2. Gather Resources

Once you've decided that you are willing to work within the boundaries of your denomination and church, and under the authority of your senior minister, it will help to have the right resources.

Photo by Katie Peken

Find out what resources are approved, and  especially what resources you will be expected to use,  in your context. If this information isn't offered to you, do ask!  Sometimes ministers forget the process that they went through, half a century ago, to learn their skills, so they forget to tell you these basics.

In any Anglican church, the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 is by definition THE approved resource. This document is the charter we all sign up to, the one that kicked off the Church of England, and eventually ended the burning of people at the stake, back in the days of Queen Elizabeth I.  And in spite of the olde languagey, it's well worth getting to know it;  if you plan to be a service leader long-term, I highly recommend reading the Introduction.

However, I sincerely hope that your church does not use the BCP word-for-word in services more than occasionally;  it is unloving to insist that people worship God in a language that most of them don't speak at home, and in the majority of cases, don't understand. Ministers of religion hopefully sign up because they want to make the message of Jesus more accessible to their generation - not to preserve ancient traditions and dialects; that's for the historians, linguists and museum curators.

Any number of modern Anglican prayer books now exist, but probably only a few of them are authorised for use in your context.  An Australian Prayer Book (AAPB) was an approved resource in many Australian Anglican churches from the 1970s when it was published;  it is still approved, and still used, in a lot of churches in this Diocese.

But at my church, in our current context, we primarily use A Prayer Book for Australia (APBA), sometimes  known as 'the red brick'.  My senior minister expects that our main service will use the APBA, and his preference is to use it in our branch church and at other services as well.  As I said in my last post, you need to be willing to work within the expectations of your context, otherwise this ministry is not for you.  (I plan to post about the value of using a prayer book, plusses and minuses, in future).

Having established what is authorised and expected, you need to get your hands on the approved resources in order to start preparing a service.  Again, some ministers forget that unlike them you probably don't have your own copy at home, so they may fail to offer to lend one to you;  or they may realise you don't have a copy, but forget that it's been a few decades since they personally needed to look at the helpful hints (called 'the rubrics' because they were originally printed in red, and in many cases still are), so they may offer you a cut-down version that doesn't have all that essential background info.

If you are a member of my church, let me point you towards the resources available to you.  I've arranged them in order of usefulness, from least to most:

• Various one-page service sheets based on the APBA have been printed up sometime in the last 15 years;  the senior minister has made choices about what order to put things in, and which options to include, so the up side is that each of them gives you a basic outline of a service that you know will be acceptable.  At services where there are no other prayer books available (ie at our branch church), and no PowerPoint, you will have no choice but to use them, because they provide the congregation with the prayers and responses they are expected to say. The down side is that there is no information for the service leader about what goes in between the prayers that are listed there, no information about the logic of the order, no guidance about sentences of Scripture or Prayers for the Day,  and no options.  When you are an experienced leader, they may be sufficient, but they certainly aren't enough for someone just starting out.

• For our more contemporary service, there are PowerPoint service templates, which can be copied to a memory stick/flash drive, so as long as your computer at home has the PowerPoint application on it, you can take them home and refer to them as you prepare.  The upside: Again, each template gives you an outline of a service that you know is acceptable, and also they offer some of the preferred options, giving you a bit of room to be creative.  They contain more of the prayers and other things you will say as service leader, but again there is no helpful background information about why different parts of the service are in the order they are, and what you might do in between the parts that will appear on the screen. They don't contain ALL the possible options either, and they don't contain the sentences of Scripture or Prayers for the Day - you'll need a full copy of the APBA for that, or at least, of AAPB.

• For the early (more traditional) service, each person who attends is handed a booklet with detailed information for all the services of Holy Communion in APBA.  There are plenty of those that you could take home and use for preparation.  We have more than enough so there's no hurry to get them back (but do remember that stealing is not OK for a Christian - they need to be returned or replaced sometime, unless the minister makes you a gift of one!).  These booklets don't contain all the sentences of Scripture and Prayers for the Day that you need to run a service, you'll need to refer to the APBA for those;  but they do contain most of the options, so they are a vastly better resource than the service sheets.  The drawback is that they don't contain any of the non-communion services (Morning Prayer or Prayer, Praise and Proclamation).

• There are a few copies of the shorter, green version of the APBA at church;  this is handy because it contains all the service types and variations on them, and all the background information for service leaders;  but it doesn't contain the sentences of Scripture or Prayers for the Day, so you will still need to refer to the complete APBA for those. These green Prayer Books are few and far between in our church, so if you borrow a copy it will need to be returned promptly.

• There are a couple of spare copies of APBA at the church, that people can borrow, but only a couple, so you will need to return them promptly.  It is far and away the most useful resource for preparing to lead services in this church.

Borrowing those basics should be all you'll need for the first few times you want to try service leading, but once you are confident you'll be leading regularly, I would recommend that you invest in your own copies.  For my church, a copy of APBA will be the best investment, but it needs to be the complete (red) version, not the (green) congregation copy, because the congregation copy lacks the sentences of Scripture and Prayers for the Day.

Then of course, you need to familiarise yourself with your resources, so you can find what you need to prepare your service.  I find the APBA very frustrating, because what I most often need to locate is the sentence of Scripture and Prayer for the Day for a given Sunday. The only 'Contents' guide to those essentials doesn't give the page numbers!!!!  Who thought that was a good idea?  Having my own copy means I can stick tabs on the pages to help me find my way around, and scribble notes in the margins, and so on.