Towards a New Prayer Book
How the Acts of the 81st General Convention might inform the next iteration of the Book of Common Prayer.
Two months have now passed since the 81st General Convention was gaveled into history in Louisville, an event at which I was honored to serve as one of the alternate lay deputies from the Diocese of Pennsylvania. Since that time, commentators left and right have left their $0.02 on what happened in the Kentucky International Convention Center (and adjacent meeting rooms), and I see no particular need to retread the ground they’ve already covered. Instead, I’d like to take some time to look ahead, to Phoenix and beyond.
An outsider peeking through our red doors might wonder why so much ink is spilt every triennium over the Book of Common Prayer, particularly as, in so many parishes, missallettes or unitary bulletins are what’s in practical use from week to week. In many ways, the Prayer Book is the glue holding us together - not being a church characterized by a magisterium, a single confessional document, or the corpus of a singular theologian.
At Louisville, a number of actions were taken regarding the Prayer Book. We introduced alternate lectionaries for Lesser Feasts and Fasts and the Daily Office (the latter of which, per the inimitable Scott Gunn, may now have six, or more, lectionary options!); we took steps to incorporate language “expressing our Baptismal responsibility to care for creation” into the Baptismal Covenant; we introduced a passel of persons and events for consideration, first reading, and second reading in Lesser Feasts and Fasts (and deprecated William Porcher DuBose, who frankly had it coming) and, most interestingly, we passed Resolutions A116, A160, and D035, of which the first surgically modifies most of the portions of the marriage rites in the Prayer Book to accommodate same-sex couples; the second modifies the Catechism to change “a man and a woman” to “two people” (and adds another question concerning matrimony); and the third reviews a gender-neutral marriage Rite for proposal for ‘trial use’ at Phoenix. Meanwhile, Resolution A072, enacted after its several reading (despite none of the interim steps it called for in Baltimore having been implemented) effectively redefined the canonical definition of “The Book of Common Prayer.”
The Rev. Matthew S.C. Olver, Professor of Liturgics at Nashotah House, published a rather comprehensive three-part essay over at The Living Church earlier this month, of which all three parts are available here, here, and here, and which I commend to you. Now, I should note that I testified in opposition to D035 at its pre-Convention hearing, and in opposition to A072 (but in support of its moderating resolution, A224) on the floor of the House of Deputies. I did so because, regarding the former, I feel that having two separate marriage rites smells too much of a “separate but equal” treatment for LGBTQ+ people; and that, regarding the latter, because the interim work having not been done after Baltimore opens the door to a great deal of uncertainty and anarchy if the Prayer Book is in a state of continual revision. Bishop Doyle of Texas, writing in advance of General Convention in support of A072, characterized the argument as (my personal points of view indicated in italics)
Those who envision a Book of Common Prayer produced by a printer and those who envision an Ebook of Common Prayer
Those who envision marriage equality within the Book of Common Prayer and those who are concerned they will be constitutionally forced to bless all marriages for an ever-expanding LGBTQ+ community by placing the marriage rites in the Book of Common Prayer. A priest is constitutionally protected from being forced to solemnize any marriage, for any just cause. This protection must remain, and should perhaps be printed in the Prayer Book itself, but in retaining it, priests who find themselves in disagreement with a couple in their charge should be obligated to lead the way in making alternative arrangements.
Those who experience the latent reality that translations of liturgical materials are not seen as essential to a multiethnic and multinational church and those who don't understand the issue of flexibility with liturgical texts achieve parody (sic!) across our diverse church when it comes to liturgy (All I will say here is that there are very, very many Indigenous communities who are still using translations of the 1892 and 1928 BCPs, often prepared by individual clergy serving those communities, and that we should hear and understand their perspective)
Those who want structure and clarity for revision and those who didn't know we were without such clarity and structure
Those who want to create openness in the process and those who don't want openness
Those who want to be able to work with others to develop mission-responsive and those who want to slow down the process (Neither; it’s a bad cook who blames his tools, but we may occasionally find ourselves working in realms the current Prayer Book does not imagine.)
Those who want to build a new prayer book from scratch and those who don't want this at all.
I think that some of these are false dichotomies, and as you see, I don’t fit neatly in any one camp. I doubt many Episcopalians do.
Three courses of action now exist regarding the Prayer Book.
Do nothing, and continue with the status quo. Of course, we have to acknowledge that most parishes will keep the BCP79 in the pews and use whatever they’ve been using. This would probably be the most comfortable avenue for most Episcopalians in the pews; however, actions of the past several General Conventions are making it increasingly untenable. Due to the promulgation of the Revised Common Lectionary, all the supplemental Daily Office lectionaries, the potential addition of a new marriage rite, and the expansions/revisions to the catechism, we are no longer able to preserve the pagination of the 1979 Prayer Book. We now have two parallel books: The Book of Common Prayer, 1979, and The Book of Common Prayer 1979, 2022, 2024, etc.
