scholarly journals Parochial Ecology on St Briavels Common: Rebalancing the Local and the Universal in Anglican Ecclesiology and Practice

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Northcott
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Saint Paul ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Local Parish ◽  
The Church

AbstractThe rise of the global market economy has advanced forms of centrist, corporatist and statist rule that are insensitive to local indicators that this novel social order is ecologically, and socially, unsustainable. For many political theologians, and for secular political ecologists, the related crises of species extinction and climate change, combined with structural economic crisis, require a fundamental relocalization of the global economy and of the harvesting of natural resources. The contest between the political economy of global ‘free’ trade and a relocalized economy and polity bears analogies with debates around the relation between the local and the universal in Christian ecclesiology. In the eucharistic body politics of Saint Paul Christian communion is focused in the eucharistic gathering. However, centrist tendencies in ecclesiastical polity emerged in fourth-century accounts of the universal church. The subsequent doctrine of the primacy of Peter gave a powerful push to centrist over localist accounts of the esse of the Church in the West, and the contest between local and universal in Anglican and Catholic ecclesiologies continues to this day. Orthodox theologians Zizioulas and Afanassieff, describe and fill out the doctrinal implications of a primitive ecclesiology in which ‘the eucharist makes the church’.2 This recovery of a local eucharistic ecclesiology offers valuable resources for thinking about the nature of communion between Anglicans in a Communion increasingly riven by controversy, and for thinking about the nature of the parish in a Church of England prone in the last forty years to centrist and managerial conceptions of the Church, and to the denigration of the local parish church as theesseof the ministry and mission of the Church in England.

Passionate Coolness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyn Percy
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Rural Church ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Local Parish ◽  
Rural Context ◽  
Ecclesial Identity ◽  
The Church

This chapter explores and analyzes the ecclesial identity of a local parish church in a rural context. Deploying the concept of implicit theology, a subgenre of ethnographic theology, it argues that the character of the church is composed through core and cherished values that are seldom explicitly articulated. What emerges from the study is that the character of rural Anglicanism in the Church of England can be understood as primarily but not exclusively temperate, mild, aesthetic, and rational. Moreover, there may be a link between the grammar and timbre of worship and the kind of God individuals and congregations subsequently believe they experience. The study also notes a broader sociological significance of selecting to study a rural church. That said, it pointedly avoids reductionism, but does recognize the formation of an alloy in need of attention in the emergent social and theological construction of reality.

‘This Romish business’ - Ritual Innovation and Parish Life in Later Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire

1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 384-395
Author(s):  
R. W. Ambler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The State ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Holy Communion ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Mixing Water

In February 1889 Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, appeared before the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury charged with illegal practices in worship. The immediate occasion for these proceedings was the manner in which he celebrated Holy Communion at the Lincoln parish church of St Peter at Gowts on Sunday 4 December 1887. He was cited on six specific charges: the use of lighted candles on the altar; mixing water with the communion wine; adopting an eastward-facing position with his back to the congregation during the consecration; permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration; making the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction, and taking part in ablution by pouring water and wine into the chalice and paten after communion. Two Sundays later King had repeated some of these acts during a service at Lincoln Cathedral. As well as its intrinsic importance in defining the legality of the acts with which he was charged, the Bishop’s trial raised issues of considerable importance relating to the nature and exercise of authority within the Church of England and its relationship with the state. The acts for which King was tried had a further significance since the ways in which these and other innovations in worship were perceived, as well as the spirit in which they were ventured, also reflected the fundamental shifts which were taking place in the role of the Church of England at parish level in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their study in a local context such as Lincolnshire, part of King’s diocese, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between changes in worship and developments in parish life in the period.

The Shrine of St. Winefride and Social Control in Early Modern England and Wales

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
Matthias Bryson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Alternative Concept ◽  
The Church

In 1534, Henry VIII declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England. In the years that followed, his advisors carried out an agenda to reform the Church. In 1536, the Crown condemned pilgrimages and the veneration of saints’ shrines and relics. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every shrine in England and Wales had been destroyed or fell into disuse except for St. Winefride’s shrine in Holywell, Wales. The shrine has continued to be a pilgrimage destination to the present day without disruption. Contemporary scholars have credited the shrine’s survival to its connections with the Tudor and Stuart regimes, to the successful negotiation for its shared use as both a sacred and secular space, and to the missionary efforts of the Jesuits. Historians have yet to conduct a detailed study of St. Winefride’s role in maintaining social order in recusant communities. This article argues that the Jesuits and pilgrims at St. Winefride’s shrine cooperated to create an alternative concept of social order to the legal and customary orders of Protestant society.

