Rooted in history...
Today I visited the diocesan archives. That sentence maybe isn't one that would fill the average Scottish Eposcopalian with excitement (or maybe it would...). But today's visit felt really rather significant.
Scottish Episcopal churches haven't been part of anything like the establishment for many centuries, in fact one could argue they have never been anything other than 'outsiders' in Scotland, a small grouping of non-conformist churches who insisted on their historical leadership by bishops and having a deep and engaged encounter with theology in their liturgy. So why care about where our church registers, minutes and dusty old books end up.
Well, in large part because we have been built on things like this:
This is a 1744 publication of Bishop Thomas Rattray's 'Liturgy of St James', a book that explores the ancient and primitive forms of worship in the earliest days of the Christian church in Jerusalem. He was the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal bishops, the first among equals, and was in an ambiguous state at the time. For a start he was dead, having died in 1743. And the church that he was part of had no bishops: the 'glorious revolution' of 1689 had made Scotland presbyterian. But this Bishop of Dunkeld (and briefly a predecessor of mine, Brechin) had published, posthumously, the above book. Which formed the basis for the Scottish 1764 Office, which is the basis for all of the SEC eucharistic liturgy (and for the Episcopal Church in the USA's liturgy...). We are a church that defines ourselves as eucharistic communities: and this slightly tired and dry book from 1744 is the root of it all.
So, visiting the diocesan archive can be a really rather exciting thing indeed!
Scottish Episcopal churches haven't been part of anything like the establishment for many centuries, in fact one could argue they have never been anything other than 'outsiders' in Scotland, a small grouping of non-conformist churches who insisted on their historical leadership by bishops and having a deep and engaged encounter with theology in their liturgy. So why care about where our church registers, minutes and dusty old books end up.
Well, in large part because we have been built on things like this:
This is a 1744 publication of Bishop Thomas Rattray's 'Liturgy of St James', a book that explores the ancient and primitive forms of worship in the earliest days of the Christian church in Jerusalem. He was the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal bishops, the first among equals, and was in an ambiguous state at the time. For a start he was dead, having died in 1743. And the church that he was part of had no bishops: the 'glorious revolution' of 1689 had made Scotland presbyterian. But this Bishop of Dunkeld (and briefly a predecessor of mine, Brechin) had published, posthumously, the above book. Which formed the basis for the Scottish 1764 Office, which is the basis for all of the SEC eucharistic liturgy (and for the Episcopal Church in the USA's liturgy...). We are a church that defines ourselves as eucharistic communities: and this slightly tired and dry book from 1744 is the root of it all.
So, visiting the diocesan archive can be a really rather exciting thing indeed!
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