Evangelical Anglicans Today and the Book of Common Prayer

The Loss of a Tradition of Prayer Book Worship

"As any orthodox Anglican can appreciate,it is dangerous when traveling to drop into an unknown parish for Sunday worship. When visiting Britain over the years, I often asked friends to recommend good Church of England parishes. Most of the recommended churches have been excellent congregations with solid preaching and faithful parishioners. Yet the worship almost never follows the Book of Common Prayer (1662). Copies are not in the pews. The official doctrinal standard of the established church is obviously not in regular use, certainly not at the main Sunday service. The rectors of these parishes would heartily endorse the theology of Cranmer’s masterpiece but they almost never use it, except perhaps to comply with a family’s request at the funeral of an elderly member. Why is the BCP so rarely used by those who most warmly embrace its doctrine?

The answer to this puzzle is complicated. For one, English evangelical Anglicans played a significant role in the movement of liturgical revision that occurred in the Church of England during the 1960s and 1970s. Evangelical scholars such as Colin Buchanan were key participants in the process and the result was that Series Two and Three (1966, 1978), and the Alternative Service Book (ASB,1980), contained elements that evangelical churchmen could use with a reasonably clear conscience. Though they loved the theology of the Book of Common Prayer, these churchmen believed its Elizabethan language was a barrier to reaching the unchurched and its continued use in the ‘Space Age’ smacked of antiquarianism.

Their case was strengthened by the spectacle of prominent defenders of the prayer book who praised its literary merit while openly deriding its theology. Many evangelicals reasoned that if orthodoxy was going to continue to be relevant, it needed to discard its 16th century dress. Some (though by no means all) young people who attended evangelical parishes welcomed the contemporary language that meshed well with the upbeat musical choruses that were becoming popular in Christian circles during the 1970s.

One unfortunate by-product of these developments was that evangelicals ceased making regular use of the historic Book of Common Prayer. There was a silver lining to this dark cloud, however. One happy result of evangelical participation in the revision process in England was that the ASB,though certainly influenced by the liberal theology of the ‘60s and ‘70s, was less stridently revisionist than its North American counterparts – the 1979 American book and the Canadian Book of Alternative Services (BAS, 1985). Still, as part of an overall strategy to make the Church of England more relevant and refill its pews, liturgical revision was a spectacular failure. Instead, church attendance plummeted during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Though many evangelical parishes didn’t liberalize their preaching, their worship definitely became less identifiably Anglican. While the message remained robustly Reformational in some parishes, the medium took on the folksy informality of American pop evangelicalism (though when the British adopt American manners it usually comes across as forced and unconvincing).

Meanwhile, in North America, evangelical Anglicans were following a similar path but with even less sound liturgical resources. Liturgical commissions in the Episcopal Church USA and in the Anglican Church of Canada had no significant evangelical participation, and the results were predictably awful. The 1979 American book contained a catechism that was explicitly Pelagian, and the Canadian BAS declared blithely in the preface to its funeral rite: 'For the truth is that we do not know the condition of the dead, and while faith may consign their wellbeing to the creative and redemptive remembrance of God, everything we say about them remains, as thing said, at the level of symbol.'1 And that is to mention only two more egregious features of the updated orders."

To read the full article in the Winter 2010 issue of Mandate, the Prayer Book Society journal, click here and scroll down to page 8.