How Viable is the Book of Common Prayer Today?

An earlier form of this paper was given at the Anglican Way Conference, St. John’s Church, Savannah, 8 March 2024.

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:

Oh just the usual thing you know;
the BCP all through,
Just pure and unadulterated 1662;
A minimum of wise interpolations from the Missal,
The Kyrie in Greek, the proper Collects and Epistles,
The Secret and the Canon and the Dominus Vobiscum,
(Three aves and a salve at the end would amiss come);
To the “militant” and “trudle”¹“Trudle” refers to the invitation to Communion, ‘Ye who do truly and earnestly repent ye of your sins…’. The word is a corruption of “truly.” there is little need to cling,
But apart from these exceptions, just the ordinary thing.

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 ti- tle 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 to- day, 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. 

So, ‘how viable is the Book of Common Prayer today’? If by that we mean the 1662, the 1928, the 1962, or perhaps now even the 1979, one widely shared answer is ‘not at all’! Not wishing to leave any of you in suspense as to my own views, I’ll go ahead and tell you now I do think the Book of Common Prayer is still viable and valuable today and that promoting it is worth the bother. I will make the case for that by responding to three objections to the use of the old Prayer Book that I frequently hear. While I primarily have in view the 1662, my argument also applies (more or less well) to the 1928 and 1962 forms. The first objection: it’s not user-friendly, especially for new users. Second, the old language is too difficult. Third, it focuses on sin too much. I will argue, by contrast, that all three of these areas – usability, language, and theology – are in fact among the greatest strengths of the Prayer Book.

Usability of the Prayer Book

Even in places where the old Prayer Book is praised, one can see a collapse in confidence about its user-friendliness. This lack of confidence is evinced in the proliferation of complete service booklets, what Scottish Episcopalians call ‘wee bookies’, printed every Sunday to eliminate the need for people to handle the Prayer Book. The reasons given for this trend usually focus on visitors, sometimes on children, and the concern – the quite reasonable, laudable, and indeed Cranmerian concern – for user-friendliness. But, of course, the less often people have to handle the book, the less likely they are to do so, and, in turn, the less likely they are to learn how to use it.

The preface to the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer claims that it is a liturgical system ‘a greate deale more profitable and commodious, then that whiche of late was used.’ Preface jokes that with the old service books, ‘many times, there was more busines to fynd out what should be read, then to read it when it was faunde out.’ In the Book of Common Prayer, the diffuse, complicated, and confusing medieval systems or uses of various dioceses were replaced with a single use designed to be a highly commodious or usable means for facilitating public worship. Of its many innovative features, perhaps the most obvious at first glance, was to simplify the liturgical system so it could be contained between two covers. Whether this negative characterization of the medieval liturgies is fair is irrelevant for our purposes at present; what matters now is the Prayer Book was designed to be user-friendly.

‘Less is more’, Jakob Nielsen explains. When it comes to designing a user-friendly interface, ‘Every single element in a user interface places some additional burden on the user in terms of having to consider whether to use that element. Having fewer options will often mean better usability.’ Whatever else a Prayer Book is, it is a user interface, and the preface tells us that it was designed with the needs of the user in mind. The number of moving parts, the necessary book juggling and page-flipping, and the number of choices that need to be made were all intentionally minimized.

The order in which the services are situated in the book roughly corresponds to the regularity and frequency of use. So daily Morning and Evening Prayer come first. No other liturgy in the book ever replaces these daily offices. They are, as it were, the melody line on which the harmonies of the other offices play or the matrix in which they flourish. Since 1552, daily Morning and Evening Prayer, Mattins and Evensong, have begun with a list of biblical sentences or quotations. The rubric instructs the presider to select one or more to read ‘with a loud voyce.’ Eleven options are provided, such as Ps 51:17, ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’ Now, we have already noted that when a user interface presents a choice among options it ‘places some additional burden on the user.’ In this case, however, all of the various options do the same job or move the service ahead in the exact same direction. All of these scriptures draw attention, in different ways, to the pervasiveness of human sin (both generally and personally), God’s just wrath against sin, and the need for contrition, confession, and repentance.

So the progression of the service is unaffected regardless of which sentence is selected; it is a low-stakes choice. They serve to call the assembly to confess their sins, thus providing a biblical warrant for that next action in the service, as if answering the question ‘Why are we doing this?’? before it can be asked. The answer is because the scriptures bid us to do so. This is made quite explicit in the scripted exhortation that the presider reads after one or more of these sentences: ‘[T]he scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness.’ Whichever sentence is selected, this scripted explanation fits with it.

