Watch Night: the Covenant Service

This post, which I wrote several years ago, has consistently been the most viewed at The Confessing Reader. I offer it again this year.

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In 1663 Puritan pastor and divine Richard Alleine published Vindiciae Pietatis: or, A Vindication of Godliness in the Greater Strictness and Spirituality of It. Anglican priest and evangelist John Wesley republished Alleine’s work in his A Christian Library in 1753, and on August 11, 1755, used a chapter from the book, “Application of the Whole”, in what was probably the first celebration of the Covenant Service in the Methodist movement.

According to The United Methodist Book of Worship,

The heart of the service, focused in the Covenant Prayer, requires persons to commit themselves to God. This covenant is serious and assumes adequate preparation for and continual response to the covenant.

As the annual Covenant Service developed in the Methodist societies of England, the service was conducted whenever Wesley visited a Methodist society around the country, while in London the service was usually held on New Year’s Day. In later years, the Covenant Service came most commonly to be held on New Year’s Day or Eve. When celebrated on New Year’s Eve, it came to be called a “Watch Night Service”, would often last three hours or longer, and included hymn singing and appropriate readings from Scripture.

The Watch Night Service became a fixture of rural churches, both Baptist and Methodist, across the South. Many churches, particularly African-American Methodist and Baptist churches, still celebrate Watch Night services, though the practice has waned in other churches. My Baptist mother recalls, from four or more decades past, three-hour Watch Night services of hymn singing, praying, Scripture reading, and occasionally a sermon, lasting from 9 o’clock until midnight. (The entire congregation attended, including the children – at least until the days when nurseries for children became usual. I have vague memories of these Watch Night services from my early childhood – from knowing they were happening, not from attending them, but the practice died in my home church when I was quite young.) In this way, the Watch Night service functions much as a Vigil Service (such as the Easter Vigil, or a Vigil for the Day of Pentecost) has functioned in liturgical churches.

While we renew our commitment to the New Covenant with every baptism and with every celebration of the Holy Eucharist, it seems fitting on New Year’s Eve, on the Eve of the festival of the Holy Name of Jesus when we celebrate our Lord’s submission to the Law (“on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised” Leviticus 12:3), we should renew our covenant commitment as well.

The following text, based on Wesley’s Covenant Service, is taken from the Book of Common Worship (1962) of the Church of South India. (In the CSI, January 1 is designated “The Day of the Covenant”.) In this abbreviation of the South Indian Covenant Service I have included the collect, lessons from that service, substituting for that liturgy’s Gospel reading the Gospel appointed for the Holy Name of Jesus (known in previous prayerbooks as “The Circumcision of Christ”), and the section of the service called “The Covenant”. The language of the prayers has been rendered in contemporary idiom. The Lessons and Gospel are now taken from the English Standard Version Bible.
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The Collect

O God, who has appointed our Lord Jesus Christ as Mediator of a new covenant, grant us grace, we beseech thee, to draw near with fullness of faith and join ourselves in a perpetual covenant to thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson
Jeremiah 31:31-33

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

The Epistle
Hebrews 12:22-25a

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven.

The Gospel
Luke 2:15-21

When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

THE COVENANT

And now, beloved, let us with all our heart renew our part in the covenant that God has made with his people, and take the yoke of Christ upon us.

This taking of his yoke means that we are heartily content that he should appoint us our place and work, and that he alone should be our reward.

Christ has many services to be done; some are easy, others are difficult; some bring honour, other bring reproach; some are suitable to our natural inclinations and temporal interests, other are contrary to both. In some we may please Christ and please ourselves, in others we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves. Yet the power to do all these things is assuredly given us in Christ, who strengthenth us.

Therefore let us make the covenant of God our own. Let us engage our heart to the Lord, and resolve in his strength never to go back.

Being thus prepared, let us now, in sincere dependence on his grace and trusting in his promises, yield ourselves anew to him, meekly kneeling upon our knees.

All kneel.

The minister says in the name of all:

O Lord God, Holy Father, you have called us through Christ to be partakers in this gracious covenant: We take upon ourselves, for love of you, to seek and do your perfect will. We are no longer our own, but yours.

Here all the people join.

I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for you or laid aside for you, exalted for you or brought low for you; let me be full, let me be empty; let me have all things, let me have nothing; I freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you are mine, and I am yours. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

Thoughts on Parish and Cathedral: is Irish monasticism a model?

