Hello St. Paul’s,
In the course of developing our new strategic plan we have heard a call for reining in the length of our 10:30 Sunday morning service. As our post-pandemic attendance has increased, so has the time needed for administering Communion, and this call is a timely reminder not to take for granted the valuable and limited time of our parishioners. I’ve consulted with my liturgical colleagues, and over the next few weeks you may notice a few small changes, introduced gradually, that we hope will “tighten up” the service without making it feel rushed and without losing any of the essential elements. Here are some of the things you may notice:
- Offer a shorter welcome at the beginning
- Play shorter introductions to hymns we regard as familiar
- Say the Creed rather than chanting it.
- Eliminate the Offertory hymn
- Add a third Communion station
- Restrict the names read aloud on the prayer list to recent requests (note that we read the entire list every day at Morning and Evening Prayer, and that you can always add names in response to “those we now name”).
- Process out during the closing hymn
I cherish our tradition of taking a prayerful moment after the sermon and after Communion, and I want to preserve that dynamic.
There are other measures we could take that would make a greater impact on our worship. For example, we could omit one of the Scripture readings (only the Gospel is required), but it is one of the strengths of our tradition that we hear four significant chunks of Scripture every week; I would be reluctant to water that down. We could omit some verses of the hymns, but that would be disrespectful to the author and would deprive us of the words’ full meaning: I would never recite only half a poem. We could say the entire Eucharistic prayer instead of chanting the beginning and ending: that would change the tenor of our principal service in a way that I am not ready to adopt.
I hope you will let me know your thoughts on these changes as you experience them and on the dynamic of our liturgy in general. Many of you became members of St. Paul’s because of the beauty of our worship, and we want to maintain that high standard.
See you on Sunday, as we celebrate Cathedral Day!
Your sister in Christ,
Penny
