Matins or Members Only?

To my fury Blogspot deleted a pearl-laden post I made about this Guardian article, an intriguing and counterintuitive question about whether the turn to the eucharist in the past century has not come with unforseen problems. The Guardian article asks whether the church wants commitment or numbers, positing that when the typical weekly worship for most Anglican churches was not a eucharist but rather "morning service" (the office of Matins, filled with hymns and psalms but no recitation of the creed and no need to declare oneself as a communicant), the churches were more full than they are now.

I tend to doubt the central implied premise, that people would cheerfully come to church each week if only they weren't required to BELIEVE anything, that people really just want to "do their duty" and avoid theological contestations. I know there are sometimes concerns that eucharists take longer than Matins (which by the by is NOT my experience), and I think the RCC churches filled to the brim on Saturday afternoons show that people seek times for worship more convenient than Sunday mornings, but the idea that participating in a eucharist may be too much commitment for many Christians strikes me as the most dangerous of slippery slopes. In fact, the next ledge down might be that denominating ourselves as "Christians" is too exclusive, in which case we've lost the basics just to add a few more warm bodies.

But this article did challenge me to reflect more; just as the Christian churches have turned to the eucharist, the more "conservative" form of weekly worship, so too have the great monotheistic religions all turned to more fundamentalist emphases, with rather destructive results for the world. What I notice most about this here in London as I hang about with young people is a common reaction of turning against religion overall, of adopting the "coexist" mentality that looks at all religions as doing more harm than good in the 2st century. I don't think Matins over Mass is going to do much to change that.