Let's face it; there's no great place in the service for announcements. However, I have found two things to be true.
1. No matter how many other ways I communicate things, for some people, unless it is said at the notices, it has not been communicated. They seem to need someone at the front saying, "Listen up, folks! This is important and you need to act on this." Or they'll look at you blankly weeks later saying "I didn't know about that."
2. Perhaps partly because of the above, various people and groups in the parish will feel slighted or offended if I don't announce matters relevant to them. It is as if they have been relegated to unimportance. So for the sake of keeping the peace, some things must be said at the notices.
I try to keep notices brief and only mention things which really do need action, and which are relevant to all or most parishioners in some way, but I won't get away with not having them at all. I tend to put them before the final hymn and blessing.
Indeed, I don’t think
@Shane R objects to, and I certainly do not object to, notifications, however, the (mis)placement of them can have a deleterious effect on the service. This is why I like the pan-Eastern/Oriental/Assyrian approach of putting notices at the end of the liturgy, because not only does such a position avoid disrupting the service, or at least minimize it, but also, if an announcement is made midway through the liturgy that people have to act on, it’s a safe bet that some of the people who would act on it will have forgotten by the end.
Hhmm. I am flexible. I am prepared to engage with and enjoy a variety of liturgical forms and practices. So perhaps this is true. If I have a strong preference it would probably be this; keep the liturgy simple. Let the central things stand out clearly, and avoid cluttering them with many accretions.
Just out of curiosity, how do you define accretion? I once had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine who might become my bishop in which I challenged him to consider that liturgical accretions as defined by Vatican II do not exist. This was admittedly a hyperbolic assertion, but there are some things that look like accretions which are actually authentic and original, particularly in the West Syriac Rite, which is of mutual interest to us. We know this based both on manuscript evidence and the extreme similiarity between the Syriac Orthodox liturgy and the pre-Vatican II Maronite liturgy, both of which feature extremely flowery prayers which I find to be beautiful and distinctly Semitic, as befits an Aramaic liturgy. Likewise it is obvious that the several of the oldest complete liturgical texts, such as the Alexandrian-style Anaphora of the St. Mark/St. Cyril family from the Euchologion of Serapion of Thmuis and the Antioch-style Anaphora of St. Hippolytus from the Apostolic Tradition only contain the parts intended for the bishop or celebrant, and direct responses, as opposed to the parts for the deacon or choir and the rubrics, and consequently if one reads the Greek Divine Liturgy of St. Mark or the Coptic Divine Liturgy of St. Cyril or the Ethiopian Anaphora of the Apostles, there is a great deal of additional material present which looks like accretion but really isn’t (so in a sense, in adapting Hippolytus into Eucharistic Prayer 2 without looking at the admittedly obscure Ethiopian version which has been in continual use since antiquity, the Consilium under Bugnini and those who copied their work, like the 1979 Episcopal BCP, arguably did inadvertently cut the liturgy to the quick, if not beyond; this also applies to the adaptation of the Egyptian form of the Liturgy of St. Basil, Eucharistic Prayer no. 4 in the Novus Ordo and Eucharistic Prayer D in the the 79 BCP).
Of course accretions do exist and some liturgies have them, a good example being the attachment of the Last Gospel (John 1:1-14) to the Armenian Rite, and certain historic additions to the traditional Roman Rite, like the Leonine Prayers said at the end of a Low Mass. One could argue the Low Mass itself is an accretion, although it represents a simplification, and the Missa Cantata insofar as it is a Low Mass with the music of a Solemn Mass is a simplification of the latter.
So perhaps it might be fair to say there are good accretions and bad accretions? Or if you prefer, valid additions as opposed to pointless accretions? For example, they are not organically a part of the Anglican liturgical patrimony, if a new BCP came along that featured the spectacularly long benediction at the end of the Byzantine Rite or some sort of concluding litany I would expect would annoy you to no end, and it would annoy me to.
But that said, there are boundaries, and one thing which does irritate me no end is clergy who make oaths to use authorised forms of services and then cheerfully ignore those oaths. I'm not talking about small creative flourishes but forms of service which bear no resemblance to something in a prayer book!
Indeed. The 1979 BCP has “Rite III” but it is not supposed to be used for the main Sunday service, but there are parishes which just completely do their own thing, and get away with it, and even get lauded for doing so, for instance, St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, which has a problematic liturgy even on the basis of the text alone, and that’s before you get into the icon of the Khangxi Emperor who prohibited Christianity in China, and other dubious figures, and the “liturgical dance” which is directly adapted from Shaker worship (the Shakers were a peculiar sect, mainly in America, which believed in complete celibacy who historically perpetuated their existence by adopting children and raising them in the community, but recently have more or less died out; their worship was characterized by dancing for hours on end in distinct round meeting halls).
