From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

What do the terms “high” church and “low” church mean in our contemporary church context?

I think the meanings have to do with the heart of their forms and the externals. Even though vestments are regularly used, how many Episcopal priests would or could articulate that their vestments are sacrificial ones? Their use was opposed on the grounds that the Eucharist was not a sacrifice and thus such vestments were inappropriate in Anglican churches.

I was once at a Morning Prayer service at a largish Episcopal church in New Haven. It is one of the few churches in the Episcopal Church that maintains the tradition of Morning Prayer with Hymns and Anthems as a principal Sunday service. As I was leaving, I heard a young woman say, “This church is so high!”

What she meant was that the liturgy was dignified, the choir magnificent, and the liturgical atmosphere relatively formal. It was rather like visiting the best of an English Cathedral matins service.

Equally, serving in an Anglo-Catholic parish, I had a seminarian ask me if the parish was “low” because we offered morning prayer every day. The message she had gotten was that Sunday morning prayer was a low tradition and, consequently, parishes with regular morning prayer must be low ones.

The challenge is more than semantic because it has to do with essentials of parish identity—of how a community approaches sharing the Gospel and drawing others to Christ.

We like the short-hand of “low” and “high” because it gives us an easy way to describe churches or even people. Yet, the Church is more complicated than any shorthand can manage to adequately encompass.

I was once asked if I’d only like to serve at Anglo-Catholic parishes. I borrowed a friend’s description and replied, “I really don’t care. I’ll celebrate the Lord’s Supper from the Lord’s Table in a dirty surplice and tippet. I just want to be in a place that is authentic and takes its worship life seriously.”

We are being challenged, as a Church, to live not so much into a predefined definition of who we think we are but to do the deeper work of offering praise and worship that comes from the deepest place of our being as a Body.

This will not always be “high” or “low” or in any other way definable. I saw a catty comment about sung compline by candlelight referred to as “playing” church the other day on Facebook. More of us might need to “play,” to rediscover the joy and wonder of lovingly offered adoration of God in Christ.

The simplest thing I can offer about high and low is this: look to the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Learn it, live with it, wrestle with it. It protects the Church and the people from liturgical and theological malpractice. It is neither high nor low really. It provides the ground for rich exploration and we have really barely begun to delve into its riches adequately.

The BCP serves as an excellent source and shape for the lived Christian experience in and with Christ.

Whatever our personal preferences, there is ample room in its expansive breadth to be Church in a way that is at once corporately and universally authentic to our Church’s identity while also offering a legitimate shape for local congregational exploration and experimentation. The answer lies in intentionality—the lovingly offered outpouring of our thanks and praise that takes its shape in excellence and intentionality of giving.

So long as we allow the Spirit to move us to new places and we seek to offer whatever we do with integrity and an eye toward the One who comes among us when two or three are gathered, then high or low is pretty irrelevant. Any church can make an idol of its worship and the priests the center of a show. But it takes care and discipline to make sure that our church is always focused, in every way possible, on the Living Word.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert