Mere Orthodoxy has gone to meddling once again, this time in an article by Gillis Harp:
Yet fixing old problems can open the door to new ones. A singular focus on holy communion can occasionally overshadow other crucial elements in worship, especially the ministry of the Word. Preoccupation with the eucharist may prompt evangelicals to overlook the hazard of sacramentalism. Readers may be surprised to hear this cautionary note coming from an Anglican, but our experience here may be instructive.
Sacramentalists make many swelling claims about the results of following their way:
Yet an even larger project is, in fact, envisaged here. This evangelical sacramentalism is also being called upon to do some heavy philosophical and cultural lifting. It champions a sacramental approach to Scripture and the creation at large as the best way to counter the “disenchantment” they associate with the Protestant Reformation and, more generally, the rise of modernity.
Boersma, for instance, laments “the abandonment of a pre-modern sacramental mindset in which the realities of this-worldly existence pointed to greater, eternal realities, in which they sacramentally shared. Once modernity abandoned a participatory or sacramental view of reality, the created order became unhinged from its origin in God, and the material cosmos began its precarious drift on the flux of nihilistic waves.”
My experience in Roman Catholicism tells me that the opposite is true: leaning on the sacraments as the central instruments of grace encourages a “box-checker” mentality where personal renewal is simply assumed to take place in the context of the sacramental system. My first parish priest was even less charitable about this point: mindful that most of his congregation were products of a pre-Vatican II church (we’ve always been about the old-timers in South Florida) he said that Roman Catholicism for many degenerated into making a “business deal with God.”
What we need in Christianity is a body of believers who have been renewed by the rebirth in Jesus Christ, informed by the Word and fortified by the sacraments (I’ve recently discussed both baptism and the Eucharist.) That will be a more perfect church and Bride prepared for Our Lord’s return.
Positive Infinity 
The 39 Articles #XIX posits that the “visible church of Christ” includes both preaching “the pure Word of God” AND ministration of the Sacraments instituted by Christ. It is clear in Anglican church practice (including the Books of Common Prayer) that the Sacraments are in the life of the church but not at every service, while the ministry of the word is part of every gathering.
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Sometimes I think I’m the “Rip van Winkle” of the Anglican/Episcopal world, having woken up with memories of how things were done in the “Old High Church” and being told that “tradition” dictates otherwise. No where is that more evident than the “Communion every Sunday” business.
The Episcopal Church I grew up in did HC every Sunday at 0800 (which isn’t uncommon) but for the other two services (yes, we had two of them, one where the paid youth choir was featured and one where the paid adult choir was featured) we did the HC once a month and MP the rest of the time. No one thought this was “Baptistic” (my mother would have set them straight on that) or any other kind of concession to those dreadful “Bible thumpers.” But esp. with the Liturgical Movement and the 1979 BCP that followed we were all told that HC every Sunday was “traditional” and that we were all wrong.
But we weren’t. If you look at the traditional Anglican prayer books (esp. the 1662 BCP) you will see that MP and EP were designed to get the worshiper through the Scriptures once a year. It was, in reality, the first “read the Bible in a year” program before Evangelicals ever thought of it. And the HC readings, overwhelmingly from the NT, were not designed to “take over” so to speak. I note here that the first “law of the land” in the Virginia colony mandated MP and EP, not the HC.
I discuss this issue some in my recent series on the HC. I don’t see the point of throwing out ~400 years of practice to “keep up with the Jonses.”
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