So on Sunday I attended an “evangelical Anglican” church, St Michael le Belfrey. It is the parish church right next to the Minster, and it has a lively and committed congregation. The building dates to the Middle Ages, but the style of worship and preaching was solidly evangelical. If I didn’t know that the congregation belonged to the Church of England, I wouldn’t have guessed it from the service. I was curious in attending, because I wondered whether the service would blend elements from a more typically Anglican liturgy with contemporary praise and worship. Not so. The service didn’t use any elements from the Book of Common Prayer or Common Worship (the Church of England’s updated BCP); in fact, communion wasn’t even celebrated. The worship was led by a band, all the songs were contemporary, and the lyrics were projected up on a screen that blocked half of the nineteenth-century reredos. The priest wore a collar, but his sermon was exegetical and conversational, he used powerpoint, and there was a very well-done video that accompanied the “giving Sunday” theme. (It’s a universal principle that if you are just visiting a church, you will attend on a Sunday that is really meant primarily for the congregation.)
In fact, the church, for those of you who are Bloomington evangelicals, reminded me very much of Exodus Church. There was a time of thanksgiving when congregants were encouraged to simultaneously speak out loud their prayers of gratitude to the Lord. The giving Sunday focus was also the culmination of an entire campaign to raise a chunk of money, much of which went back out into the community through non-profits that were not officially part of the church. The congregation clearly desired to be generous with their money, and to support other organizations in York and Yorkshire that are doing good work. The church, as you can see from their website, is clearly missional.
It was odd for me to be worshiping in a centuries-old building, which belongs to a centuries-old church tradition, and yet to be involved in a service that bears the hallmarks of so many recent developments in Protestant spirituality. What felt to me like a juxtaposition ended up causing me to reflect on both the disjuncitons and contiguities between medieval and modern evangelical spirituality. (And even as I wrote that last sentence, I recognize that I am reducing “medieval spirituality” to one thing, when in fact medieval forms of devotion and practice did vary radically across time and place.) So, for example, we sang a song, new to me, “Ready for You.” Here are some of the lyrics:
Here we are, standing on the edge of something new.
Lead us on, further than we’ve ever been before.
We are living for the glory of the Lord
Hearts open wide, we’re ready for you.
Evangelicals tend to like “new” things. New churches, new ministries, new books, new readings of Scripture. (It’s a tendency we surely share with humanities scholars, who are equally enamored with new paradigms. I say this as both an evangelical and a humanities scholar.) In broad strokes, both the Middle Ages and the contemporary Catholic church can often be dismissed as tending merely to “conserve” tradition, which means, in spiritual terms, missing out on the “new” things God is doing. But this is a matter of perspective. God has, after all, been about the same thing from the beginning of time. The church doesn’t do anything today that it hasn’t also done for all of its two-thousand-year history. We are living for the glory of the Lord, yes, but when have we, the church, not been? Standing in St Michael le Belfrey, looking at the layers of history inscribed in the building, I struck me as odd to be so keen on “something new.”
But then I started thinking about the monks who left St Mary’s Abbey (also in York) in 1132, and founded Fountains Abbey. Those who left found the adherence to the Benedictine Rule at St Mary’s to be lax, and they desired a more rigorous form of religious life. Although they wanted to “return” to an older form of communal devotion, I wonder if they wouldn’t have experienced their exile from St Mary’s as an obedience to some “new” work that God was doing. When Fountains was founded, it joined the Cistercian order, a monastic order that was itself begun in order to reform the Benedictine order. In their reform, however, it is arguable that the Cistercians went beyond the Rule of St Benedict in their austerity. Would the earliest Cistercians thought they were following some new work of the Lord, even as they perceived that new work to be a return to something older? Patty is probably better equipped to answer questions about the confluence of newness and tradition in the Middle Ages, since her book on “the medieval new” is coming out with Penn very soon. But I was pondering the odd mixture of old and new in Christian devotion while singing praise choruses in a medieval church on Sunday morning.
In another, entirely random, observation: one of the greatest differences between modern church architecture and of any other time period is the place assigned for children. Up until very recently, children did not have a separate space carved out for them in the church. I can’t speak to other periods, but in the Middle Ages, children, if they came to church, would just mill around in the nave with everyone else. (Pews are a very late-medieval invention, and even then not every church had them.) I’ve noticed while visiting parish churches that today they all include a space for children in the back of the sanctuary, with toys and other age-appropriate activities. At St Michael le Belfrey, some of the children left the main sanctuary during the sermon, but we could occasionally still hear the sound of their activities drifting up, and there were a number of infants in the service. It’s an entirely different model of the church community. I won’t lie–I’m a big fan of our children’s wing at ECC, with its many classrooms and caring teachers, ready to welcome kids with age-appropriate activities. But there is also something lovely about a church that really only has one room–the whole congregation, regardless of age, sharing the same space and listening to one another.
On a final note–I’m grateful to the St Michael le Belfrey folks for introducing me to this song. I’ll admit to liking the metaphor!
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