By Robin G. Jordan
Ten years in the making, the proposed ACNA service book, The Book of Common Prayer 2019, is a study in anachronistic thinking. In some ways the proposed book resembles the contemporary language trial liturgies of the 1960s and 1970s. For a book that took a decade to prepare, the proposed BCP 2019 lacks the polish that characterizes the best of the more recent service books.
The proposed BCP 2019 suffers from a number of defects. The most serious of these defects is its doctrine. The proposed book does not just flirt with unreformed Catholicism, the book jumps into bed with it. The book will delight Anglo-Catholics who have been yearning for the days of the pre-Reformation Medieval Church. It not only revives the Medieval Catholic sacramental system but also reintroduces a number of practices associated with that system. The only thing that is missing is the invocation of the blessed Virgin and the saints and the adoration of the reserved sacrament. Perhaps these devotions will be published in a subsequent edition.
While the Prayer Book and Liturgy Task Force cannibalized a number of texts from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, any resemblance of the proposed book to the classical Anglican Prayer Book is superficial. The book is no more Anglican than the Catholic Church’s Divine Worship: The Missal.
The proposed BCP 2019 embodies what former ACNA Archbishop Robert “Bob” Duncan has championed as the “new settlement.” The “new settlement” is essentially a repudiation of the Protestant Reformation, the Elizabethan Settlement, and historic Anglicanism and a return to the age of unfettered episcopacy, sacerdotalism, sacramentalism, and superstition.
The proposed BCP 2019 makes no provision for shortening or simplifying the Daily Offices. It also makes no provision for those occasions when the services of Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion do not meet the needs of a particular congregation.
The entrance rite of the Eucharistic Liturgy is an odd mixture of elements from Medieval Mass books and later rites. Rather than pruning the liturgical clutter that accumulates at the entrance rite, the Prayer Book and Liturgy Task Force have added to it. While permitting a small number of substitutions, the task force has made no provision for the omission of these elements in the event circumstances require the shortening or simplification of the rite.
The so-called Standard Anglican Eucharistic Prayer is tediously long for a Eucharistic Prayer in an age of sound-bites and shortened attention spans. It is guaranteed to make aging church members doze off, young people reach for their cellphones, and first-time guests regret attending the service and vow not to return for a second visit. Forgotten are the Baby Boomers like myself who welcomed the shorter and more participatory Eucharistic Prayers of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and the 1985 Book of Alternative Services.
The Ancient Eucharistic Prayer, as it is styled, bears a striking resemblance to Eucharistic Prayer II of the Catholic Mass of Pope Paul VI. Both are based upon mid-fourth century Anaphora of the Apostolic Tradition. The common origin, however, does not account for the similarity.
The communion of the people is separated from the consecration of the elements by the Fraction, the Lord’s Prayer and the Prayer of Humble Access. The Sancti sanctis or Ecce, Agnus Dei and the Agnus Dei may be added to this sequence of elements. The protracted interval between the consecration and the communion contrasts sharply with the much shorter interval in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and the 1985 Book of Alternative Services. Aging church members will have a few more minutes to doze and young people to play games on their cellphones or check their Instagram and Twitter accounts. First-time guests may be heading for the door.
The foregoing is just a few of the defects of the proposed BCP 2019. Based upon this sample, my knowledge of young people gained from attending classes with them at the local university, and a quarter of a century of pioneering new churches, I do not believe that the proposed book will be an asset on the twenty-first century North American mission field. In fact I believe that it will be serious liability. The book lacks the kind of simplicity, flexibility, and adaptability that are required on today’s mission field.
Indeed I am convinced that main purpose of the proposed BCP 2019 is not to provide the Anglican Church in North America with a liturgy but to establish, together with To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism, the doctrinal standard for the province just as the 1559 Book of Common Prayer and the 1571 Articles of Religion, what we know as the Thirty-Nine Articles, established the doctrinal standard for the reformed Church of England in the sixteenth century and formed the doctrinal core of the Elizabethan Settlement and historic Anglicanism. The proposed catechism and prayer book are the formularies of Bishop Duncan’s “new settlement.” This explains his eagerness to promote their acceptance.
Accepting To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism and The Book of Common Prayer 2019, however, means repudiating the Protestant Reformation, the Elizabethan Settlement, and historic Anglicanism and ultimately the Holy Scriptures and the gospel. ACNA’ers who are committed to Biblical Christianity and historic Anglicanism and who purchase and use the proposed catechism and prayer book will be compromising their faith. There is no two ways about it.
A far better use of the money that was spent in the preparation of these two formularies would have been to provide rent subsidizes to congregations struggling to find rental space for their worship gatherings and children’s ministries and one-time grants to congregations enabling them to purchase laptops, multimedia projectors, screens, and sound equipment. For people like myself who have done “church in a box” in which a congregation sets up and tears down the worship area and the children’s ministry area every time there is a meeting, prayer books and hymnals are just something else that takes up expensive storage space between meetings and which must be transported to the rented space, unloaded, and unpacked before meetings and repacked, reloaded, and transported back to the storage site after meetings. As long as church has a laptop, multimedia projector, and screen, prayer books and hymnals are something that a church can do without. For occasional services such as baptism and confirmations there is desktop printing.
After all, we are living in the digital age. The 1950s and the 1980s are not coming back. They are gone forever. We cannot capture them in a prayer book any more than we can capture an imagined golden age of Christianity. God put us in this place and this time. It is his will that we serve him in the here and now.
What outward-looking dioceses and church networks need to be doing is investing in an online liturgical resource library like the one I proposed in my last article, a library that will enable worship planners to customize a liturgy for the local church, a liturgy that is tailored to its particular circumstances and which meets its particular needs.
The kind of worship gatherings that a startup holds are quite different from those that an established parish church might hold. What works for one church in its community may not work for another church in its community. Communities are different. Neighborhoods are different.
When it comes to establishing the doctrinal standard for a province, the process should be out in the open and not behind closed doors. The different parties should be given ample opportunity to hammer out their differences in public. No group should be allowed to sneak such a standard under the radar as the College of Bishops is attempting to do.
All ACNA’ers have a stake in the Anglican Church in North America, not just the bishops, not just the Catholic portion of the province. The views of all the stakeholders should be considered in the establishment of such a standard.
If the parties cannot reach an agreement, then it may be time to restructure the province into two or more parallel provinces that occupy the same geographic territory and overlap each other like the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe and the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe. Non-geographic networks based on theological affinity may be the future of the ACNA, not geographic dioceses in which one church party is entrenched and other church parties are marginalized.
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