Wholesale revision of the Prayer Book. This would be the most costly option, both in Christian Unity and in fiscal outlay. While it is cheered for by many West Coast clerics and professors of liturgy, there appears to be no actual groundswell of support for wholesale revision beyond the Pravda-like “People are yearning” statements one typically hears in snippy letters from parish bullies. Which people, and to what end? Tract 61, of course, reminds us that “The spirit of Schism, in addition to its other inherent characters of sin, implies the desire of establishing minor points as Catholic or essential points, or the spirit of exclusiveness.
The desire of novelty is restlessness; the maintenance of our own novelty is selfishness.”1
Curatorial revision of the Prayer Book. This process would likely satisfy few people; seasoned liturgists would doubtless be annoyed that the opportunity to leave their mark on the Church will slip away; people in the pews would question the expenditure. But, with 45 years now having passed since the 1979 Book of Common Prayer was adopted, we can see more clearly some of its shortcomings:
There was an assumption that ‘cultural Christianity’ was normative, and that the Eucharist, being the liturgy proper of a gathered community, should be the act of public worship. Needless to say, with more and more unchurched adults, this assumption has been proven quite false. The COVIDtide suspension of corporate worship should have been seen as a test, of sorts; it was a test which, for the lack of a robust and coherent Daily Office and a people trained to pray it, largely failed.
Marriage equality was not conceived of at the time.
The plethora of options, with lack of explanation, makes the Daily Office (in particular) extremely difficult without guidance.
The refusal to print even the tones for the Sursum Corda (which are very ancient, and certainly not under copyright2) in the Prayer Book inevitably leads to unedifying page-flipping during the Canon of the Mass.
The user interface is extremely conservative, and relies on obsolete typographical conventions. The Lutheran Book of Worship, published in 1978, has the congregational or unison parts set in a slightly heavier typeface. We don’t have that, but we also don’t have consistent text sizes or capitalization - particularly at the ALL ITALIC CAPS “Amen” at the end of the Canon of the Mass.
Supplemental material is available digitally3 in the form of massive PDFs or very primitive HTML pages, both of which require significant deformatting to be used elsewhere.
The Psalter has aged rather poorly, as well as some of the ‘new’ material. (“This fragile earth, our island home” is surely the liturgical answer to plywood paneling, mullets, or shag carpet.)
We probably don’t need two Sunday lectionaries or however-many Daily Office lectionaries. (Particularly since I suspect that the Daily Office has fallen into near-total desuetude outside of church-nerd circles.
Dom Gregory Dix’s works are a response (based on dubious scholarship) to issues within the Roman Communion, but the “common shape” theory is directly antithetical to “common prayer.”
How to proceed?
There is no path forward regarding Prayer Book revision that will leave everyone happy. However, I would consider, as a first step, ascertaining what resources are actually used, and why.
A parochial canvass would probably swamp the SCLM.
Open polls could attract disproportionate responses from the sorts of people who actually care about these things, thus painting an inaccurate picture of the situation on the ground.
A canvass undertaken at the diocesan level (say, through the Secretaries of Convention) would put a great deal of work on volunteers.
Then, I would look at best practices in other liturgical resources.
It is common for congregational responses to be set in a heavier typeface, and for rubrics to be italicized when red ink is not available. While the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) and its successor Evangelical Lutheran Worship both use red rubrics, this presents a significant cost.
Some clarity on terms is needed. Our resources use “presider” for some things, “celebrant” for others, and “minister” or “officiant” for yet others. Personally, I would deprecate the use of “presider” for vagary - when a layperson leads an Office, it gets extremely confusing.
Quite a lot of the rubrics need to be rewritten for clarity. The ones concerning the Daily Office lectionary are inexcusably bad; I had to resort to diagramming sentences in order to determine that, if you use two lessons at Evening Prayer, the first lesson is the OT reading from the opposite year.
From there, it would make sense to begin typesetting new liturgies, and field-testing them in a variety of situations *removed* from the academe. A Book of Common Prayer should ideally work with minimal interpolation or interpretation in all of the following cases:
Use case 1: A seasonal house of worship with rotating clergy, which is open for four months out of the year.
Use case 2: An Episcopalian who is at Army Basic Training and wishes to pray the Daily Office while there, but (of course) is forbidden from using electronic devices. There is no Episcopal chaplain onsite.
Use case 3: A parish with a part-time priest, which offers lay-led Morning Prayer as the principal act of worship at least once a month.
Use case 4: A parish whose Christmas Eve bulletins have all been rendered unusable half an hour before Mass.
Use case 5: A church plant at which the Daily Office is the principal act of worship, and which primarily attracts non-Episcopalians and unchurched people.
The Book of Common Prayer is, in many ways, the ark of our tradition. But a ship which is only designed for the calm, well-guarded waters of a seminary chapel, a cathedral, or a well-resourced parish is not a ship that has been designed for the rough waters and uncharted shoals of 21st-century ministry. Ships are safe in harbor - but ships are not designed to stay in the harbor.
So, let us raise sail, and make our way westward - to Phoenix, and to other points unknown. If we keep the needle fixed on Jesus, we’re bound to make it there eventually.
https://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract61.html
However, I cannot speak for the Rite 2 “And also with you,” which is actually incorrect. That needs to be fixed, but the ‘wrong’ version is probably stuck fast in everyone’s heads by now.
Here: https://www.episcopalcommonprayer.org/existing-liturgies1.html