Writing about Universalist Christianity and improving how churches work
A friend asked me: did Universalists observe Lent?
In my reading, they did not observe in the “giving up” sense but did, in the twentieth century anyway, have meditation manuals and special devotional services — say, by the Women’s Association. And of course Maundy Thursday, important also as a day for welcoming new members.
British Unitarian blogger and minister Andrew Brown blogged about Univeralist leader Robert Cummins´s counsel to ministers in his own time, excerpted from one of the last Universalist polity manuals, pre-consolidation.
Still in Dvorak, but typed faster!
Thanks to Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Dan Harper for putting up the all-typed-out version of the 1832 edition of Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement. If you had looked at the library of your everyday nineteenth-century Universalist, it would have included the Bible, a Life of Murray and perhaps this.
Thanks! and enjoy.
This is an outline of Service Eleven from Hymns of the Spirit, previously mentioned. I’ve removed a couple of prayers, including the litany, written by Von Ogden Vogt, and which are probably copyrighted. More about what it means later.
The Service may begin with a Chorale, an Introit, a Processional Hymn, or with selected Sentences.
by the Minister and people:
[in full, deleted here]
The Lord be with you.
And with thy spirit.
Praise ye the Lord.
The Lord’s name be praised.
if desired.
if desired.
Then the Minister may say:
Here endeth the reading of the lesson.
by the Minister, the responses to be said or sung by the people:
Let us pray. O Lord, show thy mercy upon us.
And grant us thy salvation.
O God, make clean our heart within us.
And take not thy holy Spirit from us.
[Bidding collect, then litany with sung response.]
ending with the music of the following chant.
Now unto God, the unseen fount of all our life,
And source of all wisdom and strength,
Be glory and majesty, dominion and pow’r, forever and ever. Amen.
to be said by the Minister and people, standing.
[In full, here deleted. Not familiar to me.]
Another phone-typed blog post as I wait for my bus to church this morning. Yesterday I wrote that one service was unlike the others. This is incorrect: there are two. In the editor’s words:
The first five services are of a traditional type, based upon forms long familiar, but printed with greater detail and choice of content. The Sixth to the Ninth Services follow a similar but simplified sequence of events, and are ethical in tone, as are the Tenth and Fourteenth Services. The Tenth and Eleventh Services follow a somewhat different pattern, which has proved acceptable in some churches. The Twelfth to Sixteenth Services are for use at Christmas, Easter, a Spring Festival, Thanksgiving Day or Harvest Festival, National Anniversaries or a service for International Peace. For other special occasions, — Whitsunday [Pentecost — ed.], All Souls’, Children’s Sunday, etc. — the usual order of service can easily be adapted by the use of appropriate scripture and responsive readings, and of prayers selected from the section entitled Additional Prayers and Collects.
Two issues come to mind. First, that Hymns of the Spirit is essentially a Unitarian project that the Universalists joined, as evidenced by the list of miscellaneous services core to the Universalist calendar. (Did the publishers fear low Universalist adoption?) See also the set of hymns at the back that “do not enter into the general scheme of the book. ”
But that’s the past. Consider instead the opportunity. So often, an old mode of worship is judged poorly as if it were an anthology of elements. But a service also includes a framework, directions, themes, and the provision of options. These are also valuable in discerning the liturgical theology of a church and tradition. (The physical space and use of light, sound and artifacts too.)
Which brings us back to Service Eleven to consider for rehabilitation in the New England tradition of liberal Protestant churches.
The old 1937 joint Unitarian and Universalist hymnal, the Hymns of the Spirit had orders of service and liturgical elements that I suspect were well used through the 1960s and 70s, with use continuing til today.
You could divide the services into clearly Christian, something other than Christian but familiar and services for holidays and special occasions. Leaving the holiday services aside, I was pleased to discover that all but one of the other services walked down the well-established path of Morning Prayer with Sermon, with its origins in the Elizabethan prayer book. The not-Christian services were (on the whole) simpler, and the Christian services had the — or rather, a — litany preceding the collects, but the lineage is unmistakable. Certainly to the Episcopalians and others heralding to the same tradition — optional Presbyterian service books come to mind — since Morning Prayer and Sermon would have been the default service back then.
Which should make me happy? Not quite. Morning Prayer and Sermon is a hybrid affair, and the sermon feels like an indigestible afterthought. But with really good music and a careful preacher it functions like a stimulating alternative to Evensong. Alas, I have small congregations with little access to fine music in mind. More mission post than cathedral.Â
For these, the service which was the exception might help. More about that next time.
For the record, I’ve written this on my phone with the WordPress app — a first for me.
Regular readers know my affection for the series of prayerbooks first arranged by Charles H. Leonard, Universalist minister and seminary professor, and later extracts and abridgments. The first dates to 1867; the last, a local extract, was printed in 1957. I type out the collects and readings from the former each week.
Careful readers will also my suggestion that, for very small and minister-less Unitarian and Universalist churches, especially the older ones, I recommend reviewing the old church school literature for worship forms and themes. The structure are simple but churchly, the themes timeless (good for congregations that meet less than weekly) and are easily “matured” to an adult or mixed-age congregation. The Beacon Song and Tune Book serves as an analog to the hymns and services of the “old red” Hymns of the Spirit.
Now I have just found a parallel to “Dr. Leonard’s prayer book”: Sunday School Hymnal with Offices of Devotion (1912). It’s not quite as evergreen as the Beacon Song and Tune Book but this nearly hundred-year-old book wasn’t meant to be. I’d use it as a resource book: to see what psalms and gospel passages work together to make a service. The prayers, at first glance, can be abandoned and replaced, once the themes are recorded.
Somehow I missed what seems to be a valuable project to transcribe the obituaries of ministers and notable laypersons from the Universalist Register.
A good selection of years are included from 1862 to 1882, but it’s far from complete, especially in the 1870s and after 1882. Do take a look.
While the likes of Hosea Ballou, Thomas Starr King and Edwin Hubble Chapin are included, far more interesting to me are remembrances like these:
Rev. Silas Russell, in East Dover, Me., May, 1860, aged 70 years. He was a very worthy, unassuming, and even retiring man-delighting most to preach in secluded places, where there was little pecuniary reward. His end was peace and joy.
If a gospel for the 100% becomes adulation for the 1% — read that as you will — then it’s good to restore hope for the other 99%
But how, I wonder, would one contribute to the work? It’s a project of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society, so perhaps to contact the leadership of the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography?
Thanks to my friend Kevin for pointing out this online newspaper article, that Inman Chapel, a former Universalist church in the North Carolina mountains will get a historical marker. This is the same Inman family treated fictionally in the novel Cold Mountain.
Nothing gets me to blog like the intention not to blog.
I read this brief NPR piece about declining numbers of editors on Wikipedia. I’ve long thought the process was one bit too complex — particularly about flagging biased articles — so I’m hopeful for improvements.
Which raises a question: which Unitarian and Universalist articles yet need to be written or vastly improved? Wikipedia has, and can yet better be, a resource for training and personal exploration. And also, which core articles should be in as many languages as possible.
I’d gladly abandon other Unitarian and Universalist online historical works if the history writers out there could settle on working within the Wikipedia structure.