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2.
Who Should Do the Liturgical Planning?

Rectors or Vicars are canonically responsible for the worship of the congregation. The canons also direct that they seek the assistance of “persons skilled in music” and “together” see that music appropriate to its liturgical context is used. There is no requirement that they consult with anyone else.

The Parish Priest as Planner

In many ways the ordained priest seems an ideal choice for parish liturgical planner. He or she has almost certainly studied liturgics in the course of preparation for the ministry and will have information and insights that other worshipers lack. The priest will be the usual presider and preacher at the parish liturgies and is, therefore, in a position both to understand and to implement the necessary planning. If the priest takes this responsibility seriously, then the services should be well and coherently planned. In many congregations, the rector or vicar has traditionally assumed this responsibility and has produced services that are both beautiful and worshipful. In small congregations, the parish musician is often a part-time accompanist with no expertise in liturgical music, and the priest becomes the sole planner by default.

The parish priest as sole planner, however, has the weaknesses as well as the strengths of an individual operation. What is gained in singleness of outlook is often lost in narrowness of vision, and the beautiful services fail to meet the needs of the congregation. In parishes where there is more than one priest, the participation of the priests who will preside at particular services seems almost essential. In the same way, a parish deacon should be a part of the planning process. The deacon not only has a significant role in the celebration of the liturgy but is specifically charged “to interpret to the Church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world” (Book of Common Prayer, hereafter BCP, p. 543). This concern, applied to liturgical planning, should help to rescue services from irrelevance by bringing vital and different concerns to the planning process.

Staff Planning

In large parishes, the planning is often done by the professional staff: clergy, musicians, and perhaps a director of Christian education. I have taken part in such a weekly staff liturgical planning meeting in a cathedral congregation. The bishop, five priests, two deacons, the organist, and a lay assistant provided an interesting and competent mix with a good deal of expertise. There was a wealth of good ideas, a fair amount of give and take, and good liturgy. The obvious lack was congregational representation. Our concerns were admittedly clerical. The Roman sacramentary says,

In planning the celebration, the priest should consider the spiritual good of the assembly rather than his own desires. The choice of texts is to be made in consultation with the ministers and others who have a function in the celebration including the faithful… [i.e., the members of the congregation]. (General Instruction of the Roman Missal, par. 313)

This is excellent advice. Lay people generally have a better feel than clergy do for their own congregation. It is better to argue about the competing claims of Pentecost and Mothers’ Day when planning the service than to have to discuss it with angry parishioners after the celebration.

The Parish Worship Committee

A parish worship (or liturgy) committee (including clergy, parish musicians, lay readers, and congregational representatives) is the ideal group for making the general decisions we have been discussing, looking at the life of the parish in its totality, and setting up general parameters for worship. These committee members can consider not only the congregation’s resources but its expectations for its liturgy. They are better equipped than any individual or professional staff, no matter how competent, to decide what the characteristics of the parish’s worship will be.

These characteristics include important but seldom discussed questions such as the following:

• How formal or informal should the style of our parish liturgy be? There is no right answer to this question, but that does not mean that members of the congregation, including ordained members, do not have strongly held views on the subject.

• What kind of music do we want? Healey Willan and three familiar hymns? A wide variety of hymns and service music from The Hymnal 1982? Songs of celebration, either from the booklet of that title or some other appendix to the official hymnal? Then we need to ask whether all the music should be sung by the congregation or whether some pieces are the offering of the choir. We can then go on to ask how large a place music should have in our services. Again, there is no correct answer except in terms of the specific congregation. The Hymnal provides musical settings for almost the entire service. This does not mean every congregation will or should sing everything. The canons require that music be used “as an offering to the glory of God and as a help to the people in their worship….” What music and how much music are questions to be decided locally.

• What is the style of our parish liturgy? This is a question often left to the rector or vicar to decide, not always happily for the congregation. When it is discussed, it is often by a vestry criticizing the parish priest or by a search committee seeking a new one. Even then the answer is frequently a single stereotypical word: low, catholic, charismatic, renewed, central. A description of what the congregation expects to happen on Sundays with some clear idea of how much variety is acceptable is more helpful.

• How much change will there be in the liturgy from Sunday to Sunday? Many congregations will wish to find a liturgical format and keep it almost untouched. Others will wish to change not only texts but manner of performance from week to week, singing the psalms, for example, to simplified Anglican chants sometimes, reading them responsively at others, and using the settings in Gradual Psalms on still other occasions. Sometimes such changes can be effectively used to mark the changes in liturgical seasons.

