The greatest danger to any tradition is always those entrusted with its care. A survey of church history reveals that one of the most difficult, thankless tasks is to hold fast to what has been handed down. A tremendous benefit of serving a church blessed to use The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition (1662 IE) for all her public services is the opportunity to worship and grow as Christians liberated from the liturgical experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries. The men and women whom God has placed under my spiritual care have been succored with the balm of Gilead, rather than racing like mice in the maze of an ecclesiastical experiment.
If this benefit were the only one, it would still be worth considering adopting the 1662 in your parish or mission, but there are a multitude of advantages a church gains from trusting in a system whose empirical evidence of success across centuries and cultures is unmatched when compared to the other options before us. The cure of souls is too important to be shackled to the cruel slave master of chronological proximity.
This position holds especially true for parishes seeking to embrace a more traditional prayer book rather than arrange their current modern book in a more traditional manner. The layman’s great enemy while striving for fidelity in a rule of faith is unnecessary complexity. This principle lies at the heart of the Anglican reformers’ attempts to create a rule of life for the common man through the prayer book – to make a nation of holy men and women rather than just a cloister of them. The 1662 IE operates in a medium of intentional simplicity which is already quite challenging for the average unchurched or ill-churched person to grasp, but the red rubrics, glossary, directions for how to follow the services, and just general lack of added, mission-creep complexity offer a gigantic advantage for discipling churchmen in our present landscape.
As an example, the mission that I serve is in a small town surrounded by farms. We live in what some describe as the Rust Belt, but these people deserve much better than that label. They live and work in a world abandoned by those hirelings who could find easier and more lucrative places to exploit. Those once-trusted institutions of corporate America and mainline Christianity are gone, replaced too often by despair and drugs and moralism – all three corrosive to the soul. What these people need – and I suspect this is not unique to them – is a firehose of grace to clear away the muck and grime that has built up over years of neglect. To borrow a phrase from Simeon Zahl (from a lecture at Beeson Divinity School) they need the most efficacious and sound ‘technology of the heart’ ever devised for implanting the good news of God’s unmerited favor: the classic Book of Common Prayer.
The 1662 IE taps into Zahl’s idea of ‘affective technology’ without the baggage of years of unedifying conflict and inter-ecclesial political strife. Imagine not having to talk about this split or that break with an interested visitor but instead being liberated to dive into the serious theological depths of reformed catholicism. I can hand this book to a visitor as a living link back to the church of the first five centuries of vernacular English worship (the language our visitors happen to speak), and of course, to the catholic church of the first five centuries of Christ’s reign. The Prayer Book protects us from ourselves and our partisan divides. As Anglicans struggle to find unity in the wake of a challenging century, what better way than for us all to humbly gather around the common prayers of Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer, Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor, E. B. Pusey and John Keble, C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot, George Washington and Patrick Henry, Elizabeth I and Jane Austen. Our mission in Connersville, Indiana, broadcasts a podcast of the daily office using the 1662 IE. We often receive messages from people all over the country, from all denominational backgrounds, who are picking up this Prayer Book as a means of anchoring their devotions in something deeper than the casual, unserious worship that presently dominates the American religious landscape. The 1662 IE is a true balm to these weary souls as it was to the Anglicans who came before us: those saintly churchmen who weathered the storms of change and chance sheltered in the ark of faith and succored by the Book of Common Prayer.
The Rev. Richard Tarsitano is the vicar of Trinity Anglican Church, a Mission of the Reformed Episcopal Church. He is a former Navy Chief and holds a B.A. in English from the University of North Florida and an M.Div from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He was recently featured in the collection Re-formed Catholic Anglicanism (Anglican Way Institute, 2024) with a chapter titled: ‘Sweet Wisdom’s Order: Richard Hooker and the Re-Formed Catholic Stand against Chaos’.