This past week I had the distinct privilege of being present
when the 2019 Book of Common Prayer was presented as a gift to the Church and
specifically the Province of the Anglican Church in North America.
Over the past several months we’ve been walking through the
2019 BCP service of Holy Eucharist. This week I’d like to begin looking at the
services known as the Daily Offices.
However, in order to give a more rounded understanding of
the roots of the Book of Common Prayer I share with you this week the Preface
of the 2019 BCP. I highly encourage the prayerful reading of the preface and I
promise you will be blessed.
Bishop Menees
Christianity—the fullness of the good news about Jesus
Christ—came very early to Roman Anglia (England) through the witness of
soldiers, sailors, merchants, and missionaries. Legend holds that the biblical
tomb-giver, Joseph of Arimathea, was among the first of those scattered
evangelists.
The early Christian mission in the British Isles was an
encounter with pagan tribes and societies. Converts banded together, and in
this context communities of common prayer, learning, and Christ-like service
emerged, living under agreed rules. Thus “monasteries” became centers of the
evangelization of this remote region of the Roman world, and ever more so as
the empire disintegrated. Early heroes and heroines leading such communities
bore names that are still remembered and celebrated, names like Patrick,
Brigid, David, Columba, Cuthbert, and Hilda. Haphazardly, and without a
centralized hierarchy or authority, what emerged in Britain, by God’s grace,
was a Church that saw herself, in each of her local manifestations, as part of
the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church: culturally attuned and
missionally adaptive, but ever committed to and always propagating “the faith
that was once for all delivered to the saints” (JUDE 1:3).
Reform came in various waves, based more in the Roman
systems of Diocese and parish. At the end of the sixth century, Augustine, a
Benedictine monk and first Archbishop of Canterbury, was sent out from Rome by
Pope Gregory the Great with instructions that encouraged preservation of local
customs when they did not conflict with universal practice. Dunstan,
25th Archbishop of Canterbury, great reformer of common worship, and Anselm,
36th Archbishop, early scholastic theologian, were among notable monastic
successors of this far more hierarchical Roman mission. Closer connection to
the continent and distance from the Patristic era also meant that from the
seventh century onward, British faith and order were increasingly shaped by
efforts to create a universal western patriarchate at Rome. The Norman Conquest
of the 11th century also played a role in diminishing the distinguishing
peculiarities of Ecclesia Anglicana. Liturgy also became increasingly
complicated and clericalized.
All across Europe, the sixteenth century was marked by
reform of the received tradition. So great was this period of reevaluation,
especially concerning the primacy of the Holy Scriptures, that the whole era is
still known to us as the Reformation.
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, 69th Archbishop of Canterbury,
who was martyred at Oxford in 1556, led the English phase of this reform of
Church life and Church worship. Undoubtedly Cranmer’s most enduring achievement
was his replacement of the numerous books of the Latin liturgy with a carefully
compiled Book of Common Prayer. This was a Prayer Book in the vernacular, one
which brilliantly maintained the traditional patterns of worship, yet which sought
to purge away from worship all that was “contrary to Holy Scripture or to the
ordering of the Primitive Church.” The Book of Common Prayer, from the first
edition of 1549, became the hallmark of a Christian way of worship and
believing that was both catholic and reformed, continuous yet always renewing.
According to this pattern, communities of prayer—congregations and families
rather than the monasteries of the earliest centuries—would be the centers of
formation and of Christ-like service to the world.
For a century, the Church of England matured and broadened
as a tradition separated from the Church of Rome. Its pastoral, musical, and
ascetical life flourished: Jeremy Taylor, Lancelot Andrewes, Thomas Tallis,
William Byrd, and George Herbert are but a few of the names associated with
this flowering. Also begun were three centuries of colonial expansion that
exported the Book of Common Prayer to countless cultures and people-groups the
world over.
The English Civil War of the seventeenth century drove the
Church of England and her liturgy underground. Nevertheless, with the
Restoration of the Monarchy, the Book of Common Prayer, authorized by
Parliament and Church in 1662, became Anglicanism’s sine qua non. Great
Awakenings and the Methodist movement of the 18th century, as well as
adaptations necessary for the first Anglicans independent of the British Crown,
challenged and re-shaped Prayer Book worship, as would the East African
revival, charismatic renewal, and the dissolution of Empire in the 20th
century. Similarly, the evangelical and anglo-catholic movements of the 19th
century profoundly affected Anglican self-understanding and worship in
different, often seemingly contradictory, ways; yet the Book of Common Prayer
(1662) was common to every period of this development. For nearly five
centuries, Cranmer’s Prayer Book idea had endured to shape what emerged as a
global Anglican Church that is missional and adaptive as in its earliest
centuries; authoritatively Scriptural and creedal as in its greatest season of
reform; and evangelical, catholic, and charismatic in its apology and its
worship as now globally manifest.
The liturgical movement of the 20th century and the
ecumenical rapprochement in the second half of that century had an immense
impact on the Prayer Book tradition. The Book of Common Prayer (1979) in the
United States and various Prayer Books that appeared in Anglican Provinces from
South America to Kenya to South East Asia to New Zealand were often more
revolutionary than evolutionary in character. Eucharistic prayers in particular
were influenced by the re-discovery of patristic texts unknown at the Reformation,
and often bore little resemblance to what had for centuries been the Anglican
norm. Baptismal theology, especially in North America, was affected by radical
revisions to the received Christian understanding, and came perilously close to
proclaiming a gospel of individual affirmation rather than of personal
transformation and sanctification.
At the beginning of the 21st century, global reassessment of
the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 as “the standard for doctrine, discipline,
and worship” shapes the present volume, now presented on the bedrock of its
predecessors. Among the timeless treasures offered in this Prayer Book is the
Coverdale Psalter of 1535 (employed with every Prayer Book from the mid-16th to
the mid-20th centuries), renewed for contemporary use through efforts that
included the labors of 20th century Anglicans T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis, and
brought to final form here. The Book of Common Prayer (2019) is indisputably
true to Cranmer’s originating vision of a form of prayers and praises that is
thoroughly Biblical, catholic in the manner of the early centuries, highly
participatory in delivery, peculiarly Anglican and English in its roots,
culturally adaptive and missional in a most remarkable way, utterly accessible
to the people, and whose repetitions are intended to form the faithful
catechetically and to give them doxological voice.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) is the product of the new
era of reform and restoration that has created the Anglican Church in North
America. The Jerusalem Declaration of 2008 located itself within the historic
confines of what is authentically the Christian Faith and the Anglican
patrimony, and sought to restore their fullness and beauty. The Book of Common
Prayer (2019) is offered to the same end.
+Foley Beach
Archbishop
Anglican Church in North America
On behalf of the College of Bishops
+Robert Duncan
Archbishop Emeritus
Anglican Church in North America
On behalf of all who shaped this Book
The Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist
ANNO DOMINI MMXIX
