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Following Father Harrison

At a Diocesan Synod a few years ago I was both amazed and dismayed by the priorities and even the style of events. Let me give you some examples from the ’liturgy’ we were required to use at evening prayers on Saturday:

"Wind of God, dancing over the desert of our reluctance, lead us to the oasis of celebration."

"Breath of God, inspiring communication among strangers, make us channels of your peace, that we may give in deep thankfulness, placing the overflowing basket of our [sic] gifts on the table of rejoicing."

Then we sang the Servant Song (Brother, sister, let me serve you) followed by a short litany with petitions such as:

"in a world of great wealth where many go hungry and fortunes are won and lost by trading in money, come Holy Spirit, and show us what is true."

The Lord’s Prayer came in a new expanded edition with memorable phrases such as:

"bring a cool breeze for those who sweat, and: you are giving us our daily bread when we manage to get back our lands or to get a fairer wage, and: forgive us for keeping silent in the face of injustice and for burying our dreams." Et cetera!

This embarrassing combination of politically correct consciousness-raising and nauseating mawkishness is, alas, all too typical of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. It is made all the more repellent by the fact of its enthusiastic adoption by just those classes of well-bred, well-off white folks from our more comfortable suburbs who enjoy rising above their bourgeois guilt to the dizzy heights of self-congratulation.

You would have been hard put to realise that the Church is first and foremost for the worship of God in time and eternity. On the contrary, it often seemed as though God was only some kind of rubber stamp for our latest fashionable enthusiasms. Less than a century ago we would have been blessing guns in much the same spirit of righteous indignation and getting sentimental about the Angel of Mons.

We have lost our way and we don’t even know it - let alone acknowledge it. At Synod we were exhorted to ever greater efforts at mission. But who would want to join a society which doesn’t even know what it’s about? The three Tikanga are no substitute for the Blessed Trinity, nor social zeal for the presence of God. It’s time to get back on the rails before we go over the cliff.

As a teenager I often attended All Saints’ Dunedin North and the experience of that church left an indelible impression on me greater than any other. The vicar was Father Charles Harrison, an Englishman and a former Roman Catholic layman. His was not a cuddly personality. The moment you entered All Saints’ you knew they meant business. The building was in immaculate condition and the congregation behaved with reverence in it. The services were what used to be called ’Prayer Book Catholic’ having an Anglican dignity, restraint and respect for beautiful liturgy - but not aping Rome. The preaching was quite superb - indeed Father Harrison broadcast nationally on the radio. He had something to say and he said it well. For the music they sang simple traditional settings like Merbecke and Martin Shaw along with the usual hymns and anthems. Everything, simple though it might be, was done to a professional standard, and you were made strongly aware of two things, firstly it was for God, and secondly, it was worthy of your respect.

Since then the flood has come and gone, and few indeed are the arks to be found on Mount Ararat. At a time when the Church in these islands is encouraging every ethnic group it can think of to discover the glorious traditions of its past, good old white middle class Christianity has been heaving the ballast overboard as fast as it can go. Indeed, our ark has now become so utterly lightweight the slightest puff of wind could sink it. And please let us be honest about it. Pakeha Anglicanism is utterly middle-class, preoccupied with all the fashionable shibboleths of the chattering classes, feminism, racialism, social justice, self-realisation - and all from some of the this country’s most comfortable suburbs. To their credit the evangelicals have maintained a grip on fundamental Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, the incarnation and the reality of heaven. Even more importantly they are aware that the Church exists for God, and not the other way about - even if they seem to have some quite strange ideas both about God and the Church.

You only have to compare the prefaces of our Anglican New Zealand Prayer Book and the Prayer Book used in the St Michael’s Orthodox Church in Fingall Street to see an essential difference. The NZPB describes itself as the Church’s gift to itself, while the Orthodox book describes itself as an unworthy gift to God.

Whatever happened to middle and high Anglicanism? Is it just that we have all been demoralised by the success of Derek Prince and Benny Hinn? Why are we trying to be so cosy, desperately determined to be popular. It’s a simple sociological fact that the Emperor Constantine the Great is dead. You no longer need to be a churchgoer to be a respectable member of society, so most people don’t go - if they ever did. But if they did decide to give the local Anglican Church a go would they find the same conviction and sheer professionalism which I found all that time ago in All Saints’. People are, after all, used to being professionally treated by banks, business firms, libraries, consultants - etc, etc. You expect a banker to know about interest rates, and his or her tellers to be able to deal with your monetary transactions sensibly and efficiently.

But bankers and their tellers know about banking. Do parishes and their priests know about Anglicanism? It’s all very well just being Christian - you have to be Christian in a particular way, and for us that way is Anglican. So what do you think of scripture, sacraments, liturgy, pastoral care, preaching, teaching, and all the rest - and how do you put it all into practice in such a way that any visitor to your Church will see that - as I said earlier - it is about God and it deserves respect?

Charles Harrison, thou shouldest be living at this hour - Aotearoa New Zealand hath need of thee!