Trends in liturgical revision since the late eighteenth century have moved away from the simplicity of this approach back toward the medieval model of more movable parts and more options in the discretion of the presiding minister. The proliferation of options, rather than being freeing, paradoxically tends toward choice paralysis. ‘Having choices is actually rare in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer’, as Sam Bray and I wrote in How to Use the Book of Common Prayer. ‘Later prayer books have a huge number of choices, making them complicated to use.’ In Morning and Evening Prayer in the 1662 Prayer Book, ‘the only choices you make are about the sentences and the canticles’ and, in both of those cases, the different ‘options serve the same function in the service.’²S. L. Bray and D. N. Keane, How to Use the Book of Common Prayer: A Guide to the Anglican Liturgy (IVP, 2024), p. 41.

The simple, usable design – the commodiousness of the use, as Cranmer put it – reinforces its profitability or usefulness to the praying Christian. A simple structural pattern recurs throughout the Prayer Book: a scripture is read aloud to the assembly and they respond appropriately, in several key places, like the daily confession of sin, by simply doing just what the scripture read aloud says to do. This pattern carries a clear meta-message about the holy scriptures: that they ought to be heard, that their core message is comprehensible, and that they require humble, grateful, obedient response. By scripting the appropriate response – in this case, the confession of sin – the liturgy inculcates its users in a transformative approach to scripture reading that minimizes the risk that God’s word will be profaned.

If reducing options enhances usability then one might conclude that printing a complete service booklet for each unique service, thereby eliminating from view any options that are not used for that particular occasion, is ideal. Moreover, the booklet eliminates the need to flip to proper collect of the day, the Psalms, or look up the scriptures for the day. From the narrow point of view of usability for a novice user in one particular church service, yes, the booklet is better. But the analysis that leads to that conclusion focuses too narrowly on one particular occasion and one particular kind of user – the novice user. But the Prayer Book is not just a manual for ministers planning Sunday morning worship; it has historically served as the rule of life for all Anglicans. Our aim for novice users is not just to facilitate easy participation in one particular service on one particular Sunday, but to draw them into the Prayer Book, to facilitate their familiarity with the Prayer Book and help them discover its value beyond the Sunday morning church service. Printing complete booklets for every service puts us on a trajectory away from those goals in at least three mutually reinforcing ways.

First, when the presiding minster gets to design and print service booklets for every particular occasion, the Book of Common Prayer easily becomes the book of options. Second, if the congregation uses the book less, they become less and less familiar with it, decreasing the likelihood that they will notice or care how the presider modifies the service. Third, if the laity do not gain some familiarity with and affection for the Prayer Book – qua book – in church, the likelihood that they will use it domestically and personally only decreases. If we believe in its continued viability, we should aim to get the book into more people’s hands and help them become more familiar with it.

Language of the Prayer Book

One frequently hears that the Prayer Book’s 500-year-old English is too difficult for visitors and children. And while admitting there may be an initial difficulty with unfamiliar vocabulary, I argue that there are advantages to the Prayer Book’s language that outweigh the initial difficulty. To show why that is I will have to explain a bit of linguistic history – please, bear with me.

The Book of Common Prayer reflects a time when written English did not differ quite so much from spoken English as is now usual. As Stella Brook put it in her definitive study The Language of the Prayer Book, it is for ‘the ear rather than the eye.’ Literacy was not universal and written documents were treated rather like scripts for reading aloud. The art of speaking well – rhetoric – was a strong focus of pedagogy. Written English changed a great deal over the seventeenth century, especially non-fiction writing, as general literacy increased by leaps and bounds. Much of that change involved shedding some qualities that benefit speaking and hearing but add less value for reading and writing. Along with that was the greater realization of the unique potential of writing in contrast to speaking – greater focus on information and precision. The key reason for this is, as Walter Ong and others have shown, that what is written can be read over as many times as one needs, so that how one writes things need not be highly memorable nor need it be mostly comprehensible on the first read.

But, in a culture without writing or with low literacy, as in the sixteenth century, ‘You know what you can recall’, as Ong famously put it. Therefore, ‘to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence.’ Redundancy is a quintessential characteristic of spoken communication. This tendency toward redundancy, like the other characteristics of speech, comes from the greater reliance on the memory required by speech.

For hard-won knowledge to be preserved, Ong explains, it ‘had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential.’ These characteristics are seen in abundance in sixteenth-century English, a culture that despite the pervasiveness of writing and print continued to prioritize the viva voce – the living voice – and the speaker’s memory over mere texts. The learned person was understood as one able to speak well and persuasively in any situation from the treasury of an ample memory. Those familiar with the Elizabethan Puritan Thomas Cartwright’s debate with John Whitgift will see that this concept shared by both Cartwright and Whitgift of the learned pastor, with his ample memory and rhetorical art, lies at the core of Whitgift’s objection to the mere ‘reading minister’ and the imposition of a liturgical script. Whitgift, by contrast, saw the Prayer Book’s script as an asset to the learned pastor.

