Worship in the Church of South India

Extract

The Church of South India in fifteen years published separate J. forms for ten services. They are flimsy booklets, difficult for booksellers to handle and easy for owners to tear or mislay. They were used, some of them widely, in and beyond C.S.I., and were then reconsidered and revised: and now they have been made into a book, The Book of Common Worship, by Oxford University Press. It is a time to look back and to look forward.

How does the Church of South India worship ? At the sixth biennial Synod, Nagercoil, 1958, after more than ten years of union, the Moderator or presiding bishop, Bishop Sumitra, said that in six of the fourteen dioceses union so far had made no perceptible difference. That is disappointing, for any step towards the reunion of the Church ought to renew and broaden the worship of the various denominations. But is it surprising ? For many bad reasons, and for some good ones, we all cling to the familiar, hoping blindly that it will prove to be safe. We say that we know what we like, meaning that we like what we know. Indeed, it may look as if we went to church, not in order to worship God, but in order to say, hear, and sing, as nearly as possible, what we said, heard, and sang, last Sunday. There may be many mansions in the Father's house, but we are comfortable enough in the room we were born in.