Sometime in the 1950s a visitor walked into a stereotypical English parish church in a stereotypical English town and asked, 'What is the service like here'? The answer comes:
That was the first stanza of a poem some of you may know by the 1955 Revd S. J. Forrest, called 'What's the Use?' At the risk of ruining the joke, I will explain a bit. The title plays with two senses of the word "use" — first, "use" as liturgy, the sense it has in the long title of the Prayer Book: '…according to the Use of the Church of England', and "use" as utility or value.
Forrest gives poetic expression to a joke common among English churchmen in the mid-twentieth century — that the devotees of the Prayer Book seemed oblivious to how much they departed from it. It suggests another way of understanding the titular question: 'How viable is the Book of Common Prayer today, given that its ardent supporters very regularly depart from it?'
In our day, liturgical diversity is the sanctioned norm within the family of churches that regard themselves as Anglican. It is now the case now that to use the Book of Common Prayer (especially in the classic 1662, the American 1928, or the Canadian 1962 forms) is to swim decidedly against the tide. The 80th General Convention of the US Episcopal Church voted to redefine the Book of Common Prayer to mean any and all of 'those liturgical forms and other texts authorized by General Convention' and approved by two consecutive Conventions. The liturgical future apparently envisioned by Resolution A059 is one in which a library of authorized liturgies, which may never be printed between two covers, would be made available online, all of which have "Prayer Book status." Clergy would then be free to pull from any of these online resources to build a unique liturgy for their parishes.
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