Old favourites or new awkwardness?
Wanderer
Shipmate Posts: 47
The service I attended for today (Remembrance Sunday) made me think : when you have civic /special occasion services (Remembrance, Christmas, etc) that are likely to be attended by people who don't darken the doors of the church at any other times of the year, how much challenge/new stuff do you mix with giving them what they expect from the service?
How do you square getting the Christian message across with not making them so uncomfortable/embarrassed that they never come again?
My experience today :I am, by temperament and upbringing, a MOTR Anglican but the parish church I have attended for the last twenty years is much further down the candle, evangelical and increasingly non liturgical. It thrives with a growing congregation largely made up of former non-conformists (if I may use that as an umbrella term) and new (often via Alpha) Christians. However, as the parish church, we play host every year to the Remembrance Sunday parade service where the town brass band leads the uniformed organisations in marching through the town to the church, the brass band plays for the hymns during the service and then the last post at the war memorial in the churchyard. Usually unchanging from year to year. But this year the worship band led two songs in middle :an action one and a Hillsong thing. I don't think they aided the worship as the unchurched scouts etc wouldn't have known them anyway. I could only see the British Legion old boys who were resolutely motionless throughout. Personally I think it is perfectly legitimate for the sermon to be challenging but not to embarrass people with action songs (particularly in a service that is not primarily for kids). I accept that my antipathy to such songs is probably clouding my judgement, but what do you think?
How do you square getting the Christian message across with not making them so uncomfortable/embarrassed that they never come again?
My experience today :I am, by temperament and upbringing, a MOTR Anglican but the parish church I have attended for the last twenty years is much further down the candle, evangelical and increasingly non liturgical. It thrives with a growing congregation largely made up of former non-conformists (if I may use that as an umbrella term) and new (often via Alpha) Christians. However, as the parish church, we play host every year to the Remembrance Sunday parade service where the town brass band leads the uniformed organisations in marching through the town to the church, the brass band plays for the hymns during the service and then the last post at the war memorial in the churchyard. Usually unchanging from year to year. But this year the worship band led two songs in middle :an action one and a Hillsong thing. I don't think they aided the worship as the unchurched scouts etc wouldn't have known them anyway. I could only see the British Legion old boys who were resolutely motionless throughout. Personally I think it is perfectly legitimate for the sermon to be challenging but not to embarrass people with action songs (particularly in a service that is not primarily for kids). I accept that my antipathy to such songs is probably clouding my judgement, but what do you think?
Comments
If instead of the usual service then maybe have one Hillsong if you absolutely must, but to achieve what?
If the Parade service was in addition then it is not on for a decision to be made to bolt something else onto the act of civic, parish and community remembrance: no Hillsong thing, just leave things the way they always have been.
Under no circumstances should there have been an action song.
I quite agree about the misplaced action song - I am glad it isn't just me who thinks this way!
The only non traditional parts were some powerpoint slides around the silence (before 11 am they were set to Barber's Adagio to strings).
We don't do God save the Queen as a) I don't believe in singling anyone out for God's blessing and b) the hymn is racist
EM we don't agree on much theologically but I offer my thanks for leaving out GStQ. I always feel it says to people like me who have republican views "this isn't for you. Go away."
As for the National Anthem, as we sung it yesterday I was accepting the idea that the Queen is a figurehead for the nation, and asking a blessing on all our leaders. The two verses we sang were not racist; the one that is, I've never heard used.
As for Hillsong or whatever in a Remembrance service, I should think that the person who made that choice was thinking something along the lines of "We need to show the visitors that church has moved on since they stopped coming and is now more relevant to today." Not sure it will actually do this, though.... And even that is no excuse for an action song!
@Galilit : the vicar removed Once in Royal from last Xmas' Carols by Candlelight service so maybe it's all part of a similar drive to be contemporary. I'm not sure how that particular change went down, only that it was the plan.
@Robert Armin : I agree about the Lord's Prayer and we had it twice in the course of the service : modern words during the intercessions while in church, traditional words when at the war memorial (ours in on the High Street edge of the churchyard and many people just attend the wreathlaying, not the whole service.
As for GStQ : we just had one verse while at the war memorial which seemed about right to me.
I might be entirely wrong in being offended on other people's behalf about this. Our church youth leader is also a scout leader (I didn't know that until yesterday) and it was her who led *those * songs. So perhaps she had told her scouting colleagues what she was going to do, or if not they will have opportunities to let her know how they felt it went down. As I said, I wasn't able to see any scouts from where I was sitting, but the singing was desultory and the BL certainly weren't joining in.
