Straight Talk about a Common Liturgy for the Anglican Church of North America

By Robin G. Jordan

During the past sixty years two major events have impacted the development of liturgies in the Anglican Church. The first major event was the 1958 Lambeth Conference’s endorsement of the recommendations contained in the Report of its Sub-Committee on the Book of Common Prayer. Among these recommendations was that the provinces of the Anglican Communion drop the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as its doctrinal and worship standard. This recommendation would have both negative and positive effects.

We have been seeing the effects of not having a more precise unifying principle than acceptance of the Apostles and Nicene Creeds, a common structure for the Holy Communion service, and the historic epsicopate playing themselves out in recent years. The Anglican Communion has become an aggregate of provinces with only a past connection to the Church of England holding them together.

Due to the negative effects of the recommendation we tend to loose sight of its positive effects. One of its positive effects was that it would admit as acceptable a wider range of service options for Anglican congregations than previously. The 1958 Lambeth Conference would set its tacit seal of approval on a number of new liturgies then in various stages of development. They included the Church of South India’s The Book of Common Worship (1962) with its three orders for morning and evening worship.

The action of the bishops at the 1958 Lambeth Conference in regard to the acceptability of a broader range of forms of worship was not without precedence. In 1853 a group of Episcopal clergy under the leadership of William August Muhlenberg submitted a memorial to the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops. This memorial raised a very important question:

…whether the Protestant Episcopal Church, with only her present canonical means and appliances, her fixed and invariable modes of public worship and her traditional customs and usages, is competent to the work of preaching and dispensing the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men, and so adequate to do the work of the Lord in this land and in this age?

The conclusion of the memorialists was that the Episcopal Church was not competent to that work. They proposed that Episcopal Church recruit candidates for ordination from other bodies of Christians without requiring from “that entire surrender…of all the liberty in public worship to which they have been accustomed….” The memorial would prompt the strong opposition of both the High Church and Anglo-Catholic parties in the Episcopal Church. These parties viewed the memorial as a statement of solidarity with the denomination’s larger evangelical party.

The response of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops was to refer the memorial to a committee of bishops who presented their report to 1856 General Convention. E. Clowe Chorley in his The New American Prayer Book: Its History and Contents (1929) tells us what happened to this report.

They recommended the discretionary use of Morning Prayer, the Litany and the Ante-Communion as separate services; also the Holy Communion with a sermon. That, at other than the stated morning and evening prayer, ministers might use such parts of the Prayer Book and lessons as would "tend most to edification." The report further provided that diocesan bishops might set forth "such special services as, in their judgment, shall be required by the peculiar spiritual necessities of any class or portion of the population within said dioceses.

In response to a request of the House of Clerical and Lay Deputies made in 1853 for a form of prayer for the Increase of the Ministry, the committee recommended the adoption of the following new prayers:

A Prayer for Unity
A Prayer for the Increase of the Ministry
A Prayer for Missions and Missionaries
A Prayer for the Young
A Prayer for a Person about to be exposed to special danger
A Prayer in time of public calamities, dangers, or difficulties
A Thanksgiving for deliverance of a person from any peril
A Prayer for deliverance from public calamities and dangers
A Thanksgiving for the recovery of a sick child

Outside these proposed additions the Prayer Book was left untouched so far as actual legislation was concerned, though the committee concurred in the view "that in adjusting the length of our public services, more regard should be had to the physical ability of both minister and people." To this end the House of Bishops expressed the opinion that the three Offices of Morning Prayer, Litany and Holy Communion might be used separately; that on special occasions the clergy might have discretion in the use of the Prayer Book and the choice of lessons and that the bishops might put forth special services to meet peculiar necessities, with the proviso that such should not supersede the Prayer Book "in congregations capable of its use."

Chorley also tell us how the larger Church reacted:

The Church at large was not satisfied with the treatment of the Memorial and especially with the failure to embrace the opportunity to revise the Prayer Book. In 1859 the House of Deputies declared that the action of the bishops "had disturbed the minds of many in our Church," and asked them "to reconsider their resolutions and to throw the subject matter into such shape as will admit of the joint action of both Houses of Convention." This the bishops refused to do and defeated a motion in their own House to refer the whole matter of the Memorial and Prayer Book revision to a Joint Commission.