Thomas Cranmer, the editor of the Prayer Book, brought these rhetorical priorities to writing. One can hear this in the opening exhortation for Morning and Evening Prayer. After reading one or more of these sentences, the presider exhorts the assembly with these words:

Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness; and that we should not dissemble nor cloke them before the face of Almighty God our heavenly Father; but confess them with an humble, lowly, penitent, and obedient heart; to the end that we may obtain forgiveness of the same, by his infinite goodness and mercy. And although we ought at all times humbly to acknowledge our sins before God; yet ought we most chiefly so to do, when we assemble and meet together to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at his hands, to set forth his most worthy praise, to hear his most holy word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul.

You may not have been counting, but there were ten doublets – like ‘acknowledge and confess’ – in this opening exhortation and one quadruplet – ‘humble, lowly, penitent, and obedient.’ The amplifying redundancy or parallelism extends beyond verbal doublets and quadruplets. There are antitheses; the positive bidding ‘acknowledge and confess’ is then contrasted with the opposite expressed with a doublet, ‘that we should not dissemble nor cloak them.’ And ‘as well for the body as the soul’ constitutes a merism.

This ceremonial register of speech serves four intertwined functions at once. First, it increases comprehension. For hearers to effectively process speech, it cannot proceed in too linear a fashion; it must circle back on itself, repeating what matters. If a particular keyword is unfamiliar to or unheard by some in the assembly, say “penitent” for example, the combination of closely related words, ‘humble, lowly … and obedient’ supply the necessary clarification. Redundancies at the verbal and structural level slow down the progression of content to the pace of aural comprehension. Second, it enhances memorability because what is repeated is recalled. Third, it serves to “thicken”, elevate, or amplify speech. Albert Lord, who studied the illiterate bards of Yugoslavia and Bosnia, called this “ritual elaboration.” Long before, Aristotle observed in his Rhetoric, that ‘amplification is most suitable for epideictic speakers’, that is, ceremonial speech. Fourth, this specialized mode of speech, this ceremonial register, signals immediately to all who hear it the significance of the space they occupy and the task at hand. It impresses upon participants the gravity of the task at hand. As Lord Williams put it, ‘[W]e’re reminded that what we’re trying to talk about is not just the business of the house in the street, it is also strange and astonishing and terrifying.’ In other words one can hear at once that this is the language of temples and courts.

Memorability is intrinsic to ceremonial speech not only because the presider must recall the words and actions for the ceremony but also because ceremonies always aim to shape the thoughts and behaviors of participants outside of the ritual. This is as much true in a highly literate culture as it is in a pre-literate culture. Our rituals aim to shape our mind and manners beyond the temple walls. Memorability must remain a priority for liturgy in literate societies.

Now, of course, there are different degrees of ceremonial elaboration. The Prayer Book’s English shows relative restraint with ornamentation. Its language is not showy or overwrought, nor does it shift from prose to verse, a danger against which Cicero and Quintillian warned. Contrast, for example, the prose of the Prayer Book to that of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible, with its greater reliance on Latinate vocabulary and syntax, and the difference is clear. Contrast both with the verse of John Donne and one can I think hear why liturgy is not, nor should it be, written as poetry.

The prayer book wears its rhetoric lightly. Brook explains, the Prayer Book ‘follows the practice of using two words to express a single idea, but, with a few exceptions, it employs the device sensitively and intelligently. It uses word-play, but in a subtle and unobtrusive manner. It brings directness and homeliness into its passages of plain prose, but couples them with decorum which prevents over-exuberance.’

These qualities of the language are why it is still sung by choirs in cathedral Evensongs across the world. It is why these words are etched on the memory of those who repeat them. In more recent Prayer Book revisions that try to employ a more modern idiom, there is nothing like it. This is why English poets consulted by the mid-twentieth century liturgical revisers – T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden on the Psalms, for example – have tended to resist the whole enterprise and tried to hold onto as much of the Prayer Book’s language as possible.

Theology of the Prayer Book

Urban T. Holm, one of the leaders of the 1979 Prayer Book revision, explained that one of the key goals of that work was to do away with what he called “the Tudor God.” The most significant test of the viability of the Prayer Book today is its theology, what it says about God, and our relation to him.

As valuable and usable as the language of the Prayer Book is, we would misunderstand what the Prayer Book is for if we failed to see the simplicity of its design and the effectiveness of its language as a means to an end. The primary use of the Prayer Book, by which it must ultimately be measured as valuable or not, is to inculcate within its users faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. To promote true faith the user must have quite a clear sense of his or her need to rely upon Christ Jesus for all that is ‘requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul.’

