Liturgy

Upon first entering St Gregory Nyssen Episcopal Church in San Francisco, you will see a church distinctively arranged. Immediately before you stands an altar table in an open space; and rising beyond it in a bright courtyard, a rocky baptismal font. Nave seating for worshippers stretches off to the right.

St Gregory’s altar table bears two inscriptions: one pedestal facing the entry doors reads in Greek from Luke’s gospel, Read more about The Scandalous Table

At last August’s Societas Liturgica Congress on Baptism, Walter Knowles’s paper mentioned that Cyril of Jerusalem had been appointed by Acacius of Caesarea, an Arian metropolitan. Startled by an association I had scarcely noticed earlier, I listened throughout Walter’s paper to catch echoes of Arian sympathies in the Jerusalem Holy Week ceremonies we inherit from Cyril’s episcopate —even if he himself was not their author—but the paper did not linger there. Read more about An Arian Holy Week…? (Well, at least not Manichaean…)

"Services in Episcopal church are like repeating fifth grade. There’s no place for me there.”
“Do I have to be able to read music to belong to this church?”
My colleagues who heard this observation and this question, one from a friend, the other from a stranger, are seasoned, committed leaders in our church, but both felt they were hearing something significant in the impression of a first-time visitor to an Episcopal Church. Read more about Like repeating fifth grade