"Ah yes, for us (Sydney) Anglicans, what we say, our words, are important."

This is a comment from a friend of mine when I let him know about the new project I am going to write about in this blog.

His point was that whereas for a group like Hillsong it really is all about the music and a certain kind of preaching, for us Anglicans, while music is important and teaching the word of God especially so, other words said during our services have always been important.

The-group-formerly-known-as-the-Archbishop's-Liturgical-Panel has been beavering away and is about to let loose a new website with remarkably helpful resources for people constructing the words and outlines of our services/ meetings when we meet as the people of God in a public way.

Phases in our history

There have been three phases in the history of our services and the words we use here in the Diocese of Sydney: Authority, Reaction, Responsibility.

Authority: This refers to a time when our services used were those which were properly authorised and at least in theory the minister had no real choice but to use "the said book and none other except as lawful authority allows".

Reaction: is what happened some time in the 70s and later, building up to a crescendo at the end of last century when we baby boomers overthrew the control of authority over what went on in our church. We did this for all kinds of reasons, most of them good, some more dubious. (Interestingly, a theologian friend of mine here in Sydney who is not a baby boomer said to me the other day that he thought that all we baby boomers ought to apologise for the way we wrecked everything before we can properly move on in the future. Typical generation Xer!)

But Reaction has now run out of steam. We are now in a new phase.

Next phase: Responsibility

We now have to take responsibility in a positive sense for the words that are used and the structure of our services. There is actually a lot at stake here, at least in the long term.

Where there is not thoughtfulness and responsibility, particularly for the theological shape and content of our gatherings, a dangerous decline and theological emptiness will eventually impact on us.

As well as that, we simply may not be making available to the people of God remarkably good prayers and other resources. There will be basically a secularisation of our services. Even today, I detect that Oprah Winfrey and that rather gushing personal style is unthinkingly becoming the control of our services. You see this Oprah-style at play when the most important person in the church is you (or, worse still, the service leader) rather than, of course, the one we have all come to meet: Jesus.

There is also a need for thoughtfulness and responsibility because, simply, we want our services and meetings to work.

By work, we mean both genuinely be an encounter with God through his word and people and work in the sense of providing a really encouraging, edifying experience that inspires and instructs our people to live the Christian life and is attractive to outsiders.

New web resource

The group-formerly-known-as-the-Archbishop's-Liturgical-Panel is now trialling a website in which a great number of resources will be made available.

The website will be called bettergatherings.com and will contain both information and advice about services, a massive range of resources that can be used, prayers and so forth including especially some of the classic Anglican prayers that we would do well to keep, and a program called Service Builder in which you can just put things in and out will come an outline of a service which can then be downloaded into PowerPoint and so on. This is but the beginning.

More importantly, what is needed in the diocese is a genuinely engaged theological discussion about what goes on in our services and gatherings. What we really think we are doing and what message we are sending, both by what we say or not say. In other words, it's going to be theological issues that will drive the genuine movement of the responsibility phase of our services in the diocese going into the future.

I was interested that the other day I heard a woman speaking about how she had just become an Anglican attendee and it was really helping her spiritually. "Yes," she said, "I love the way in which we start our service and meet with God, the way we have confession. It's just the right thing we should be doing when we start to pray."

I thought to myself that she was right and then a thought came: yes, such practices as the regular public confession of sin with a clear evangelical assurance of forgiveness ought to continue to be a mark of our Sydney Anglican services. And unless we do take seriously our responsibility, they, like so much else including the proper reading of God's word in the congregation, may well just slip away.

So let's keep at it.