So, in this beginning of daily Morning and Evening Prayer, this twice daily confession of sin, we find a pattern repeated throughout the Prayer Book’s liturgies, a pattern founded upon the Pauline principle fides ex auditu, ‘faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God’ (Rom 10:17). Hearing God’s Word carries the potential to activate faith. Faith in the Gospel logically assumes, and thus, must be preceded by, awareness of sin and helplessness which drives one to seek God’s mercy. Clinging with faith to divine mercy is necessarily followed by gratitude and love for that mercy, expressed in merciful and loving actions. John Boys, dean of Canterbury under King James I and VI, paraphrasing the martyr Bishop Hugh Latimer, put it this way: ‘Lady faith is a great state, hauing a Gentleman Vsher going before her, called agnitio peccatorum [the acknowledgment of sin], and a great train following after her, which are the good works of our calling.’

This tripartite pattern is presented plainly in the general confession. It begins with a description of the human condition: 

Almighty and most merciful Father,
We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,
We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,
We have offended against thy holy laws,
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done,
And there is no health in us.

Following the invocation, each of the five subsequent phrases is an acknowledgment beginning aphoristically ‘We have’ (with the last preceded by ‘And’). The sixth and final admission, ‘And there is no health in us’, breaks the ‘we have’ pattern and draws the necessary conclusion from these previous admissions. This is the core acknowledgment in the confession, its bedrock. Each of the previous acknowledgments have, as it were, lowered us, inch by inch, into the grave. There is no health in us; in other words, we cannot rescue ourselves.

The second half of the confession begins an ascent of five steps, corresponding to the five anaphoric ‘we have’ phrases in the first half:

But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders;
Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults,
Restore thou them that are penitent,
According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord:
And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake,
That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life,
To the glory of thy holy Name.

All the ‘we have’ admissions lead to the unequivocal conclusion: ‘there is no health in us’, meaning we cannot save ourselves. ‘But’, begins the ascent, so to speak, out of the grave, a petition at a time. Each of the four petitions and one prepositional phrase in the second half of the confession corresponds inversely to the five ‘we have’ phrases in the first half, revealing a chiastic structure: ‘[E]rred and strayed from thy ways’ is the antithesis of ‘a godly, righteous, and sober life.’ ‘[T]he devices and desires of our own hearts’ are surrendered in favor of the ‘promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord.’ Those who have ‘offended’ ask to be ‘restored’ because they are ‘penitent.’ Those who ‘have left undone those things which we ought to have done’ ask God to ‘spare’ them because they are now doing that which they most chiefly ought to do, namely ‘confess their faults.’ Those who ‘have done those things which we ought not to have done’ admit their need for mercy: ‘O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.’ This second half of the confession has three vocatives in the — ‘O Lord’, ‘O God’, and ‘O most merciful Father’ – recalling Joel 2:32, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved.’ It inculcates faith by teaching us to call upon the Lord, over and over again.

In this general confession, which the Prayer Book bids its users say twice daily, we observe the full procession of Lady Faith – the acknowledgment of sin leading the way and godly life to the glory of God following after. The Prayer Book reiterates this gospel triad – repentance, faith, and charity – again and again in the structure of its services and in its prayers. That’s the principal value of the Book of Common Prayer. Its repetitions and reiterations, its rhythms and balanced phrases, are designed to implant the gospel deep in the memory, which is necessary for the transformation, the renewing of our minds, that we may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God (Rom 12:2).

I am not claiming that all more recent liturgies fail to convey the gospel. I am arguing, though, that the simplicity and reiterations that informed the Prayer Book’s design provide a truly user-friendly means for hearing and responding to the divine word with faith, a pattern of prayer that a novice user can easily learn and quickly internalize, and that, because of that, carries the strong potential to shape thinking, speaking, and behavior beyond the liturgy in our daily lives and conversations. And yet its language and theology are thickened enough that, after many years of repetition, the familiar user does not find it thin, its value spent up. It bears the weight, as it were, of life-long use – a different usability challenge than ease for the novice. Later revisions present more challenges for the user, the hearer, and the memory. While they provide many more options that is precisely what makes them less user-friendly. In this case, less is more. The more options, the more confusion. In C. S. Lewis’s analogy, they require us to think about the steps too much to lose ourselves in the dance. And, because they minimize repetition, newer liturgies do not show forth the procession of Lady Faith nearly so often as the Prayer Book; even when a liturgy is built on that pattern, options allowing rearrangement disrupt it, thus obscuring the Prayer Book’s crystal clarity concerning the gospel. Far from being reasons to give up on the old Prayer Book, its usability, language, and theology are the qualities that most point to its continued viability and value.