This Assembly of Believers

Bryan Cones

Description

“Among the symbols with which the liturgy deals, none is more important than this assembly of believers.”
This claim made in the 1970s forces the local church to consider those within its congregation, and recognise the gifts and challenges of difference within the church community. In 'This Assembly of Believers' Bryan Cones seeks to take seriously the pastoral context of a congregation, recognising the physical ability, gender and sexuality of those who make up the congregation.
Starting each chapter with their lived experience, Cones poses important questions of the liturgy in light of these experiences before realigning the liturgy to demonstrate the positive theological significance of the marginalised within the congregation.

Sujets

• Christian Practice
• Christian Rituals
• Philosophie et théologie
• Liturgy
• Worship
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780334059738
• Langue: English

Extrait

This Assembly of Believers
The Gifts of Difference in the Church at Prayer
Bryan M. Cones





© Bryan Cones 2020
Published in 2020 by SCM Press
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The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
The Scripture quotations contained herein are from The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
978 0 334 05971 4
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd



Contents
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: In Search of the ‘Boundless Riches of Christ’
1. ‘This Assembly of Believers’: The Primary Symbol at Work
2. Assisted Reproduction: The Baptizing Assembly
3. ‘Christ Is Present in His Church’? Gender, Presiding, and the Primary Symbol
4. The Pastoral Care of ‘the Sick’: Assembling Bodies with Impairment
5. Equivalent, Equal, or Something New? Adjustments to Marriage in the Primary Symbol
Conclusion: ‘How Beautiful the Feet’: Discerning the Path of the Primary Symbol

Bibliography




List of Abbreviations

APBA
A Prayer Book for Australia (1999), Anglican Church of Australia
BCP
Book of Common Prayer (1979), The Episcopal Church
BOS
Book of Occasional Services (2003), The Episcopal Church
EACW
Environment and Art in Catholic Worship (1977), US Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy
ELW
Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
EOW
Enriching Our Worship (1998), The Episcopal Church
EOW2
Enriching Our Worship 2 (2000), The Episcopal Church
NZ=HK
A New Zealand Prayer Book = He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa (1989), Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia
PCBCW
Book of Common Worship (2018), Presbyterian Church, USA
RBC
Rite of Baptism for Children (1969), Roman Catholic Church
RCIA
Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (1972), Roman Catholic Church
RM
Roman Missal (2011), Roman Catholic Church
SC
Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum concilium (1963), Second Vatican Council
UCCBW
Book of Worship (2006), United Church of Christ, USA
UMBW
United Methodist Book of Worship (1992), United Methodist Church, USA
UiW2
Uniting in Worship 2 (2005), The Uniting Church in Australia





Introduction: In Search of the ‘Boundless Riches of Christ’
‘Among the symbols with which the liturgy deals, none is more important than this assembly of believers .’ 1
The quote that opens this introduction, indeed, the quote that opens every chapter of this book, comes from a decades-old teaching document, now abandoned, 2 of the US Roman Catholic Bishops’ (then) Committee on the Liturgy. Its author, an acerbic 3 though well-loved Roman Catholic presbyter named Robert Hovda, was among the company who laboured mightily to bring to practice the insights of the twentieth-century North Atlantic liturgical movement. Back in 1978 his words, still energized by the Second Vatican Council’s 1963 Sacrosanctum concilium and weighted with episcopal authority, continued to fuel what was then a still-expanding change in the way Roman Catholic assemblies were keeping Sunday and other days, with parallel movements among other Western Christians.
By the time I began my own study of liturgy in 1993 at Conception Seminary College with Joyce Ann Zimmerman as my first teacher, it had already been around for a while. But at some point – and I do not remember when – I was reading (or re-reading) Environment and Art in Catholic Worship and found Hovda’s phrase as if for the first time. It has since become the primary lens through which I imagine and interpret what some Christians of my Western traditions are up to when we gather as a liturgical assembly. It also drives most of the questions I ask about those gatherings. I hope it has also been my primary concern in my ministry within ‘this assembly of believers’, first as a baptized member, later as one charged with ‘shepherding’ a community’s prayer, and more recently as one of its baptized and ordained presiders in the Episcopal Church.
Particular periods of ministry in ‘this assembly’ have reaffirmed for me Hovda’s claim. They have also raised further questions, particularly concerning how the differences gathered in the liturgy’s ‘primary symbol’ contributed to the meaning of what the assembly celebrated. At Dignity/Chicago, an LGBTQIA+ 4 Roman Catholic liturgical community in Chicago, Illinois, where I helped prepare Sunday Eucharist, the marriage of same-gender couples, the baptism of children of such couples, and the pastoral care of sexual and gender minorities have made me particularly sensitive to the appearance and treatment of these differences in the assembly. Such liturgies also alerted me to the ways in which the practice of assemblies gathered around particular differences, in this case marginalized ones, both contests and expands the received liturgical tradition, for example about the nature of marriage and family formation.
This has also been true in more broadly representative assemblies. My more recent liturgical ministry in an Episcopal church in suburban Chicago, where I served as a presbyter, included a significant number of members with cognitive differences and physical impairments. In their company I noticed more and more the ways in which persons whose bodies do not conform to majoritarian norms 5 of ‘temporarily able-bodiedness’ 6 or cognitive function are consigned to the ‘bleachers’ in the liturgy, and so made spectators, as if at a football match. 7 I wondered then and now how attention to such differences might both contest and enrich the received liturgical practice and the reflection it generates.
Because of these and other assemblies, I have become particularly interested in the ways in which human difference within the assembly – especially differences made marginal by society, by church, or by both – contributes to the meanings generated by liturgical celebration. While affirming Louis-Marie Chauvet’s claim that the ‘diversified Sunday assembly’ is the ‘most typical [and] “sacramentally” exemplary of the church’, 8 I confess that I rarely encounter sustained reflection on what particular differences contribute to the full expression of the liturgy’s ‘primary symbol’. I am curious to discover ways in which attention to difference in the assembly may disclose or conceal the paschal patterns of what Hovda calls the ‘liberation-and-reconciliation’ 9 that liturgy is intended to make present.
More specifically I am interested in how Hovda’s basic theological insight about ‘this assembly of believers’ might be fruitfully explored to generate a more robust theology of the liturgical assembly through its difference. I hope to build upon the insight of M. Shawn Copeland that ‘[t]he sacramental aesthetics of Eucharist, the thankful living manifestation of God’s image through particularly marked flesh, demand the vigorous display of difference in race and culture and tongue, gender and sex and sexuality’. 10 Such difference gathered in the liturgical assembly is the foundation for what Copeland terms ‘eucharistic solidarity’, though one in no way limited to the Eucharist. My primary contention is that the generous reception and articulation of human difference through the liturgy contributes as yet unappreciated dimensions to the sacramental imagination of an assembly and of assemblies in communion with each other.
This project, then, is a fundamentally liturgical theological endeavour that attempts to interpret an assembly’s theologia prima 11 through the differences it gathers. Because it begins, on the whole, with actual liturgies, it is also fundamentally pastoral, in that it begins with actual assemblies and actual people within them, individuals who through their own difference refract some new dimension of