One Church, Many Rites

A Reflection on the many ways we pray, worship, and encounter God in our Anglican tradition

I rarely write Parish Posts that are specifically topical or driven by questions I have received during the week. Specificity is not always helpful to a broad audience. But this week I have been inundated, in the very best way, with questions about the differences among our new Sunday worship experiences.

In particular: What exactly is the difference between Rite One and Rite Two? Why does Rite One sound older? Why is it spoken? Why doesn’t it have music? Why does Rite Two sound more like the English we actually speak? And why, until recently, has Rite Two seemed like simply the way Christ Church worships?

First, a little Christ Church history:

For those who have joined us amid the rather remarkable growth of the last few years, you may not know that Christ Church regularly offered a Rite One Eucharist from 2017 until the pandemic interrupted in person worship in 2020. When we were eventually permitted to return to our building, after what became nineteen months of disruption, we returned under significant restrictions developed by the Diocese of Atlanta with the guidance of healthcare professionals. At one point, public worship was limited to forty minutes and one service per day.

So we chose Rite Two and stripped the liturgy down dramatically. Things we now take for granted disappeared. There was no congregational singing, no Creed, and a reduced pattern of readings. Slowly, wonderfully, the pieces came back.

Thus, Rite One is not actually new to Christ Church. It is a recovery of something that belonged to our common life before COVID.

And here is an important correction: Rite One does not mean “no music,” and Rite Two does not mean “music.” Many Episcopal churches celebrate magnificent sung Rite One Eucharists. Likewise, nothing requires Rite One to happen early in the morning or Rite Two later. The familiar pattern of an early, quiet, spoken service followed by a larger principal Eucharist with choir, hymns, and ceremonial is simply a widespread Episcopal custom.

At Christ Church, however, we have intentionally chosen that pattern.

Now, I should confess something before proceeding: I am a liturgy nerd.

There was a period in my life when I rather seriously imagined that I might become a professor of liturgy and never particularly expected to spend my vocation as a parish priest. Consequently, I can discuss the development of Eucharistic prayers, liturgical revision, and obscure Prayer Book rubrics at a depth capable of producing either enthusiastic conversation or visibly glazing eyes. I will try to restrain myself in what follows as best I can (but if you are into this stuff, please come see me in the office and let’s NERD OUT TOGETHER!).

The short history is this: Rite One and Rite Two are two children of the great twentieth century Liturgical Movement.

That movement began well before the Second Vatican Council among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and others. Scholars were recovering ancient sources of Christian worship and churches were reconsidering how the whole baptized community participates in the liturgy. The Second Vatican Council became an extraordinary catalyst for this work, and its reforms profoundly influenced Christian worship far beyond Roman Catholicism.

Among Anglicans, these conversations raised particularly difficult questions. How much of our inherited liturgy should be preserved? How much should be recovered from the worship of the ancient Church? How much should be expressed in the language people actually speak?

For Episcopalians, there was another complication. Our previous Prayer Book, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, retained the traditional English descended from the Prayer Book tradition of Thomas Cranmer, the world of thee and thou, with thy spirit, and sentences whose rhythms sound much closer to Shakespeare and the King James Bible than to a conversation at the grocery store.

For generations of Episcopalians, those words were not merely old fashioned. They were sacred vocabulary. Their cadence, poetry, dignity, and beauty had carried people through baptisms and weddings, wars and funerals, ordinary Sundays and deathbeds. That language itself had become, and remains, a vehicle into the mystery of God.

But language had changed. Biblical scholarship had changed. Liturgical scholarship had changed. Our understanding of the ancient shape of Christian worship had deepened. The Church was also rediscovering the Eucharist as the central act of Sunday worship undertaken by the whole gathered Body of Christ.

So, in wonderfully Anglican fashion, we did something resembling what Anglicans have been doing for centuries.

We found a middle way.

The 1979 Book of Common Prayer gave us Rite One and Rite Two. Rite One preserved traditional language in worship, not simply freezing the 1928 service in amber, but carrying its theological and linguistic inheritance into the renewed liturgical structure. Rite Two embraced contemporary English and more fully expressed many of the insights of twentieth century liturgical renewal.