The Revd Fr David Hyman, associate rector of my parish and planting priest of a new mission congregation here in Chatham County with whom our family is now associated (thanks be to God, we will have our own geographical parish church!), recently posted an entry on his weblog, Blackbeans, that provokes thoughts regarding the relationship of the parish church and the cathedral and what this means to the planting of a new parish.

There is indeed a lot to think about here:  the nature of episcopal authority, the nature of connectional polity, the nature of “placeness” – the fact that a parish, and the larger Church of which the parish is the local manifestation or expression, is geographically located precisely because the Church lives among people (cf. the Pauline salutations to the church in… or to the bishops and deacons of the church in …).

The current geographically non-contiguous structure of the Anglican Mission, and to a lesser extent of ACNA, can be helpful to the Church insofar as it permits a missional focus that might not be as strongly manifested in the traditional diocesan structure. But this non-diocesan structure is a real liability, and more than that can become a denial of what it is to be the Body of Christ, if the non-contiguous missional networks are formed on the basis of “affinity” (as some Anglican Mission documents state), because it feeds a free-market “choice” model of Church, which is a denial of the prevenience of grace, election, and the Pauline model of diversity in the Body. It is theologically dangerous, and – I write with fear and trembling, as one who has “chosen” parishes to attend – heterodox.

One of the models that has been drawn on since the early days of the current movement in North American diaspora Anglicanism (I remember hearing ++Bob Duncan refer to it at the gathering in Dallas in 2003) is that of Celtic monasticism. To be sure, it has been referred to often enough to assume something of an air of triteness, especially when there hangs behind it an unarticulated dichotomy of Celtic Christianity (= good) vs Roman Christianity (= bad). But, rightly understood, does that model offer anything to the Church in mission?

The non-contiguous polity of Celtic monasticism arose from the sociopolitical conditions of Ireland.  Lying outside the Roman Empire, Ireland had no cities. When bishops were appointed and ordained for work in Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries, their dioceses were contiguous with the tuathas, the local petty kingdoms (the word tuatha actually means people) into which the island was multiply divided. But the real centers of ecclesiastical mission and authority were the monasteries, some of which grew to include several hundreds or more than a thousand monks and lay dependents (including families). These monasteries even took on the Latin term civitas, “city”. Outside the major episcopal centers like Armagh, bishops were usually monks within a monastic civitas, and held sacramental and magisterial authority, but not political authority, which was reserved to the abbots of the monasteries. When monks left a monastery to preach the Gospel to the unevangelized parts of Ireland, the Western Isles and the Scottish mainland, they established new monastic centers that were dependent on, and under the abbatial authority of, the mother house (monastery) from which the monks had originally come. Eventually this model spread to the continent, and Irish monasteries were founded in Gaul, Germany, and even northern Italy. The spread of the model of daughter houses dependent on the original mother house back in Ireland or elsewhere meant the development of a widespread non-contiguous network of monasteries outside the diocesan structure of Britain and the continent (which had, of course, arisen within the political contingencies of the Roman Empire).

This polity permitted a supple missional focus to Irish monasticism that meant a fairly rapid spread of evangelizing monks. But we would misread history were we to assume that mission was accomplished in the early medieval period only through this model, when in fact the evangelization of the Franks, the Frisians, the Saxons, the Danes and other Germanic tribes was accomplished by the Church in Gaul (later France) along diocesan lines and with the full support of Rome. Another problem arose when the Irish monks in Gaul, Germany, and Italy were not willing to recognize the local episcopal authority of the diocesan bishops – in other words, refusing to recognize the reality of the Church in the place where they were.

So what could North American diaspora Anglicanism learn from the historical model of Irish monasticism?

1) First, the strength of the missional connection of founding churches and daughter churches that David Hyman notes in his post. An interesting historical footnote in this regard is that this is how dioceses came to exist in the Church (at least in the West) – the dependence of suburban and rural parishes (and urban “stational” parishes) on the mother church of a city, and the appointment of presbyters rather than bishops as pastors of these dependent churches.

In time, it may even be that geographically contiguous dioceses will arise from such “familial” networks of mother and daughter churches, as they did some sixteen hundred years ago, and that the rectors of mother parishes will become bishops, or at least assume some quasi-episcopal role (perhaps even developing into a ministry like that of the ancient chorepiscopus).

2) Second, the example of Irish monasticism provides a check on the heterodox and destructive notion of choosing a missional network of churches with whom a local congregation has affinities other than simply being other local expressions of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Irish monasteries didn’t choose their mother house. They had been founded by monks who had come from the mother house or from other daughter houses, and there was no changing from one monastic “network” to another because of affinity or preference.

