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Favourite Hymns

We will assemble the results of the letters received about favourite hymns into a summary chart soon.

More English than the English?

The most English Anglican church I’ve been in was the cathedral in Karachi and a downtown parish church in a city halfway between Karachi and Lahore. (Even spoken and sung in English rather than Urdu Punjabi). There and Oro Province in Papua New Guinea, which in its HIGH Church liturgy and music is a long long way from Australia.
The least was in the cathedral in Sydney, Australia. It is so evangelical Protestant — they in fact remove the altar (communion table there, of course) when it’s not a communion service. I was organist and choirmaster in a Baptist church in Victoria BC while I was at law school; they were so literate and cosmopolitan that the Anglican Diocese of Sydney would certainly insist that they must be Papists.

Of course being Anglican in culture doesn’t necessarily mean being in the Anglican Communion. In Fiji the Anglican churches’ music is far less liturgical than that of the Congregationalists. As it was in Canada in the 1970s when the Anglican and United Churches came within a stone’s throw of uniting. Occasional exceptions. Michael and Dorothy Peers visited me in the jungles of what was then the North Solomons on their way to their first bishops’ conference in England. We of course went to the United Church on Sunday morning, Anglicanism being unknown there. Dorothy shocked the congregation by sitting with him and me on the right side of the central aisle rather than on the left with the other women.

Mac Robb
St. Paul's, Ashgrove
Brisbane, Queensland, AUSTRALIA
mac.robb@gmail.com
2 July 2015

Praying outside the box

Talofa Lava from the Sunny Samoan Islands. I loved your post about churches not looking like churches. It's funny, I personally love our old traditional churches, and can't stand the modern-looking ones, but here in Polynesia and Fiji (I am a priest in the Diocese of Polynesia, ACNZAP) money and the humid climate make traditional structures difficult... mostly money to be honest. In Fiji, we have several churches that are just corrugated tin roof and dirt floors. Yet, our liturgy still works, and they are some of the most spirit-filled churches I have ever been in, and honestly, some old traditional churches can be very cold places (in both the spiritual and temperature sense). Very few churches here have even a keyboard. Most of us use guitars, yet the hymns are still beautiful. We hold a lot of services on the beach, and not just on Easter. There, our altar is a plastic table, and we sit on mats.

I still come to terms with those places I like to call churches-in-a-box, but over time I realize that if the space has the spirit, that is what matters.

Thanks so much for your wonderful website. I read it every week.

The Diocese of Polynesia now has a website! http://www.dioceseofpolynesia.org/

Amy Blizzard
St. John's Anglican Church, Lauli'i American Samoa
Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA
amy@manumaloacademy.org
3 July 2015

Earlier letters

We launched our 'Letters to AO' section on 11 May 2003. All published letters are in our archives.