The Convocation of 1710: an Anglican attempt at counter-revolution

1971 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 311-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. V. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Church Attendance ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
Ecclesiastical Courts ◽  
Marked Decline ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Revolution

The Revolution of 1688 began for the clergy of the Church of England an era of grave crisis. It was not merely that the deposition of James II had posed for many of them a critical question of conscience. More serious were the effects of the Toleration Act of 1689 which quickly showed themselves in diminished attendances at church, and in a marked decline in the authority and status of the parish priest. By its literal provisions the act permitted dissenters a bare liberty to worship in their own way; but, as interpreted by successive administrations and by the great majority of the laity, it effected an ecclesiastical revolution. Although various statutes required all Englishmen to attend their parish-church each Sunday, and though the act merely permitted them to go to a meeting-house instead, it was widely held after 1689 that church-attendance was voluntary. The ecclesiastical courts continued to exercise their traditional jurisdiction in matrimonial, probate, and faculty causes, and over the clergy; but their coercive authority over the morals and religious duties of the laity became virtually impossible to enforce.

scholarly journals Reshaping Rural Culture? The Church of England and Hiring Fairs in the East Riding of Yorkshire c. 1850–80

Rural History ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
GARY MOSES
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Rural Culture ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Rural History ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The Church

A previous article in Rural History entitled ‘“Rustic and Rude”: Hiring Fairs and their Critics in East Yorkshire c. 1850–75’, examined a critique of hiring fairs and farm service mounted by the Church of England in the East Riding of Yorkshire during the mid-Victorian period. This discussion builds upon that article by offering a more detailed examination of the actual attempts to reform and abolish hiring fairs that emanated from that critique. The article examines three stages of reform and abolition stretching over the mid-Victorian period: a first stage that centred upon imposing a system of hiring based upon written characters; a second stage that focussed upon imposing segregated hiring for male and female servants, and a final abolitionist stage. The campaign's tactics and the various measures deployed against hiring fairs during each stage are detailed and their level of success evaluated and explained. The broader motivations of the campaign and the manner in which they signified deeper Church anxieties about the nature of the rural social order are also discussed in a concluding evaluation of the campaign's impact.

Robert Browning's Evangelical Heritage

1975 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Maynard
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The Family ◽  
Congregational Church ◽  
The Church

When, in an episode in the long courtship by mail between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Elizabeth “confessed” that she was to be numbered, in religion, among “those schismatiques of Amsterdam” Donne talks of, Browning, always the opportunist in the affair, fired back: “Can it be you, my own you past putting away, you are a schismatic and frequenter of Independent Dissenting Chapels? And you confess this to me—whose father and mother went this morning to the very Independent Chapel where they took me, all these years back, to be baptized—and where they heard, this morning, a sermon preached by the very minister who officiated on that other occasion!” The Independent Chapel in question was, of course, the Locks Fields Chapel, or, as it came to be called, the York Street Congregational Church, at Walworth, about a mile from the Brownings' Camberwell home, south of London; and the minister was a George Clayton. Browning's credentials as a schismatic were, however, less obvious than he implies. On his father's side Browning's people, in fact, were members of the Church of England (his grandmother was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman), and in the 1830's he and his sister also attended evening services at Camden Chapel, a separate offshoot from the parish church of St. Giles, in order to hear the more “eloquent and earnest” sermons of Henry Melvill, “Melvill of the Golden Mouth,” whose sermons were also highly approved by John Ruskin. If Clayton's Independent Chapel was nonetheless the family church, there can be no doubt that this was because of the influence of Browning's mother, already a member there before marriage. About 1820, her husband, raised in the Church of England, followed her and officially joined the York Street Congregation.

