– a personal view by Peter Johnson

Only a few years ago, restless spirits in the Methodist Church were complaining about our ‘hymn sandwich' service: the rigidity of it all, the formality and predictability. Bring in, they said, the religious songs, the music groups! We brought in those songs, that music.

After all we are a Free Church, aren't we? Yet, it seems to me that we've also brought in a greater measure of formality than I've ever known in the sixty-odd years I've been a Methodist.

What has changed? We now have a ‘packed lunch' service. All the items are in neat packages and the preacher reads us the labels before opening them up. ‘We'll have a prayer of Adoration, a prayer of Confession and a prayer of Thanksgiving.' So we do. The sermon is now invariably placed after the third hymn or song and what really strikes me is that so many of the spoken words we use in our worship come so evidently from a printed page. If we're old enough to remember the Books of Offices of thirty or more years ago, then a look at the current Methodist Service Book shows us the change that's come over our forms of worship. ‘Words, word, words!' as Eliza Doolittle sang.

A Jewish rabbi, in a book published a year or two ago, said, ‘reading other people's prayers is like wearing someone else's clothes'. In public worship, those who lead it are inviting their congregations to adopt the prayer patterns that they lay down for them. That's inescapable. Since the Book of Common Prayer, Protestant congregations have had measured, balanced, traditional forms of words; prayers which have woven into the fabric of a nation's life over more than three centuries. Maybe we in Methodism are on our way back to try and engraft ourselves on to our Anglican roots - no longer a Free, but an Established or ‘Establishment' Church. Even so, I don't think our methods today are a way forward.

Think of our preoccupation with ‘responsive prayer'. The sentences are so long and ‘literary' that by the time the preacher gets to the bidding, the congregation, trying to remember what the response should be, has forgotten it! I'm puzzled, too, in the Communion Service that the celebrant bids the congregation, ‘The peace of the Lord', to which they duly respond, ‘And also with you' and then, two minutes later, the parson intones, as if once hadn't been enough, ‘The Lord be with you,' to which the flock obediently respond, ‘And also with you.'

Some twenty years ago, Methodism was afflicted with a bad attack of Meditation in public worship. Michel Quoist had a lot to answer for. Talk about wearing other people's clothes!
My reactions to these meditations was that they were fine for one's private devotional reading but they were so individual in tone, so personal to the author, that they excluded me.

And the meditation-bug has struck again!

Somehow, to me, other people's words, when read in public worship still seem to lie on the page. Is it that I, as listener, recognise that the phrasing and the choice of language come from outside, beyond the personality of the speaker or is it that the quasi-poetic words are in themselves better suited to the printed page than to being read aloud in a congregational context?

Years ago, I remember the then Local Preachers' secretary reading the President's letter at a recognition service. It exhorted the new preacher to remember the importance of extempore prayer. Whether ordained or not the preacher is a local preacher and has access to the feelings, thoughts, needs of the congregation. He, she, should be sensitive enough to encompass some of those feelings, thoughts and needs in words that come from within him­ or herself. Prayers would be tailor-made, not off the peg and not ‘other people's clothes'.

Peter Johnson is a Local Preacher in Runcorn