The only reason for geographically non-contiguous networks is to advance the Church’s mission, not to exist as enclaves of the like-minded.

What might this mean practically, for the Anglican Mission and ACNA in particular? Already existing parishes and congregations that join either the AM or ACNA would not themselves choose the network (or nascent diocese) to which they belong. Instead, this decision would rest with the bishops of the Church. Parishes and congregations founded by church planters (latter day Irish missionary monks!) and by mother churches would remain in administrative and sacramental connection with their mother churches. In no case would a local congregation or parish simply choose, on the basis of shared characteristics and outlook, to be part of a missional network.

3) Third, the Irish monastic model provides a cautionary example as well, insofar as the monasteries came into conflict with diocesan authorities and churches. What might the practical consequences of taking caution be?

At a minimum, the conflict should not be read in such a way that the diocesan model of mission is denigrated or assumed merely to be administrative and not missional. It may very well be that, in the fullness of time, God’s will is such that churches in non-contiguous missional networks become part of geographically contiguous missional networks called dioceses, bringing with them the supple and creative missional focus that brought the non-contiguous networks into being in the first place. This is what eventually happened to many of the far-flung Irish monasteries, though admittedly sometimes through episcopal coercion rather than willing submission. But the opportunity for willing submission itself becomes a sign of the Gospel, insofar as it embodies an apostolic virtue (cf. Ephesians) – I should note that this is also true of submission to episcopal authority (and network authority), whether geographically contiguous or not.

We also must honestly and uncomfortably ask ourselves the question of whether it really advances the kingdom to have overlapping jurisdictions and missional networks in many areas of the country. In those places where the churches cooperate with each other, where they don’t duplicate ministries or unnecessarily consume resources best shared, then in a missionary setting, overlapping might be alright – but the caveat here is that the churches and missions in these areas should jointly be under some general [episcopal] oversight (which is why I think the withdrawal of the Anglican Mission from full membership in ACNA was a tremendous mistake). And, of course, it should go nearly without saying – but we have to name demons to exorcise them – that church-planting should never take place in an area of shared mission such that divisiveness or a mindset of competition is created.

Hope for a Communion on the verge of a breakdown?

Philip Turner’s latest contribution to the ongoing post-Dublin discussion: “Communion on the Verge of a Breakdown: What Then Shall We Do?“, posted both at the ACI website and at the TLC Covenant weblog/website.

Benjamin Guyer’s piece at Covenant (“A Protest against the New Primatial Standing Committee“), to which my priest and friend David Hyman drew my attention yesterday, has drawn a couple of interesting replies from James Wirrel and Ian Montgomery. Guyer has been consistently dismissive of GAFCON (not that I don’t have my own concerns with the movement for ecclesiological reasons) and of any extramural Anglicans in North America (he is particularly disdainful of ACNA and AMiA), so Fr Montgomery’s hortatory comment (after Wirrel’s extended comment) is particularly apt. The fact that Guyer has shown himself over and over again either to be incapable of recognizing or just refusing to recognize that AMiA, and to a lesser extent ACNA, have been able to bring unchurched and other-churched people into Anglicanism who would otherwise likely never have darkened the door of an Episcopal parish, has been a real irritant to me. Be that as it may, however.

To be sure, we have all sinned and come short of God’s glory in the ongoing struggles within the Anglican Communion. Conservative Episcopalians like Guyer have been dismissive of ACNA, AMiA, and GAFCON in ways that misprise and slander faithful Anglicans in these groups (accusations of North American conservative money fueling the engine of the Global South I can understand from Western revisionists – but from Western conservatives?). Some Global South provinces began and encouraged endeavors in North America that have caused division and scandal within conservative dioceses in The Episcopal Church (why, for instance, were any AMiA congregations started in the Diocese of South Carolina under no less a conservative bishop than Ed Salmon? – and yes, I know some of the history behind that, but as a member now of a church in the AMiA, it still scandalizes me).

The Communion Partners and other faithful, theologically conservative Anglicans within The Episcopal Church and those faithful, theologically conservative Anglicans in ACNA, AMiA, the Reformed Episcopal Church, and other extramural jurisdictions must work together, under the leadership of the Global South primates and other bishops to re-form the Communion. Concrete steps toward reconciliation must begin soon, before we can actually move ahead with the theological and ecclesiological heavy-lifting the task will require.

