AN INTRODUCTION
In 2007, SCC started an experiment: a second service upstairs in the café with an informal liturgy inspired by Celtic communities like Iona and Northumbria. It has proven to be an enduring experiment! From the beginning, we (especially Katie Gorrie and Joel Mason) borrowed bits from those communities and elsewhere, added our own original touches, and shaped a short service that would meet a more contemplative need than our usual services.
In the following years, we updated our liturgy regularly, removing bits that didn’t feel right and trying out new additions. We moved toward more inclusive language while holding onto some traditional phrasing. About ten years ago, we realised that we had so fallen in love with the liturgy that we didn’t really want to part with any “bits” anymore. More and more, visitors had been touched by services and carried booklets home with them across the world. It felt like something special to think that similar words might be used in scattered communities in faraway places. Since then, the only changes we’ve made to our regular liturgy were minor tweaks to improve the flow or experience.
But we still wanted to have the room to experiment with new liturgical expressions to see what they could add to our life together. We decided to create an “Alternate Liturgy” that leaders could choose to use occasionally for something different. We now use it around once a month. It may be “alternate,” but it is also starting to “feel like us”! As this new year begins, I wanted to introduce more folks to the sections that make up this “alternate liturgical journey” that we’ve been travelling, now and then, for ten years. So for the next couple of weeks stayed tune here to explore the different sections that make up the “Alternate Liturgy.”
