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| June 7, 2013 | ||||||||||
Dear friends,Next Monday will be the 88th anniversary of the inaugural worship service of The United Church of Canada. In chapel this week, the Rev. Bronwyn Corlett led us in an inspiring service using hymns and prayers from that special day in 1925.
I have a photocopy of the inaugural service that I keep on my desk right under the Bible that I was presented with at the General Council where my appointment was approved. I keep it there, but I hadn’t looked at it for a while, so this was a good reminder to get it out again.
It was a significant occasion, I know, but even still it’s hard to picture a worship service this long in any gathering of the United Church today. They wanted to lift up the best of the traditions of the founding denominations, and they were making commitments for the church of the future. This service reflected their dreams for future generations of the church: for us.
Reading the Order of Service with 2013 eyes, we find a mix of the familiar and the quaintly archaic.
The hymns:
"The Church’s One Foundation"
"All People that on Earth do Dwell"
"O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing"
"O God of Bethel, by Whose Hand"
"When I survey the Wondrous Cross"
"O Spirit of the Living God"
are mostly ones we still sing today, although with updated language.
Bronwyn also updated the language of the Commemoration of the Faithful prayer that she led us through, although without losing any of the original meaning. It’s just that some of the original wording would get in the way of our understanding today.
After chapel I had a meeting with the Rev. Michael Blair and we talked about the service before moving on to other topics. He pointed out to me that several of the lines from the Commemoration of the Faithful are echoed in the words of A New Creed. Of course some of the phrases have their origins in the much older words of the scriptures. The same ideas have been repeated in the words contemporary to different times, so that their full meaning can be experienced by successive generations.
This may be something like the work that the Comprehensive Review Task Group is doing – identifying the ways to structure church, and to speak of church – for our generation and those to come.
Somehow it seemed very appropriate that this lovely chapel service, drawing on the words of a worship service in 1925, was led by a young minister who as a woman would not have been qualified for ordination at the time of church union.
We maintain the best of our traditions, and draw on the strengths of each generation.
Nora Sanders
