Few who read these words will have proper appreciation for the shock and awe of this country boy when he visited Westminster Abbey. My Dad likes to say “I’ve been to two county fairs and a…….” well, let’s just forget what Dad would say. But for this extremely low-church Baptist / Pentecostal a trip to Westminster Abbey was a shock. These English boys take Catholic-style high-church to a whole new dimension. Wow!

Let’s start with the architecture. Wow! I’ve more often gone to church in prefab metal buildings than in 1000-year-old Cathedrals where every English Monarch dating back to William the Conqueror except for two were crowned and most are buried. Wow! I wish I could find words to describe this structure. Oh, here’s a word….Wow! Did I mention it was a sight to behold? Wow!

Honestly, I can’t find words to describe the place. The sense of eternity instilled in there was brought to bear when I couldn’t find the toilet. The docent insisted there was a sign directing me to it “over by poets corner” and when I lamented that I didn’t see the sign he said in dripping sarcasm “We’ve only been doing this for a thousand years.”

Of course, the place is filled with dead Brits of every stripe. Nearly a millennia of Kings are buried here, along with Chaucer, Handel, Charles Darwin & David Livingston. I’ve not been to Rome and haven’t seen most of Europe, so I never fully grasped---until this trip---exactly how pervasive the tradition of burial in the church building was. We low church folks build a main auditorium and then shed Sunday School classrooms off to each side. In these fancy places they build a main nave (that’s the high church way of saying “Auditorium” though technically it’s the long area between the main doors and the high alter) and then they attach numerous (dozens, in this case) “chapels” off every side in which marble sarcophagi are place to hold the bodies of all sorts of folks; Queens, consorts, Kings, poets, and the like. But then we Hillbillies do a low church version of the same thing back in the Ozarks. We build a “church house” and then put a cemetery outside. Same thing, only simpler and kind of appropriate in a “breaking away from England” sort of way.

To really get Westminster in perspective you’ve got to realize that when the American Revolution took place, the Abbey was already 400 years old. To walk on the grave stones in the floor of the church that date back to the 1600’s is a remarkable experience----and we think the American Civil War and the Civil Rights movement is “history.”

I honestly just can’t find the words to describe my encounter with the place. You just must go. It is worth the trip to London merely to see Westminster Abbey.

Now that the architecture and some of the function are out of the way, let me tell you about Worship at Westminster. We attended an end of the day service called Evensong. In fact, we were in the choir! Yep.

The building is cross shaped and the leg of the cross opposite the High Alter (just what it sounds like) is a set of risers and “wooden stalls or desks” called the quire, where the choir, the knights, the Cathedra (that’s the head bishop), and the various church functionaries sit, stand and kneel during the service. Unbeknownst to us, if you get there in the first 100 or so people, you become the choir and are directed to sit in the qwire. So while there were lots of folks sitting out in the main nave it became obvious to us that we were part of the choir when they handed us “scripts” of what we were expected to do (sit, kneel, stand, recite) and the folks in the main nave didn’t participate. So, there we were---up and down, kneel & recite, back and forth---and we did pretty well until the Apostle’s Creed offended my Baptist girlfriend’s sensibilities: she wasn’t going to say any thing affirming any kind of catholic (small “c”) church. (Apparently the narrow tribe of Baptists who raised her voted against John Kennedy in 1962.)

We sat in front of a high titled functionary of some type from Samoa who on this occasion read from the New Testament book of Acts. It was sort of a high church version of “Samoa Day” at Westminster. They then remembered and gave thanks for Justin the Martyr followed by a choral descant of Psalms 83; an experience that was new to my family. Syd asked me about it and I told her that at any moment I thought they might break out into “Shoutin’ Time in Glory” (that’s a location joke, if you didn’t get it, just let it go and move on).

As you might have guessed, this experience gave us a wonderful dinner conversation and another great opportunity to talk through what our relationship with Jesus means and about the difference between cultural words and motions verses our experience of personal enlivenment and engagement.

The experience at Westminster was wonderful. I wouldn’t give you 15 cents for it’s spiritual impact. In fact, it served to drive home in my mind the total irrelevance of the liturgy in the institutional church---even our own evangelical version of it.  The words were beautiful, flowing & sophisticated. They were worthy of a high God. Yet somehow my fear is that while the words expressed were theologically accurate, they were void of meaning. We spoke and sang of sin, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ. But I wondered, who among those I worshipped beside really took those concepts to heart considering them more than mythical symbolism but instead embraced them as truthful reality. I’ll never know, and its not my place to know. But it is my place to be sure that I, my family, and those we influence understand that theological language---no matter how accurate---cannot alone move a person closer to God. It must be accompanied by a “quickening of the spirit” in which a God’s Spirit is infused with man’s; conception which produces a new birth.

Wow! I had a great day at Westminster. And did I mention they’ve got great architecture? You really need to see it.