Lectures are a form a communication that carry both the weight of scholarship and the immediacy of delivery. They can communicate substantial ideas in an engaging and personal context. Like sermons, when they are committed to print, lectures lose some of their personality. However worthy the lecture, you always have the feeling after reading it that you would much rather have actually been there.

There is a strong impulse, however, behind the publication of the three St George’s Cathedral lectures presented so far. The content of these lectures has been so relevant to WA Anglicans and of such quality, that those who first heard these presentations believed that the ideas should be made available to a wider audience. Indeed, for those who were present, owning a printed copy of the lectures would aid further reflection on the issues raised.

Professor John Tonkin is the editor of the series of printed lectures. Each has been contained in a small booklet of 12 pages each ornamented with a different sketch of St George slaying his dragon, and a photograph of the lecturer.

The first lecture by Professor Keith Robbins, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales ponders the part Cathedrals play in the mission of the Church. Keith Robbins has just published A History of Canterbury Cathedral, and this subject launches the reflections on what cathedrals can be for the Church. At Canterbury, the medieval raison d’être of the Cathedral was to receive pilgrims. Its modern role is to accept tourists without allowing the cathedral’s pattern of worship to be swamped. Professor Robbins shows how the Cathedral has an opportunity to be an open showcase of worship, faith and Christian thinking for the wider public.

In the 1996 lecture, Dr Alister McGrath, Principal of Wycliffe College at Oxford University, contemplates the future of Anglicanism. This is a sharply focussed discussion on the contribution Anglicanism can make to resolving the division in the Church between fundamentalism and liberalism. Dr McGrath underlines the necessity of Anglican Christianity to move away from its Englishness, particularly its “presumption that the church is situated within a largely settled Christian context” (pp.5-6), and to draw strength from the evangelistic energy of African and Asian Anglicanism.

There is a double treat in the 1997 booklet. The Dean of Perth, John Shepherd, writes in each of the series about the purpose of the lectures. However, in this third book, Dr Shepherd’s foreword is a concise and perceptive statement on the nature of liturgy, worth reading in itself. The Dean’s article also provides background information for Canon Michael Perham’s lecture on “Liturgical Principle and Cathedral Practice”.

Canon Perham begins with a helpful distinction: “Worship,” he writes, “is the offering of ourselves, our souls and bodies, to God. Liturgy is that corpus of words, gestures, forms and rules that give shape to our worship.” (p.1) He continues then to unfold the principles by which liturgy gives expression to our worship, emphasising the possibility that the Holy Spirit will touch us, not through the liturgy, so much as through our self-offering. Fr Perham warns of the ever-present dangers of clericalism, and demonstrates ways in which liturgy enables the worship of all present, not just those presiding. The six ways in which a cathedral may be assisted in its ministry by these liturgical principles are simple and powerful. Cathedrals have the responsibility to know why their liturgy is the way it is. They have the opportunity to offer many different experiences of liturgy and space. Cathedrals can offer their bishop with the setting and the support to develop their episcopal ministry. Cathedrals have the means to be guardians of the breadth of tradition. They are conservative, but not just of one skewed part of tradition. They are also laboratories where engagement with the arts, challenging and life-giving new liturgies can be developed. Cathedrals exist to proclaim the priority of worship, “deep, loving, longing communion with the eternal trinity, grasping the heel of heaven”. (p.11)

These three lectures are a concise and simple introduction to clear academic thinking about the Church, its mission and worship. Because they were presented in our city and in our Cathedral, that thinking is shaped to some extent by our context, and so they provoke a local response from the readers.

© Ted Witham 1997
First published in Anglican Messenger1997