In the (albeit pollyannish) ecumenical optimism of the 1970s and 1980s, some of the proposals coming out of groups like COCU (the Consensus on Church Union) included penitential liturgies between the sundered Christian churches (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.) that included confessions of sins of schism, hardheartedness, misjudgment – and that included acts of forgiveness of one another, symbolized by the coming together of leaders in these acts of penitence and forgiveness. What if the Communion Partner bishops in The Episcopal Church (+Lawrence, +Stanton, et al.) were to come together with the ACNA bishops (++Duncan, +Iker, +Ackerman, et al.), the AMiA bishops, and Reformed Episcopal Church bishops publicly and liturgically to confess together to one another and to Almighty God their particular sins of commission and omission, and those of their churches (since bishops, as the heads of their churches, may really and sacramentally do that) against the Body of Christ within the Anglican Communion, to receive God’s and one another’s forgiveness, and having sought the forgiveness of the offended brother, were to approach the Lord’s Table together to share in his Body and Blood?

In November 2005 I was privileged to be present at the “Hope and a Future” conference held under the auspices of the Anglican Communion Network (recall that this predated the departure of San Joaquin, Fort Worth, Quincy, and Pittsburgh from The Episcopal Church), at which a number of leading conservative Episcopalian bishops were present, along with several Global South bishops and primates (including ++Akinola and ++Orombi) and bishops from the Reformed Episcopal Church. At the concluding Eucharist, the Reformed Episcopal bishops, formally out of communion with any other Anglican group since the original schism in the 1870s, joined in the procession with the other bishops. I was brought to tears as I saw the Presiding Bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church, Leonard Riches, receive communion from the hand of +Duncan, and then saw the other Episcopal and Anglican bishops receive communion from +Riches, as he administered the Cup and +Duncan the Bread to them. A schism healed, with the very tangible and visible act of communion in the Lord’s Body and Blood. Around that same time, the Church of Nigeria and the Reformed Episcopal Church announced a concordat between them, with mutual recognition and interchangeability of ministries and members. And, of course, the REC is a constituent member of ACNA – whatever that means institutionally for now, since they maintain a separate institutional existence as well. (Though this reminds me of something that I read just this morning in an essay by the Orthodox theologian Thomas Hopko, quoting Fr Alexander Schmemann: that the Church isn’t an institution with sacraments, it is a sacrament with institutions.)

Imagine such a thing with regards to the separated Anglicans in North America!

And what locally could we envision, painful though it would be and meaning the laying down of all grievances, not to be taken up again, in acts of penitence and forgiveness? What if Bishop Church Murphy, Primatial Vicar of the Anglican Mission for the Archbishop of Rwanda, were to seek publicly the forgiveness of +Mark Lawrence (and +Ed Salmon?) in a liturgy in the cathedral church in Charleston, and they his forgiveness – and were then all to concelebrate the Eucharist? (After all, some preparation has been made in +Lawrence’s settling of the Pawley’s Island lawsuit over a year ago.)

Then, after these public acts, what if the bishops and their churches committed themselves to mutual ministry in those places where their jurisdictions overlapped, pledging not to begin new initiatives without the consent – and pray God with the prayer and assistance – of the other? Even did their jurisdictions continue separate institutional existences (which I have no doubt will be the case in North American Anglicanism for years to come), it would mean the end of the schisms that have divided faithful Anglicans in North America for the past decade or so (or 140 years, in the case of the REC).

Could you imagine faithful conservative North American bishops of all the various jurisdictions going into Global South-initiated meetings of the Communion’s bishops in such a reconciled state as that? I know it seems terribly idealistic, and it would involve giving up to the Lord’s healing a lot of hurt and (often justified) grievance, but what really is there to prevent our doing this? Aren’t we the people whom Jesus has called to forgive their brothers and sisters seventy times seven times?  Aren’t we the people whom God in Christ has called to deny themselves, daily to take up their crosses and follow him?

William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1645

Today we commemorate William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Watch Night: The Covenant Service

This post, which I wrote several years ago, has consistently been the most viewed at The Confessing Reader.  I offer it again this year, with two changes.  First, the language of the prayers has been rendered in contemporary idiom.  Second, the Lessons and Gospel are now taken from the English Standard Version Bible.

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In 1663 Puritan pastor and divine Richard Alleine published Vindiciae Pietatis: or, A Vindication of Godliness in the Greater Strictness and Spirituality of It. Anglican priest and evangelist John Wesley republished Alleine’s work in his A Christian Library in 1753, and on August 11, 1755, used a chapter from the book, “Application of the Whole”, in what was probably the first celebration of the Covenant Service in the Methodist movement.