There were sacrifices in this process. There almost always are when the Church changes the language of its prayer. Some believed that modern English had gained accessibility but lost some of the poetry, mystery, and majesty of the older forms. Others experienced the older language as an unnecessary barrier between the worshiper and God. Rite One and Rite Two became a particularly Anglican answer to that tension. We could receive the fruits of liturgical renewal without pretending that everything inherited from the past had suddenly ceased to be beautiful, useful, or holy.

And that history helps explain what we are doing today.

At 8:30 a.m., Rite One gives us stillness. It is brief, spoken, quiet, and deliberately uncluttered. Without hymns or choir, there is room for silence. Without contemporary speech, we enter a vocabulary not quite our own, a beautiful, poetic language inherited from generations before us. Its unfamiliarity can itself remind us that worship is not ordinary conversation. We are entering Holy Mystery.

At 10:30 a.m., Rite Two gives us another expression of the same mystery. There are hymns, music, choir through much of the program year, fuller ceremonial, and the glorious noise of a larger gathered congregation. The language is contemporary, but still elevated. It sounds more like us, even while calling us beyond ourselves. It is jubilant, embodied, musical, and communal.

And then there is JoyMass at 9:15 a.m., perhaps the least structured of the three and, with admitted rector-ial bias, possibly the most appropriately named.

JoyMass draws not only upon the Prayer Book tradition, but also upon resources from the Church of England, the mother church of our Anglican tradition, and upon supplemental liturgical resources developed in The Episcopal Church after the adoption of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Episcopal resources such as Enriching Our Worship represent the continuing work of the Church to speak our ancient faith in language that is increasingly contemporary and accessible, and they have been authorized by the General Convention of The Episcopal Church for use in the worshiping life of the Church.

Newer does not mean less reverent. Contemporary does not mean less sacred. Accessible does not mean less efficacious. The holiness of our worship does not depend upon how old its English happens to be.

At JoyMass there are children moving about, questions asked aloud, enthusiastic answers, unexpected noises, laughter, learning, and sometimes holy chaos. The language may be even more contemporary than Rite Two, and the manner of our worship intentionally more accessible to children and their grown ups. Yet beneath all of it is still the ancient and recognizable shape of the Church’s worship: Scripture, prayer, proclamation, table, bread and wine, the gathered people of God.

Three expressions. One Church.

That, I think, is the important part.

Anglicanism has never required that everyone encounter God through precisely the same aesthetic experience. We have room for silence and music, ancient language and contemporary speech, solemnity and children’s laughter. Our comprehensiveness is not an unfortunate compromise we tolerate. At its best, it is one of the great gifts of our tradition.

We are united by common prayer. That does not mean belief is irrelevant. The prayers themselves proclaim what we believe. Rather, Anglican Christianity has historically trusted the act of praying together to form us. We return again and again to the same patterns. We gather. We listen to Scripture. We confess. We pray. We exchange the Peace. We approach the altar. We receive grace. We are sent back into the world.

We may not always pray in exactly the same vocabulary, but we pray in the same shape. We inhabit the same story. We gather around the same Word and the same Table. We are formed by the same rhythms because, in the Anglican tradition, we trust that God meets us there.

The vocabulary may differ. The volume certainly differs. The experience feels different.

But the movement is the same.

And perhaps that is why I love having these different expressions of worship under one roof. The quiet of Rite One, the majesty and music of Rite Two, and the joyful unpredictability of JoyMass are not competing products designed for different religious consumers. They are different schools of prayer, each teaching us something about God and something about ourselves.

Sometimes God meets us in silence.

Sometimes God meets us in a soaring hymn.

Sometimes God meets us through words our ancestors prayed centuries ago.

And sometimes God meets us in the voice of a child who has not yet learned that church is supposed to be quiet.

Thanks be to God, our Anglican tradition has room for all of it.

Pax et Bonum!

Fr. Ben