Abstract
The leading twentieth-century Anglican liturgical scholar, Gregory Dix, strongly supported the adoption of an offertory procession at the Eucharist by arguing that it had been a universal feature in the pre-Nicene Church intended to express the self-offering of the people. More recent research suggests that this was not the case, and that the people’s gifts of bread and wine were more commonly handed in before the service began. In the light of this, can an offertory procession still be justified?
In Donald Gray’s book, Earth and Altar, there is an interesting account of the earliest parishes to introduce a celebration of the Eucharist on Sundays between the traditional time of the early service, usually 7:30 or 8 a.m., and that of the main morning service, usually 10:30 or 11 a.m. Gray credits as the real pioneers of this development Walter Frere in 1890 or 1891 during his brief time as curate-in-charge of St Faith’s, Stepney, and John Burn in 1893 during his long ministry at All Saints’, Middlesbrough. The time chosen in these and other parishes that followed suit was either 9 or 9:30 a.m., for the practical reasons that it was ‘early enough for people to make their communion fasting, and for women to be able to cook dinner afterwards’, as Burns’s biographer Thomas Fullerton records. 1
John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury from 1885 to 1911, supported this new idea so strongly that he decided to hold his ordination services at 9 a.m. from 1899 onwards and said that he hoped ‘to arrange generally for the consecration of churches at the same hour’. He encouraged the adoption of this hour in parishes because, he said, ‘it would give rest to the weary old limbs, and yet be over soon enough to enable the young people to get their bicycle rides without a sense of Sabbath breaking’. Being over by 10:30 or 10:45, it would also ‘give time for cooking the mid-day dinner, and admit of Sunday School for an hour before the parson had his’. 2 At the same time, in his book, The Ministry of Grace, he put forward the idea that 9 a.m. was ‘the Canonical Hour’, deriving this unusual expression ultimately from the commentary on the Book of Common Prayer compiled by Anthony Sparrow, the seventeenth-century Bishop of Exeter and later of Norwich, via the nineteenth-century work, Notitia Eucharistica by W. E. Scudamore. 3 It was thus described because it was argued in these tomes that this had been the ancient hour for eucharistic celebrations and consequently should be so in the present. Some other supporters of that change of time followed the learned bishop’s lead and continued to refer to this supposed ‘Canonical Hour’. Thus, historical scholarship was being called upon to provide undergirding to something that was really being advocated for a quite different reason.
This was no isolated instance, but was also true in the case of the ceremonial innovation that became so intimately bound up with the Parish Communion movement – the offertory procession. Sources from the earliest phase of the movement make no reference to its existence at that time, but Donald Gray draws attention to a 1908 article in the journal The Optimist, later called The Church Socialist Quarterly. This was by Stephen Liberty, Sub-Warden of St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, and in it he urged that care should be taken ‘to make the oblation of the elements understood to be a real offering of the product of the people’s labour’. 4 Thus, the concept of the bread and wine representing the people’s self-offering, even if not yet its liturgical expression, was already planted in the thinking of the Christian Socialists, in whose theology the theme of offering was always prominent.
What appears to be the earliest reference to the procession itself is in the Parish Communion instituted in 1927 at St John’s, Newcastle, by the vicar, Noel Hudson, later Bishop of Newcastle and then of Ely. His successor as vicar, W. S. Baker, described it thus in the volume of essays on the Parish Communion that Gabriel Hebert edited ten years later: Four members of the congregation who have been chosen beforehand (if possible a man and a woman, a boy and a girl) … carry the people’s offering of bread and wine through the congregation to the altar rail, where the offerings are received by the servers and handed to the celebrant for presentation at the altar. Such a procession helps the people to realise the significance of the Offertory, by giving it a visible dramatic form. It restores the act of offering to its true importance, and marks it as the foundation of the whole eucharistic action. It has the additional value of giving a share in the action of the worship to a greater number of the laity, who need not all be of the same sex.
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In a footnote Hebert referenced Gregory Dix’s essay in the same collection, where this position was set out more extensively. Dix began by saying that in the primitive rite each communicant made ‘oblation of bread and wine into the hands of the deacons before the altar’. He then cited passages from Irenaeus, from the Roman Canon and from Augustine that spoke of the bread and cup as constituting the Church’s offering. 7 However, none of these explicitly identified the elements that were presented with the self-offering of the worshippers, what Dix described as the offering ‘by each individual of the faithful separately for himself of a whole life lived to God’, and none of them made any reference to the means by which those elements reached the altar. They describe not the moment of the offertory, as Dix asserted, but the whole Eucharist as an offering.