According to The United Methodist Book of Worship,

The heart of the service, focused in the Covenant Prayer, requires persons to commit themselves to God. This covenant is serious and assumes adequate preparation for and continual response to the covenant.

As the annual Covenant Service developed in the Methodist societies of England, the service was conducted whenever Wesley visited a Methodist society around the country, while in London the service was usually held on New Year’s Day. In later years, the Covenant Service came most commonly to be held on New Year’s Day or Eve. When celebrated on New Year’s Eve, it came to be called a “Watch Night Service”, would often last three hours or longer, and included hymn singing and appropriate readings from Scripture.

The Watch Night Service became a fixture of rural churches, both Baptist and Methodist, across the South. Many churches, particularly African-American Methodist and Baptist churches, still celebrate Watch Night services, though the practice has waned in other churches. My Baptist mother recalls, from four or more decades past, three-hour Watch Night services of hymn singing, praying, Scripture reading, and occasionally a sermon, lasting from 9 o’clock until midnight. (The entire congregation attended, including the children – at least until the days when nurseries for children became usual. I have vague memories of these Watch Night services from my early childhood – from knowing they were happening, not from attending them, but the practice died in my home church when I was quite young.)  In this way, the Watch Night service functions much as a Vigil Service (such as the Easter Vigil, or a Vigil for the Day of Pentecost) has functioned in liturgical churches.

While we renew our commitment to the New Covenant with every baptism and with every celebration of the Holy Eucharist, it seems fitting on New Year’s Eve, on the Eve of the festival of the Holy Name of Jesus when we celebrate our Lord’s submission to the Law (“on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised” Leviticus 12:3), we should renew our covenant commitment as well.

The following text, based on Wesley’s Covenant Service, is taken from the Book of Common Worship (1962) of the Church of South India. (In the CSI, January 1 is designated “The Day of the Covenant”.) In this abbreviation of the South Indian Covenant Service I have included the collect, lessons from that service, substituting for that liturgy’s Gospel reading the Gospel appointed for the Holy Name of Jesus (known in previous prayerbooks as “The Circumcision of Christ”), and the section of the service called “The Covenant”.

The Collect

O God, who has appointed our Lord Jesus Christ as Mediator of a new covenant, grant us grace, we beseech thee, to draw near with fullness of faith and join ourselves in a perpetual covenant to thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson
Jeremiah 31:31-33

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

The Epistle
Hebrews 12:22-25a

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven.

The Gospel
Luke 2:15-21

When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

THE COVENANT

And now, beloved, let us with all our heart renew our part in the covenant that God has made with his people, and take the yoke of Christ upon us.

This taking of his yoke means that we are heartily content that he should appoint us our place and work, and that he alone should be our reward.

Christ has many services to be done; some are easy, others are difficult; some bring honour, other bring reproach; some are suitable to our natural inclinations and temporal interests, other are contrary to both. In some we may please Christ and please ourselves, in others we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves. Yet the power to do all these things is assuredly given us in Christ, who strengthenth us.

Therefore let us make the covenant of God our own. Let us engage our heart to the Lord, and resolve in his strength never to go back.

Being thus prepared, let us now, in sincere dependence on his grace and trusting in his promises, yield ourselves anew to him, meekly kneeling upon our knees.

All kneel.

The minister says in the name of all:

O Lord God, Holy Father, you have called us through Christ to be partakers in this gracious covenant:  We take upon ourselves, for love of you, to seek and do your perfect will. We are no longer our own, but yours.

Here all the people join.

I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for you or laid aside for you, exalted for you or brought low for you; let me be full, let me be empty; let me have all things, let me have nothing; I freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you are mine, and I am yours. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

And thus this day a triple light is given….

To paraphrase a line from Charles Price’s stanza added to Christopher Wordsworth’s hymn, “O day of radiant gladness” (hymn 48 in The Hymnal 1982).

Today we commemorate three saints in the Calendars of the Anglican Churches: Sylvester, Bishop of Rome; John Wycliffe, Theologian and Reformer; and Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Bishop in Western Africa.

Celebrating martyrs – in Christmastide?

A brief reflection on why we celebrate the feast days of martyrs during Christmastide, from the New Book of Festivals and Commemorations by Dr Philip Pfatteicher.

Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr, 1170

The biographical sketch and propers for Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and Martyr are posted at For All the Saints.

The Holy Innocents

The biographical sketch and propers for the feast day of the Holy Innocents, are posted at For All the Saints.

Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist

The biographical sketch and propers for the feast day of Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist, are posted at For All the Saints.