• What use should be made of Rite One and Rite Two? The answer does not have to be engraved in stone, and it is a good idea to raise the question again every year or two.

One of the common features of all of these questions is that they are best answered by representative groups of parishioners. Not only will the answers be more likely to represent the actual feelings of the congregation, but it becomes possible to involve the liturgy committee in creative liturgical change. If the committee is convinced that changes need to be made, it becomes the committee’s function, not just the priest’s, to promote the changes in the congregation. The more people involved in the planning, the more people have a vested interest in its going well. Of course, if it goes badly, the committee, not the vicar or rector, takes the blame, and it is possible to step back without causing a rift between priest and people, for the decisions have been joint decisions.

Role of the Clergy

Some rectors feel comfortable allowing a layperson to chair the parish worship committee and serving themselves as a member and resource. Others choose to chair the committee themselves. In either case, it is important that the clergy be members of the committee, so that their informed voices will be a part of the discussion. For the rector or vicar to take no part in the discussion and simply veto the decisions of the liturgy committee is counterproductive.

Sometimes clergy, faced for the first time with a prospect of a parish liturgy committee doing liturgical planning, have an identity crisis and begin to wonder exactly what the ministry of the priest is in this process. First and foremost the priest is an enabler, one who makes it possible for the people to worship. My analogy is the conductor of an orchestra. The conductor usually does not play the music personally, but he or she enables the orchestra to work together to do it. This means that the priest has a designated role as presider. The priest is a minister of the liturgy, not its master. He or she serves the Body of Christ to enable the priestly people of God to fulfill their baptismal priesthood. Priests also have personal talents not conferred by ordination but either innate or acquired. By education and training they are preachers, exegetes of Scripture, and liturgical resources. They may be singers and possess other useful and usable skills. They must be willing to use the talents of others and not usurp their roles in the worship.

If there is a parish deacon, it is the deacon’s responsibility to supervise and train lay people for their ministries, in the liturgy and in the world. But neither priest nor deacon are to do the job for them. The best model I can hold up for the Church is the Boy and Girl Scouts. They have professional leadership, but most of the grass-roots work is done by volunteers whom the professionals train.

Everything needs to be brought to the altar at the parish eucharist, and from the altar, the power of God goes forth into all these activities of Christians in the Church and in the world. All we really need to do the liturgy of the Church is a priest to preside, a leader of song, and a community that wants to worship. Yet the whole parish can be involved in the planning and the doing of it.

Clergy should not be afraid to use their own skills or to make way for others to use theirs. Ordained ministers are not diminished by someone who does things better than they do, unless they try to prevent them from doing it.

The committee should be set up initially by the parish priest, who should appoint the first members. The committee can then decide to increase its own membership by adding those it comes to see that it needs. Its scope of authority should also be spelled out clearly at the beginning. It can be an advisory committee to the rector or vicar, presenting its conclusions to the priest for canonical approval, or it can be a decision-making body to which the priest delegates the planning responsibility. It is important that the committee understand which it is.

In addition to this sort of overall planning for worship, the liturgy committee needs to look each year at the liturgical year and other parish calendars (when church school starts, public school vacations, etc.) and decide the shape of the entire year’s worship. They need to decide what the congregation will do this year to mark off Advent, Lent, and Easter, the major liturgical seasons, and what will be done to distinguish festivals from ordinary Sundays. They need to integrate into the liturgical calendar local parish celebrations (and anticipate problems that might interfere with church attendance on particular days). The point is that unless these things are decided for the whole year, or at least for a liturgical season, there will be perceived discontinuity from Sunday to Sunday.

To plan a specific service, the celebrant, preacher, and music director would be the minimum planning group. To this minimum it helps to add the deacon (if there is one), readers, leader of the Prayers of the People, an usher, and representative singers and congregation members. Sometimes parish liturgy committees find it convenient to divide into subcommittees, which may involve additional people not members of the main committee, to plan the individual services, each subcommittee serving for a liturgical season.

Often planning can be well done by ad hoc planning groups. Ideally, these are created by the parish worship committee. They are effective means of planning special services, such as the Easter Vigil, the bishop’s visitation, or a service commemorating those with AIDS. People with special interests who are unwilling or unable to serve on the parish committee will be active members of these ad hoc groups.