Two other points are worth noting about his presentation of the case. First, there is his conviction that what he called the oblation ‘of the people by the people’ was universal in ancient times, although he conceded that ‘in the East it had disappeared by the fifth century’, being replaced by the clerical ceremony of the Great Entrance, which he described as ‘a meaningless custom’. 8 The second point is that he emphasized the action of the deacons in the offertory as much as that of the people. In his description of the primitive eucharistic rite – based chiefly on the edition of the Apostolic Tradition that he was about to publish – he spoke of each of the laity having brought to the service a piece of bread, and/or possibly a little flask of wine, and said that ‘these are now collected by the deacons who “bring them up” (anapherein is the technical word) to the altar’. 9 (For the record, the Apostolic Tradition itself makes no mention of any collecting of the elements but only of the deacons bringing them to the bishop.) This action, Dix insisted, ‘remained the characteristic ministry of the deacon for centuries’. 10
In his later work, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dix took up again his argument for the primitive universality of the offertory procession. He began by asserting that ‘from before the end of the first century the offertory was understood to have a meaning of its own’. 11 His basis for this rather audacious claim is the appearance of the expression ‘to offer the gifts’ in relation to the office of the episkopos in 1 Clement, which for him implies that the people must have brought the gifts and the deacons must have brought them up, though neither of these actions is mentioned in the text and only the latter in his beloved Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus over a century later, even on his dating of that church order. 12 Some pages later, however, he was forced to admit that ‘what we do not know, as regards the pre-Nicene church generally, is when and how the deacons received them [the bread and wine] from the laity’. He noted that in the East ‘in later times’ the custom was for the people to hand in their offerings before the service began and for them to be fetched from there by the deacons at the beginning of the eucharistic action, in contrast to the Roman tradition where the people themselves presented their offerings to the deacons at the chancel rail at that point in the service, and he asked: ‘Which is the original practice, or were there always two?’ 13
He admitted that there was no pre-Nicene witness to the Roman practice, and that there was the testimony of the third-century Syrian Didascalia, which suggested that ‘the people’s prosphorae were handed in to a deacon before the service began; and therefore that the subsequent Eastern practice already existed in Syria in pre-Nicene times’. But he rejected the suggestion that he said had been put forward by Bernard Capelle and other Benedictine scholars that the Roman practice was a purely local development in the fourth century and that the Eastern practice was the original one of the whole pre-Nicene Church. ‘It may be so’, he said, ‘but I confess that I am inclined to be sceptical’, and went on to argue from later Western evidence that the Roman practice had always been the dominant one and the Syrian custom a peculiarity that had later spread throughout the East. 14
What was the underlying motivation that influenced him to dismiss as widespread a practice for which there was an actual piece of early evidence in favour of one for which there was not? At least in part the answer lies in the assumption that he shared with many other liturgical scholars of the period, that the Roman rite had preserved the authentic ancient traditions of the Church, and that where other rites differed, they were aberrations from this norm. One has only to think of the widespread belief that a post-baptismal imposition of hands by the bishop was the normative practice and that the early Syrian rites, which lacked any such thing, were deficient and needed explaining away. 15
More recent research, however, suggests that it was Rome and North Africa that were often the odd ones out in early liturgical practice. So, for example, it is only in Rome and North Africa and nowhere else that we find a preference for baptism at Easter before the fourth century, and only in Rome and parts of North Africa that Saturdays throughout the year were regular days for fasting; and conversely that the feast of 6 January was established in other parts of the Christian world from an early date, but not in Rome or North Africa, where instead 25 December was somewhat belatedly added to the calendar. 16
But there is more. Not only is the universality of the offertory procession in early Christianity totally lacking in evidence, and even its existence anywhere quite uncertain before the late fourth century, but the meaning alleged for it by Dix and others similarly rests on the flimsiest of foundations. Their claim was that the presentation of bread and wine by the people was understood by them to represent the offering of their lives to God. It is true that several New Testament passages urge believers to do just that, as in Romans 12.1 and similar passages, ‘present your bodies as a living sacrifice’, and it could be argued that the presentation of bread and wine was implicitly part of that self-offering, but this is not anywhere made explicit in early Christian literature. As Colin Buchanan has argued, the brief reference in Irenaeus cited by Dix to Christians being like the widow in Luke 21.4 who cast all her life into the treasury concerns them setting aside all their possessions for the Lord and not their bringing of bread and wine; and Augustine’s statement to the neophytes that ‘there you are on the table and there you are in the chalice’, also cited by Dix, concerns the unity of the new members of the Church with its existing members expressed in their all sharing together in communion. 17
In other words, the people brought bread and wine with them to church because they had always done so, from the days when the Eucharist had been a shared meal to which all were expected to contribute food and drink, as attested by 1 Corinthians 11.17f. The elements were needed because without them there could not be a Eucharist, and having brought them, they handed them over to the deacons, who could determine how much was required for the service and set aside the rest for the needs of the poor, just as they had always done. This was not a symbolic or liturgical gesture but a practical work of Christian charity, and there is no firm evidence that people saw it as specifically symbolizing their self-offering in any way distinct from the rest of their life spent caring for the needs of others.
