already attained rather than the means by which it will come about. A stimulating correspondence both for and against followed. Such discussion in the pages of a Catholic journal indicates that the issue is a live one within that church itself, and is unlikely to go away.

In 1983 the Association of Inter-Church Families made their appeal for a change in the ruling by producing a book called Sharing Communion. It contains case studies of experiences of people who are married across denominational lines, and tells of the pain and the difficulties encountered. Our God has no Favourites is the title of another book on the theme, authored by Anne Primavesi, a Roman Catholic, and Jennifer Henderson, an Anglican. They gave the book the sub-title A Liberation Theology of the Eucharist. It is a call to the churches to be converted, rather than to individuals to disregard their denominational allegiances.

In the LEP context the tensions are felt as painfully as they are in interchurch families, and more painfully than elsewhere, because in local covenants Roman Catholics and other Christians are sharing together in so many other ways, that the hurt at not sharing together at communion is more acutely felt.

A number of LEPs have tried to find a way through the impasse. One has been a form of parallel eucharist using Roman Catholic experimental rites. The Catholic priest and either the Anglican priest or Methodist minister would jointly preside side by side, each consecrating separate elements. At the distribution people would go to the appropriate “station” to receive communion according to their own denominational tradition.

In a shared Anglican/Roman Catholic building a parallel communion on feast days and other special occasions takes place with the two priest taking turns to preside, using his own rite, while the other administers communion from the reserved sacrament. This idea of a parallel eucharist was tried at a Christmas midnight service where Anglicans and Roman Catholics share a building. At one stage, the new Roman Catholic diocesan bishop seemed to be unable to condone the practice. However, in the end, as the result of discussion between the clergy and the bishops, the service ended up being more integrated than it was before.

A cry from the heart came from the Rev. Ron Pitcher, an Anglican priest who serves in a building shared between Anglican, Baptist, Methodist and Roman Catholic churches:

Intercommunion is a vital issue. At present two services are needed every Sunday morning, an RC mass and another. At Christ Church we have one church council, one account, one prayer group, one set of house groups, social events, fund-raising, etc.; the only time of separation is at holy communion. It follows that a united service is additional to the mass. There cannot be one music group; when the groups combine to sing on a special occasion at one of the services, some will be attending twice that morning. The giving out of notices needs to be coordinated; even so, fringe members think the initiative has come from “the other side”. One could enumerate many such “trivialities” but these trivialities

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concern the day-to-day dynamics of congregational life. Rather than special services and one-off occasions, ecumenism is the living together week in and week out. Christians in LEPs experience unity and wish to express it and strengthen it round the one Table. The fellowship in an LEP is closer among the core members than that of those attending and “receiving” at a midnight communion or the weekly Roman Catholic mass. It is difficult to accept that we ought not to share communion with friends we know so well, and with whom we share the rest of our local church life.

The pain of division cries out from such a statement, and it is very difficult to justify a hard line in such circumstances. In rural churches this is a difficulty, too. At the church shared by Anglicans and Roman Catholics at Bletchingly a deliberate policy to share as far as possible was adopted by the two priests. The decision they took was to use the Roman Catholic rite up to the offertory, then divide using two altars, and say parts like “Christ has died...”, Agnus Dei, and the Lord’s prayer in common. Church leaders are said to be unhappy about this, suggesting that it is merely papering over cracks, but the Rev. John Frederick, who gave me the information, dismisses that by saying, “there speaks an urban man, not one in a village”!

Whose problem? Local ecumenical projects may be considered something of a nuisance because

they create difficulties for the churches. The truth is that their problems are really those of the divided churches which the LEPs encounter in their work for Christian unity. This becomes painfully clear when matters to do with worship are discussed. There is a long way to go until the difficulties are resolved. In the meantime the LEPs will continue to work away at them, and they need to be given both the licence and the patient understanding of the churches’ leadership to go on trying to find ways through to a satisfactory conclusion in this central area of church life.

NOTES

I Colin Buchanan, Anglicans and Worship in Local Ecumenical Projects, Grove Books, Bramcote, Nottinghamshire, 1987. Ruth Reardon & Melanie Finch eds, Sharing Communion, Collins Liturgical Publications, 1983. Anne Primavesi & Jennifer Henderson, Our God has no Favourites, London, Bums & Oates, 1989.

Questions and Expectations in Geneva EDMOND GSCHWEND

I am a parish priest and also, for some years, spiritual adviser to a group of mixed households. In writing on eucharistic hospitality I do not put myself forward as a “professional theologian” but rather as a pastor - someone who because of his

0 AbM Gschwend is a Roman Catholic priest in charge of a parish on the outskirts of Geneva in which the Reformed and Catholic share the same worship space.

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