If there's one thing I find frustrating in worship circles it is reinvented wheels. I am an Anglo-Catholic snob, where I worship there are six candles on the alter, we go through the whole of the Nicene creed, liberal amounts of incense anoint the congregation, and I would not have it any other way. My heart grieves when I listen to the panicked clergy of our day, dismayed by the dwindling numbers in the pews, begin to contemplate incorporating Hip-Hop into their liturgy. So when I heard that the coolest Evangelicals in the New Monasticism movement (it's what all the kids are talking about these days) are remaking the Book of Common Prayer, I got quite excited.
I first heard of the New Monasticism about two years ago when a friend of mine passed me a copy of Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. The book is, essentially, his biography of faith chronicling his time in seminary, travelling to Calcutta to work with Mother Teresa, and then joining a Christian Peacemaker Team on tour in Iraq. It is a refreshing read that I would recommend to frustrated Generation X Christians who are looking for models of how to be the Church in these post-modern times.
The latest model that the New Monastics have pulled together is Common Praise: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, the end result of a collaboration of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Enuma Okoro, and Shane Claiborne, plus scores of priests, nuns, pastors, and other faithful. In this volume we have the pleasure of witnessing a great return, a return to the ideals of collective worship, of what it means to practice the unity of the Church. Far more than a mere devotional, the book as 365 days of prayer laid out, stringing together a combination of prayers, devotionals, and hymns that span denominational lines from Serbia Orthodox to Anabaptist. Also noting feast and saint days, marking the anniversaries of murders committed by officers of the Salvadoran military, and noting the birthday of Dorothy Day, the book connects the dots between the many facets of the Christian tradition while being grounded in a vision of what the Kingdom of God looks like, and what it doesn't.
To commemorate the launch of the book Claiborne and company had organized 150 Common Praise Parties taking place across the continent where the book was put into practice, in masse, for the first time. At the end of the CPPs Wilson-Hartgrove thanks us via youtube and leaves us with the image of baton of praise being passed on east to west as the sun travels, so that the whole of time and space are covered by our prays without cease. This is something that I fear is lost on my generation of Anglicans, that the ideal behind the BCP is that we, as a global communion, are praying the psalms with and for each other. By the practice of the daily offices we are conquering the earthly boundaries of space and time and achieving a unity that goes beyond worldly divisions.
What I love in this is how my stereotypes of Evangelicals are shattered. For long time coming I have rallied against the profound individualism that I ascribed to the bible-thumbing, wailing and flaying, anti-liturgical know-it-alls, who, for all the world, seem stuck on sin rather than our deliverance from it. But I am a repenting snob, who sees in this movement a hungering to recover the idea of us: the Church, the mystical body of Christ in which the individual Christian is magnified beyond the limits that our secular-consumer culture maintains.
I think there is a great lesson for us High-Church folk to take note of in this, that as we proceed into the 21st century we must return to the root of ourselves. The phrase that the New Monastics use to express this returning is "our ancient future," that was we are hurtled into a time that is propelled by the idea of salvation by technology innovation we must come back to the rituals that bind us to eternity, the space outside of time. It is there that we can meet each other, in prayer and unity.
