SUNDAY WORSHIP

"I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who abides in me will bear much fruit."

Sunday worship took place, in our childhoods, at 11am and 7 pm. Sunday School was at 3 pm, so the day was filled. Later we would experience earlier morning services, Christian Education in conjunction with morning worship and the loss of the evening service.

The basic shape of Divine Worship was what has been called the Protestant hymn sandwich, with hymns chosen from Congregational Praise. An order of service for the Burwood-Surrey Hill Parish service, held at Wyclif Congregational Church in 1975 had the following form:

Invocation and response.
A moment of meditation.
Hymn.
Scripture readings, with the verses of the psalm read alternately by minister and people.
Prayers and Lord’s Prayer.
Hymn.
Offering and the prayer of dedication of ourselves and our gifts.
Hymn.
Sermon.
Hymn.
Blessing and threefold amen.

At the start of worship, the choir entered from the choir vestry and sat in the seats which were elevated on our right. The women sat in the two front seats with the men behind. Naturally, there were more women choir members than men. By this time most members of the congregation were seated, and only the door stewards were standing in each porch with hymn-books in their hands ready to greet the last-minute arrivals.

The minister entered from the ministers’ vestry above us. He slipped into the pulpit which was placed in front of the organ pipes, raised above the communion table and organ console. We did not stand as he entered. He conducted the whole service from the pulpit, unless there was a baptism or communion service. Usually he wore an academic gown over his suit, and a shirt and tie. Occasionally a minister wore a clerical collar or the two white tabs more often associated with Presbyterian ministers. Stoles were not worn at that time.

We stood for the hymns, and bowed our heads, seated, for the prayers. We used the traditional form of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come,” and ended the prayer, as other Protestants did, with the words “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen.” The benediction, the final blessing, usually took the form “May the blessing of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be with us now and evermore.” We sang the threefold amen, “A-men, a-men, a-a-a-a-men.”

Participants had clear memories of Sunday worship:

Before church. Golden pews. Ledges where books are placed. I look from the left to the centre. Each pew has familiar faces, people choosing the same seats weekly. The stained-glass windows reflect red and golden light. Communion table, bronze vases, flower arrangements. Organ pipes, towering above. Collection plates in the front. Christening font in golden wood. Plaques in memory of lost soldiers and worthy church members, carpeted floors. Rustling, murmuring, clinking of coins. Soft organ music.

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I’m taking my shoe off so I can toast the sole of my foot on the heated pipe under the seat in front ... I remember the organist sliding along the organ seat to unobtrusively go and sit in the front end row of the choir stalls for the sermon.

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When I think of Wyclif, I think even now of the gold, gothic words, ‘O Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness.’ As a child, I sat week by week and made up games like how many other words I could make out of the letters in these words. I did the same with the numbers in the hymns, this time adding and subtracting.

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“DRAW NEAR WITH FAITH”: THE SERVICE OF HOLY COMMUNION, OR THE LORD’S SUPPER

I read the words of the Invitation to Holy Communion from a 1975 order of service, and my heart turned over.

“You who truly and earnestly repent of your sins and are in love and fellowship with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking from henceforth in His holy ways; draw near with faith, and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort . . . ” they began.

Memories of the Communion Service rushed back, the table with its starched and beautifully-ironed white linen cloth, silver plates with small cubes of stale white bread, tiny glasses of unfermented grape juice on trays which stacked on top of each other (with difficulty) as they were returned, the quiet reverence of the deacons who served us in our pews.

Participants had similar memories.

I remember the communion services, the ribbons on the end of every second pew. In the last verse of the final hymn we used to move to the communion pews so that the servers with the beautiful wooden trays could move along the space. I’ve never seen it done that way anywhere else, but it was such a sensible way to serve. The grape juice was very sweet, but it never occurred to me that there could be anything different.

I remembered the words of the Institution of the Sacrament: “On the night when he was betrayed Jesus took bread and blessed it and broke it and said, ‘Take this, all of you, this is my body which is broken for you . . . Do this to remember me.’ ”

As Protestant members of the Catholic/Protestant divide, Congregational children imagined that Catholics believed that the bread and wine actually became the body and blood of Christ, and were scandalized by what we saw as a degraded belief. In practice of course, enlightened Catholics avoided literalism and many read “May it become for us the body and blood . . .” as a statement about profound meaning. The essential difference however remained. As Congregationalists we remembered through Holy Communion; Catholics were fed. As Congregationalists we saw Holy Communion as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” Catholics saw the Eucharist as a symbol with efficacy.

One participant retained a small boy’s memory of communion:

Grape juice turns into wine if it is not thrown out. There were lots of half-bottles of grape-juice out in the vestry. I don’t think we drank them, but we used to take the tops off and smell them.

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SPECIAL SERVICES: HARVEST THANKSGIVING AND WATCH-NIGHT SERVICES

Harvest thanksgiving remained in the minds of participants, probably because with hindsight it was seen as an inappropriate carry-over from rural England. The church was decorated with vegetables, honey, jam and fruit. We sang “We plough the fields and scatter/ The good seed on the land/ But it is fed and watered/ By God’s almighty hand” but none of us actually did. This was suburban Melbourne, and most of our fathers worked in town.

One participant stated:

We had an annual Harvest Festival. But it faded out and stopped altogether, perhaps when everyone brought packets of cornflakes instead of pumpkins and marrows. My sister remembered setting up the display of food on the floor of the communion dais. Someone had places strings of onions up the pillars, but they were told to take them down. It wasn’t considered suitable to festoon the church with vegetables.

At Williamstown, a New Years’ Eve Watch Night service was held each year until after the inauguration of the Uniting Church. Bill stated: It was a service that attracted many once-a-year attendees, . . . between 60 and 120. It was also the night when the law was broken, because we rang a bell at midnight; only on one occasion that I can recall did anyone make a protest about the noise.


WEDDINGS, CHRISTENINGS AND FUNERALS

I think of Jack and me on our wedding day, the Christening of our children, and my mother’s funeral, happy times and sad, said one participant, reminding us of the Church’s role in providing rites of passage.

Baptism was not a word used in Congregational Churches. We christened our babies, made them Christ’s, and I regret the lost of that old, lovely word. Early in my life, babies were often christened in a quiet family group on a Sunday afternoon. Later, christenings took place during morning worship, the baby held in the minister’s arms as water from the font was touched on her forehead, and she was named. One Wyclif minister, having given a baby the wrong name once, always said to the parents, “Name this child.” Ministers tried to make sure that the baby did not cry, and tended to hastily hand the baby back to a parent if her face crumpled.

At funerals, coffins were always closed, and increasingly, absent, as thanksgiving services for life gained popularity. We all attended funerals in support of our fellow worshippers.

And weddings? They were like old-fashioned weddings everywhere. We promised fidelity for a lifetime, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, to love and to cherish till death did us part. No home-made vows for Congregationalists. Some of us married fellow-Congregationalists and many of us have stayed married.






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One participant summed up Congregational worship. Music and preaching were his focus:

The formal worship in the Congregational and Uniting Church suits my taste - I find great comfort and inspiration in many of the great hymns (although there are plenty both ancient and modern which are either banal or meaningless) and more of the sermons than not are well worth listening to. I'm not a very prayerful person nor particularly wrapped up in formal ceremony, so the 'old-fashioned' services suit me very well but plenty of other people want something quite different, and that can mean different scenes in different places. One shape does not fit everybody.

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Another stated:

Our services were structured, dignified and reverent but we were not a liturgical church. We observed the sacraments. I have treasured the Spirit-filled church families with whom I have worshipped.


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