At the Convention of 1862 the House of Deputies resolved that the Litany be amended to include the new suffrage: "That it may please thee to send forth labourers into thy harvest." Strange as it may seem, the House of Bishops declared that such an addition was "inexpedient."

The Episcopal Church was not the only Anglican province in which the need for greater flexibility and variety in liturgical use was recognized in the nineteenth century. The Act of Uniformity Amendment Act of 1872 would authorize a number of changes in the worship of the Church of England. These changes included the use of shortened services of Morning and Evening Prayer on weekdays, the use of the services of Morning Prayer, Litany, and Holy Communion as separate services, and the preaching of sermons and lectures without the reading of common prayers or services appointed by the Book of Common Prayer preceding them.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century the 1926 Irish Prayer Book would incorporate similar provisions into its General Directions for Publick Worship. In addition to the Orders for Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer the 1926 Irish Prayer Book would include two Alternative Forms of Evening Prayer.

The second major event was the 1962 Second Vatican Council which affirms in the Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy a number of principles that were to govern liturgical reform in the Roman Catholic Church. The liturgy was to be in the vernacular. The participation of the people was to be encouraged—“by acclamations, songs, actions, or silence.” The liturgy was to be marked by “a noble simplicity”: it was to be “short, clear, and unencumbered by useless repetitions”—two distinguishing characteristics borrowed from the Anglican Church. It was to give expression to the liturgical principle, “less is more.” The liturgy was also to be flexible enough that the various population groups using it would have room to exercise their “spiritual adornments and gifts.” The 1962 Second Vatican Council would provide the impetus for a new era of liturgical development and experimentation not only in the Roman Catholic Church but also outside of that denomination.

In the main this liturgical development and experimentation has been beneficial. Anglican provinces have produced new liturgies that are more responsive to the needs of congregations using them, particularly in the critical area of reaching and engaging unchurched population groups in their respective communities.

While some critics of the new liturgies blame them for the decline in church attendance in the West, the evidence points to other factors accounting for this decline. Congregations using the older liturgies have themselves experienced the same decline. Indeed a number of those congregations are on the verge of closing their doors due to their failure to attract new members. A number of them have already ceased from having services and are for all intents and purposes dead.

This makes the Anglican Church in North America’s development of rites and services based upon these older liturgies, particularly The Book of Common Prayer (1928) and the Anglican Missal, even more puzzling. The ACNA Prayer Book and Common Task Force gives far more attention to the development of liturgies that are expressive of the pre-Reformation and post-Tridentian Roman Catholic heritage of the Anglo-Catholic movement and its beliefs and practices than it does to the development of rites and services that are suitable for use on the twenty-first century North American mission field and which conform to the teaching of the Scriptures and the doctrine of the Anglican formularies. The argument that it is a part of Anglicanism’s rich heritage recently made by ACNA Archbishop Foley Beech is a specious one. Both in and outside the Anglican Church in North America are Biblically-faithful, gospel-sharing Anglicans who do not regard this particular heritage a part of the true patrimony of orthodox Anglicanism.   

Right now clergy and congregations in the Anglican Church in North American can for the most part use the Anglican service books that they have been using. But it is evident from the websites of a number of dioceses that the ordinary of the diocese is encouraging the use of Texts for Common Prayer. This includes Archbishop Beech’s own Diocese of the South, belying his own recent statement. The Diocese of the South is offering a liturgy and worship course for the clergy, which includes instruction on the use of Holy Communion I and II from Texts for Common Prayer. Once the final version of the ACNA Prayer Book is approved, ACNA clergy and congregations will be required to use the book under the provisions of Canon II.2.1.  The canon permits the use of “authorized Books of Common Prayer of the originating jurisdictions” until that time. ACNA clergy and congregations are not free to use any other Anglican service books or to develop local patterns of worship.