Worship, introduction - St Peter's Church, Nottingham, England on-line magazine

Worship - introduction

The PCC have fun... (!)

The bonding effects may have escaped your notice but the PCC and various cling-ons have recently spent a whole day together at the new diocesan retreat house in Southwell. Our purpose was to mull over the whole concept of worship and to make some decisions primarily related to the liturgy and style of Services we offer as a community.

We worship well at St Peter’s. We have a wide-ranging portfolio of styles of Service, music and liturgy taking place six days a week. We ground our words and music in a rich community life that belongs in the city and in the world. We aim for quality, for beauty, for excellence and professionalism. And, we surround our worship with an attitude of respect both for God and for people. There is, however, always room to reflect on ways of making what we do well even better.

An opportunity to do this has been given to us by the arrival of some new liturgy for major Services, a new Calendar and a new Lectionary known as ‘Common Worship’. This is to supersede the Services, Calendar and Lectionary collected under the title of the Alternative Service Book (1980) when it is decommisioned on 31 December 2000. As with the ASB, Common Worship is intended to supplement the Book of Common Prayer of 1662.

One of the dominant features of Common Worship is the provision it makes for communities to choose liturgy that they are comfortable with. You may remember that we were one of the parishes which experimented with some of the eight sets of Eucharistic prayers before the final draft of Common Worship went for approval at Synod. The PCC have therefore taken the decision to use the first six months of next year to build on our existing traditions of liturgy and find out which options from within Common Worship we are most comfortable with. As much information as is possible about what this actually entails will be provided for the whole community through the use of notice boards and this magazine.

During my theological crammings at University I came across the notion that worship is at the very heart of religion. Thus, when flailing around for a research topic for postgraduate work, I decided that it was probably best to stick with worship if I was going to stand any chance of understanding religion at all. I am still convinced that worship is everything, even when I feel that I understand less about religion than I did when I was but a tiny little wisp of a teenage non-conformist! Worship defines us. It is the scaffolding which surrounds our attitude to life and our negotiations with people and the world. As public rites and ceremonies it communicates through shared symbols and patterns of behaviour who we are and what we are about as a community. It expresses intensely personal moods, feelings, personal beliefs. But more importantly, because worship is all about journeying towards God and God journeying towards us it shapes and defines our stories; both the individual ones and corporate one. Over the next few months therefore different people will be sharing and talking about what worship means in them both in this magazine and through a series of Advent sermons. Please feel free to add your own thoughts, feelings, statements of likes and dislikes, fears and hopes to our ongoing corporate journey.

Esther Elliott

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