In any case, the early proponents of the Parish Communion were not primarily concerned with trying to restore ancient practices that had disappeared from use: that interest came much later, in the liturgical revisions of the second half of the twentieth century. The offertory procession was virtually the only feature where appeal was made to historical precedent, and then chiefly by Dix himself rather than by others promoting the movement. Even the widespread encouragement to introduce a parish breakfast after the service came about in response to deep anxiety about maintaining the ancient rule of fasting before communion rather than trying to imitate what at the time was thought to have been the form of the early Christian agape, 18 although very occasionally references were made in the literature to that institution. It was feared that such a late hour as 9 a.m. might lead some communicants either to prefer an earlier service or alternatively to eat or drink something before they came to church. Hence the prospect of a breakfast afterwards was intended to stem that tide, while at the same time offering the additional benefit of an opportunity for fellowship between members of the congregation. 19
On the contrary, advocates of the movement drew their arguments from theological principles rather than from historical grounds. Building on the beliefs of the Christian Socialists, their starting point was the conviction that the Eucharist was the Church’s oblation in which worshippers offered ‘themselves, their souls and bodies’, and they created a procession of the eucharistic elements by lay people alongside the bringing up of the monetary collection in order to give symbolic expression to this. That it happened to resemble an element of the seventh-century papal rite provided a useful historical undergirding to it, in a similar way that the notion of the ‘Canonical hour’ had done for the time of the Parish Communion service. This enabled Dix and those who cared about such historical grounding to develop the argument that this had once been the universal practice of the Church and also its intended meaning. But that was not the prime concern of others, who did not for the most part advocate that the worshippers should bring the bread and wine from their homes, in imitation of primitive Christian practice, nor did they follow Dix in attaching any importance to a diaconal role in connection with the offering, not least presumably because deacons were extremely thin on the ground at the time. From their point of view, these things were not necessary in order to ‘get it right’.
Even if the offertory procession lacks the sort of historical pedigree that Dix and others thought it had, therefore, does it still have merit as an expression of the people’s self-offering at the Eucharist? Its principal weakness, it seems to me, is that the bread and wine are not actually something belonging to the people that they offer, except in the most indirect way that some of the money they have put into the collection has purchased them. Do worshippers really identify themselves with objects that are simply being carried from one place to another in the building, and often by a rather limited range of members of the congregation over the course of a year? Or is that just something that enthusiastic clergy see, while for ordinary worshippers it is just another of the quaint ceremonies of Anglican liturgy?
Obviously, in congregations where every single person actually does take a turn at taking part in the procession, the situation is somewhat improved, and in those where individuals or families have baked the bread themselves, there is a much stronger connection to what is offered, but unless absolutely everyone in a congregation is going to take a turn at bread baking, with the potential for some very questionable results, this is probably not going to be practical everywhere.
I am reminded of one of the annual meetings of the North American Academy of Liturgy, when it was suggested that each of us should bring to the concluding Eucharist the little containers of shampoo and conditioner that were provided in our hotel rooms so that they might be offered up and given to the poor in the city. This was enthusiastically received and practised for several years, until one hotel manager said that he was perfectly willing to make a donation in our name to the local homeless charity, but ‘Please don’t remove all the supplies from the hotel rooms as that far exceeds the normal level of use for which we budget.’ What we had foolishly viewed as our offering had cost us nothing: it was the hotel that had borne the expense. It had simply made us feel good, and so perhaps had been the liturgical equivalent of ‘gesture politics’. Is there not a danger that the regular offertory procession is something very similar to that?