Yesterday I wrote that July 23 is the anniversary of the date in 1637 when Jenny Geddes staged a memorable protest at the use of the Book of Common Prayer in St. Giles’ Cathedral.
I think Friday should be celebrated as Jenny Geddes Day.
It would be wrong to think that in hurling her stool at the Dean of Edinburgh that Geddes was protesting about order. There may be a tendency to think that in preference to the prayer-book Geddes may have been in favour of no liturgical order at all and would have been quite happy swaying along to something like the 17th century equivalent of the pop concerts that are presented as worship of God today.
Nothing would be further from the truth. What Geddes, and those like her, was protesting about was not order per se, but the wrong order. They were opposed to innovations, additions to worship order and practice which could not be clearly discerned from the Scriptures and which were alien to the historic practice of the church. This is what the Reformation was about. The Reformers were at pains to point out two truths: their doctrine was biblical and their doctrine was in harmony with that of the earliest practice and expression of the Christian church.
The reform of wrong order is not no order, it is correct order. That is why they were reformers, not revolutionaries, and certainly not ecclesiastical anarchists.
So, the spirit of Jenny Geddes is not out with the old and in with the new. The spirit of Jenny Geddes is a rejection of anything new which has no biblical reason to be there. Apparently she knew that introducing elements in worship which are focussed on helping us experience the presence and person of God are actually unhelpful.
What we need are the elements of worship which God has given us because those elements all focus us on the person and work of the One by Whom His people are always and eternally secure in God’s presence.
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