Also, it makes literacy a requirement for full participation. This limits participation from children as well as adults who may have less than full literacy. Children can learn simple responses at an early age, well before they can read, but not if the responses keep changing, and are cued by overly subtle differences in phrasing. And if the responses are too hard to learn, there’s one less thing to draw them in, one more thing to teach them from an early age that the liturgy is not something for them. I’m not sure that’s really where we want to go.

I find the same to be the case with music. When some hymns are in regular rotation – keep coming back with some regularity – there’s a greater chance that the congregation can learn to sing them well (and ideally, in parts). The same is true for the Sanctus etc.. In churches that emphasize too much variation in hymns – with few “coming back” – the singing is often a bit muddled, and since there are none that are being learned by repetition, many seem to get the feeling that they can’t sing anyways. That might cause a downward slope for singing in general.

I’m also much in agreement about the importance of saying things “by heart” – we really need to do it. This can also be criticized – fairly – with epithets like “rote memory.” At times we also have to find ways to distance ourselves from those words, to re-focus and renew our appreciation of what we’re saying every week. This can be done in extra sessions – you know, Sunday School type things – or if the church doesn’t yet have an extra educational program, occasionally in sermons.

But we do need to have things memorized. This helps “discursivity” – our ability to stay on a topic and move onward in depth – rather than jumping around from theme to theme, getting bored after a few bits of common knowledge or exotic opinion have been expressed. It’s lots of things – patience, continuity, attention, memory exercise, and even connection between the written and the spoken word (which we can miss when we’re not speaking what we’re reading – human speech brings a strange, extra expressive appreciation to the written word).

In my relatively liberal/progressive diocese in the U.S., the NZBCP is often looked up to (by those who like progressive things) as further “ahead” than the US BCP, particularly in terms of contemporary language and cultural inclusiveness. When we use some of the services (particularly for evening prayer) I find aspects of it quite lovely and other aspects very distancing/distracting. It is interesting to hear how it is being engaged by the people for whom it was made.

I’m glad you’re putting words around the nose-in-book phenomenon. It seems to be common to anything that considers itself contemporary and inclusive.

I wish more contemporary liturgies/services utilized a direct and minimal style that is characteristic of modern language use. So often, they read (and sound) excessively self-conscious and stylistically eccentric. It’s a bad sign when the language in the contemporary liturgy sits more weirdly on the ear than the language from the very old liturgies.