Just the Middle Class?

I have realised for a long time that the churches where I play the organ are attended by middle class people. I have not seen anybody who is unsure where their next meal is coming from, who might be in need of a bath or whose clothes have seen better days. This trend has been observed and written about on the web HERE and HERE

Looking back over my church attendance during the last 60 years I cannot recall having seen the less well-to-do filling the pews. (Some people may be good at hiding their financial status I suppose.)

It seems to me that - with the current cost of living crisis - those who attend church are going to start feeling the pinch. I don't have any answers but it just feels wrong that church is a place where people can congratulate each other and feel comfortable that they belong to a 'club' which is attended by folk in their own social class.

Matthew 26:11 "The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me." (NIV). I think the poor feel shunned. This brings me back to my post about not having been contacted by anyone from my nearest church. Once you leave (or if you never appear) it is a case of "out of sight, out of mind."

The Comfortable Words

Another element of the communion service which seems to have been discarded - at least in my area - is the comfortable words. Why is this? I miss them.

To be honest I didn't bother about them when I was young. Even then I wondered why the church used such complicated language. After all, what young chorister/organist knows what propitiation means? Still, I heard them every week and they became like a friend to me.

Just as yesterday I moaned about the disappearance of the Sursum Corda and it seems to me that the C of E is chucking out vital texts and replacing them with chatter.

Sursum Corda

Many, many years ago it was common for the Sursum Corda to be a part of the communion service. There were problems such as

• the priest could not sing very well
• the priest simply didn't know the tune
• the pitch would wander about
• it was too slow and/or painful
  

The excruciating aspect was that, after the intial 'call and repsonse' section between priest and congregation, the remainder of the Eucharistic prayer was often sung, very badly. Now and again a priest would admit that he had no vocal skills and he would say the prayer.

The other problem was that the cue for the Sanctus is likely to have been in the wrong key unless the organist had previousy worked out in what key the plainsong ought to begin in order to end up 'right'. The danger there was that a priest would be used to a certain pitch and could naturally slip back into his habitual pitch.

I have not heard a true Sursum Corda for many years. If you do a search on https://www.churchofengland.org/ it does not turn up. (When I started as an organist in 1974 we used Merbecke's communion setting.) The words have since been modernised and shortened. Here is and example and you will note the pitch drifting as the priest gets into the long section.