But I'd much prefer Remembrance events, if we have them at all, to not even be multifaith but completely secular. Yet when I mentioned this to other local church leaders they were not so much aghast as entirely uncomprehending. I suppose it's at least partly to do with the "State Church" and "we are a Christian country" way of thinking.
"We are a christian Country" ........ hahahahahahaha
The only Christian response to the carnage of war is utter repentance and a complete change of heart.
Those who risked their lives for others rarely had any option - conscription. Agree with the other two though.
By the way I also dislike the euphemism of "the fallen". They were killed, sometimes within seconds of starting an action, so for God's sake let's say so.
The service there includes a parade, reading the names of the fallen, laying the poppies a short talk by whichever clergy is doing it that year (5 minutes tops), prayers and 2 traditional hymns plus GStQ. (And many prayers for good weather the night before!). There is always a good turn out.
Our church does the 2 minutes silence in the traditional way - by switching the radio on to go live to the Cenotaph - then switching it back off again. We also have prayers and references in the sermon.
We do not do action songs at all because the vicar hates them. (
@Alan29, out of interest, why do Catholics not do civic stuff? I get why they didn't used to, but now?!
We prefer to leave it to others who maybe feel more at home with that sort of thing. And we don't do non-eucharistic services. Having said that, the annual Lord Mayors civic service alternates between the CE and RC cathedrals. Awkwardness at communion time.
My feeling precisely.
I find it distinctly odd.
I suspect the most rural place I've lived the lord of the manor probably paid most of the cost of the memorial in the middle of the village - they had a short act of remembrance there before a service in the church, and I know some people went to the first and not the second (myself included but I had to rush off to parade with Guides in the local town.)
At St Quacks we have external and internal memorials-the list of names is inside, but we just mark it in church as anyone who wants a 'civic parade' can just go 5 minutes down the road to the city's main memorial.
A quibble, but is it not the Royal Anthem, and that the UK has no national anthem? We sing the National Anthem on Australia Day, just before the dismissal. So it is within the service but only just. I suppose that we will sing GStK when HM dies, but only the once, and with a bit of luck we'll become a republic very soon after.
On Sunday, we had the usual APBA Eucharist, but instead of the first Great Thanksgiving/Consecration used the fifth (could have been the third, the service was on a printed sheet). Just before the dismissal, we had part of Binyon's Ode starting with "They Went with songs to the battle" and ending with "We will remember them" , Last Post, Silence and Reveille, nothing more.
I suspect, like establishment, and the monarchy, any attempt to change the ceremony much will be resisted as it risks people asking: "hasn't the time come to stop this performative display entirely?"
Maybe, maybe not. It is politically convenient for the right, especially the press, to fetishise the armed forces, declaring them all heroes (much easier with the dead ones, the alive ones tend to do awkward things like ask for mental healthcare and somewhere to live) and denouncing anyone who doesn't honour them as the press demands as unpatriotic. With real memory, real pain, fading for the vast bulk of the population Remembrance becomes more and more a political, performative act.
I'm not sure how you got that from anything posted here.
After a period when the number of former troops who saw active service shrank the trend has been in the opposite direction since 2001. And its not just the headline-grabbing conflicts where people are serving but also in other places, many of them members of the Commonwealth, experiencing insurgencies such as Kenya, Nigeria, etc, and fighting the activities of groups such as Boko Haram who fund their murderous campaigns through wildlife poaching, illegal logging and mining, etc. British troops are being injured and killed at the moment in actions like this.
I believe the answer now is "because it just does". It's seen by the churches here as part of their service to the wider community, relationship building etc.
The same applies if you're the church that hosts the service each year as well. It's one of the few services where the focus is less on those who attend regularly and more about those specifically come to remember. Those once a year visitors will, rightly or wrongly, have expectations about what's included in the service and tone. A well-chosen chorus is okay. But an action song?! Wow ... Even if you like them, there's a time and place.
Okay, maybe I have overstated my case. But the quibble over the word "sacrifice" because many soldiers were conscripted still sounds odd to me. Sacrifices were originally of animals. Do you think they formed a tidy line, and offered themselves to the priests?
But in that instance is it not the priest doing the sacrificing?
Maybe there, but here (Canada), it's not the case, and if the senior Order of Precedence cleric is RC, they lead the event. In several places, the Remembrance Day services are held out of RC churches, and in most places, the local reserve unit's RC chaplain is present and will often say a prayer. There is a standard Remembrance Day service for RC schools in Ontario.
The Queen isn't the only one in the UK who is "gracious" and "noble." I know plenty of people who are both and who live without complaint on the leftovers of people like the Queen and from food banks.
Time to ditch the song and the institution. Why keep them?