Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices - Blogs

June 15, 2011

Mass: A Conversation

The parishioner just couldn’t accept the word “mass.”

In a long, terse letter to the rector, he decried the use of the term Mass. It’s a worship service, he said. We’re not Roman Catholic. We shouldn’t be using their terminology. "Service" is more specific and reflects the Protestant aspect of our Anglican tradition.

This parishioner had been a member of the church for 80 years. He led the youth group and Sunday School. He helped with spaghetti dinners and trimmed the grass. And he faithfully attended each Sunday, despite a question-mark curve to his back and reliance on a steel walker.

The priest was frustrated – on the one hand, quibbling over what to call the Sunday gathering isn’t the ditch to die in. On the other hand, the term Mass indeed harkened to our catholic roots. Derived from the Latin word missa or dismissal, the term connotes mission within the dismissal, of going in peace to love and serve the Lord.

The priest asked the parishioner to come in and meet with him. For the first hour, they discussed the Protestant and catholic nature of the Anglican tradition. They listened to each other and talked about what it meant to be Anglo-Catholic as well as broad church – and how both could co-exist in the same space.

Finally, though, the conversation turned.

Every time I hear the word mass, said the parishioner, I think of the lump of cancer that killed my wife.

It took a conversation, a willingness on both sides to listen, to get to the heart of matter. And on the next Sunday, the priest welcomed the congregation to the service.