the church was, as is often the case in controversial matters, united by opposing convictions. The Evangelicals believed that some aspects of the proposed book would take the Church of England in a Rome-ward direction, whereas the extreme Anglo-Catholics believed it would inhibit the liturgical freedom they had already seized and now enjoyed, and would be used by the bishops as an instrument of discipline. The proposals were, in any case, nowhere near to solving the acute problem delineated by the wartime chaplains. Had the church been more united in its enthusiasm for the new book it seems likely that the House of Commons would have voted differently. But there was another division of which many MPs were aware: there was no enthusiasm for liturgical change among ordinary churchgoers (there rarely is) and it seemed that the professionals, including the laity in the Church Assembly, were seeking to impose new ways of worship on reluctant congregations.
Whatever the explanation, however, the leadership of the Church of England was left in some disarray. There were calls for disestablishment. These were not pursued, though the implications for church–state relations of what had happened would never be forgotten. The bishops restored calm, rather cleverly and, it turned out, very helpfully, by consulting their diocesan conferences, then announcing that ‘during the present emergency and until further order be taken’ they would ‘not regard as inconsistent with loyalty to the principles of the Church of England the use of such additions or deviations as fall within the limits of the “Deposited Book”’.
Thus what became known as the 1928 Prayer Book went into widespread use. Or at least, parts of it did. The minor changes proposed for Morning and Evening Prayer, and for the Baptism, Marriage and Burial services, were generally welcomed but a more substantial change to the Prayer of Thanksgiving at the Eucharist did not win much support and was firmly rejected by Evangelicals. Among the war-veteran reformers there was deep disappointment that the new book did nothing to bridge the gap between the church and its absentee artisan members and offered no encouragement to those who wished to make the Holy Communion the central focus of parish life.
The ‘emergency’ lasted for 27 years and embraced another catastrophic world war. During this time the bishops made no serious attempt to impose liturgical discipline, except in a few extreme instances, and the clergy were left free to order the worship of their churches as they thought best. Lacking liturgical skill and much imagination, most of them were happy to accept the limitations of the new, alternative book, and, although members of the travelling public sometimes complained that no two churches had the same forms of worship, everything on offer was clearly derived from the Book of Common Prayer, which was still regarded as the distinctive, unifying expression of the Church of England’s doctrine and devotion.
There emerged, however, during the 1920s and 30s a small number of priests who were determined that the Holy Communion should become the chief act of Sunday worship in their churches, and this without turning to an 11 a.m. High Mass with no communicants – the standard practice of the extreme Anglo-Catholics. In several industrial parishes, often where the clergy were Christian Socialists, a celebration of Holy Communion was held at about 9.30 a.m., usually with the Prayer Book rite. Hymns were sung, Merbecke or the Martin Shaw Folk Mass was used as the setting, a sermon was preached, all the confirmed received communion, and families and young people were encouraged to attend. There was a strong corporate emphasis and in some places the congregations remained after the service to share breakfast in the church hall. ‘The Lord’s people, gather on the Lord’s day, for the Lord’s own service’, became a descriptive slogan.
In 1935 Father Gabriel Hebert, a priest of the Society of the Sacred Mission, published Liturgy and Society, a seminal work which emphasized the vital importance of relating the Eucharist to the life of the secular world. At the same time, he advocated ‘The Parish Eucharist with the communion of the people as the central act of worship every Sunday’. The book was widely read and its liturgical emphasis proved to be influential. Two years later Hebert edited a volume of essays, The Parish Communion, in which several clergy explained how such a service might be introduced in town and country parishes. Essays demonstrating the links with the practice of the early church were also included, and in the dioceses of Chichester and Newcastle the number of parishes moving in this direction became significant.
The 1939–45 war produced another generation of ex-service chaplains and ordination candidates who regarded the reformation of the church as an integral part of the creation of a better world and saw the Parish Communion as the key to the reform of worship. At a conference held in Birmingham in January 1948, an organization, ‘Parish and People’, was launched to promote the Parish Communion, along with the parish breakfast and the parish meeting. Its membership (mainly clergy) grew rapidly and during the next two decades the Parish Communion replaced Morning Prayer and High Mass as the chief Sunday service in most parishes.
The speed of this development became a matter of concern to the leaders of Parish and People, who were in touch with a parallel liturgical movement in the Roman Catholic Church on the continent. The theological foundation of the change and its social implications were being ignored and the Parish Communion was being adopted as ‘a nice service at a convenient time’. This greatly worried Michael Ramsey who was at the time Bishop of Durham. Nevertheless the movement was powerful enough to stimulate a period of intense liturgical experiment and revision that began with the appointment by the archbishops in 1955 of a Liturgical Commission. During the next 25 years many different versions of all the services were produced in booklet form and tried out, and in 1980 what were deemed to be the best, or at least the most widely acceptable, forms of these were published in a 1,293-page Alternative Service Book. Some were in modern English, though the gain in intelligibility was offset for many lay users by the complexity of the range of choice on offer to those conducting the services. Again, the emphasis was on the experimental and it was explained that another 20 years would be needed for the creation of texts that could be regarded as fixed for a reasonably settled period of time.
Change was, however, by no means confined to the structure and words of the liturgy; it extended to its ceremonial presentation. The insight that in the Eucharist priest and laity are engaged in a shared action, each with a distinctive role, required all to be in reasonably close proximity to the altar; preferably gathered around it. The same insight required the laity to have a more active role in the liturgy itself, expressed in the reading of the Bible, the leading of intercessions, the presentation of the bread and the wine at the Offertory, and the administration of communion. It led also to a reconsideration of the place of music and the function of a choir, with emphasis on congregational participation and sometimes the introduction of instruments to augment or even replace the organ. Back to the church band.
Such a liturgical reformation could not easily be arranged in medieval buildings designed for eucharistic worship in which the priest alone had a significant part to play and the laity were banished to a nave distant from the altar, even screened from it. The 1960s therefore saw the beginning of what would become a widespread reordering of church interiors, including the many Victorian buildings erected on Gothic principles. Nave altars were installed and fixed pews replaced by mobile chairs. In order to create a more corporate atmosphere the priest faced the congregation across the altar and a number of laypeople were located close by in the sanctuary.
Even with the most imaginative use of space and furnishings, however, this proved to be quite a long way from ideal, especially in large churches where many members of the congregation were, of necessity, still disposed in formal ranks and far from the focus of the eucharistic action. The need for a considerable number of new church buildings went some way to solving the problem in new housing developments where buildings of circular, octagonal and trapezoid shape began to appear.
The establishing of an Institute for the Study of Worship and Religious Architecture at Birmingham University offered the church an opportunity to match its buildings with its worshipping needs. But unlike France, Germany and other continental European countries, Britain was lacking in first-class, innovative architects, as well as wealthy churches, and by the end of the century most of the new buildings seemed sad, shabby even. Nonetheless the worship offered in the overwhelming