The Right to Marry in the Parish Church: A Rehabilitation of Argar v Holdsworth

2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (35) ◽  
pp. 405-417
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Humphreys
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Legal Fiction ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church ◽  
Contracting Marriage

The entitlement of all persons capable of validly contracting marriage to have such marriage solemnised in the church or chapel of the parish in which they live was, until recently, widely accepted and often repeated. Argar v Holdsworth is the case most often cited as evidencing the existence of this right. However, this received orthodoxy has recently been challenged from two sources. First, by Professor Norman Doe in The Legal Framework of the Church of England and secondly by the late the Reverend Michael G. Smith, in an article in this Journal. Both Doe and Smith throw doubt upon Argar v Holdsworth as providing any basis for proving the existence of such a right and Doe goes further in suggesting that the right to marry was abolished by the Marriage Act 1936 and has only survived since that date as a legal fiction. I seek to demonstrate that Smith's understanding of Argar v Holdsworth is seriously flawed and also that the criticisms levelled against this case as an authority both by Smith and by Doe cannot be upheld.

Some Notes on the Recusant Rolls of the Exchequer 1

1958 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 182-198
Author(s):  
Hugh Bowler
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

Recusancy was the Elizabethan term for the refusal (Lat. recusare) to attend, in one's “parish church, chapel or usual place of common prayer”, the Edwardian services of the Church of England as established by the Act of Uniformity in 1559 (1 Eliz., cap. 2). Among the penalties prescribed by this same Act was a fine of 12d., to be levied by the churchwardens for every Sunday or festival on which a person omitted attendance. These forfeitures were allocated not to the Crown but “to the use of the poor of the parish”; consequently the Exchequer rolls, being concerned only with the revenue of the Crown, bear no record of them.

Church Extension in Town and Countryside in Later Nineteenth-Century Leicestershire

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 427-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Urban Religion ◽  
Rural Religion ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Regular Contact ◽  
The Village ◽  
The Town ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Ideal

Studies of nineteenth-century urban religion have often been conducted with very little reference to the surrounding countryside. Even Obelkevich in his stimulating study of rural religion in Lincolnshire suggested that there, ‘In the Church of England, though the ideal and model of the village parish church continued to inspire town churchmen, towns and villages largely remained in separate compartments. Only through Methodism did the towns have much effect on village religious life. . . . The circuit, the key unit of Methodist organization, brought preachers and people from towns and villages into regular contact with each other and made it possible for the financial and human resources of the town chapels to contribute to the life of the outlying village chapels’. But the methodist exception is significant, not so much in a denominational sense (although the methodist form of organisation was in theory the best for this purpose) but because it is an example of a situation in which the money and men available in any one particular place were not sufficient to carry out what the church concerned wished to do there. It was therefore necessary to tap the resources of other places to help. In large towns such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, and in some of the smaller industrial towns as well, the necessary resources often had to be found within the town or not at all; and to that extent the study of urban religion on its own is understandable. But in many parts of the country rural evangelism was felt to be as urgent a priority as urban evangelism. The church of England sought to overcome the consequences of rural neglect; and all nonconformists, not only methodists, attempted to involve town members in the life of country chapels. Thus in less exclusively industrial parts of the country than Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Black Country, a genuine conflict of priorities between town and countryside could arise.

WHERE WAS THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, 1646–1660?

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-147
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER HAIGH
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Fundamental Issue ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
National Framework ◽  
The Church

AbstractWhen parliament abolished episcopacy, cathedrals, and the Book of Common Prayer, what was left of the Church of England? Indeed, as contemporaries asked between 1646 and 1660, ‘Where is the Church of England?’ The episcopalian clergy could not agree. Some thought the remaining national framework of parishes and congregations was ‘the Church of England’, though now deformed, and worked within it. Others thought that only those ministers and parish congregations who remained loyal in heart to the church as it had been qualified as ‘the church’: most of them continued to serve a parish church and tried to keep the old practices going. A third category of hard-liners thought ‘the Church of England’ was now restricted to a recusant community that worshipped with the Prayer Book in secret and rejected the new national profession. The fundamental issue was the nature of a church: was it a society of believers, however organized, or a hierarchical institution following rules prescribed by God? The question caused tensions and distrust among the clergy, and the rigorists thought of the rest as time-servers and traitors. Disagreements continued to divide the clergy after the Restoration, and were reflected in attitudes towards concessions to dissenters.

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