Let's Talk Prayer Book Revision: The Need for Brevity

In this post I weigh in on the need for brevity in the ACNA's Prayer Book 2019.

By Robin G. Jordan

Every weekday I chat with the barista at the coffee shop where I stop for a morning cup of coffee on my way to the university library. The barista is a young woman in her twenties, a recent graduate from Murray State University, whose career goal is to become a university professor. She is a Christian and attends a church in the community. In the course of one of our conversations she confirmed what I have gathered from conversations with students at the university. Young people of her age are not attracted to long, tedious church services like the two eucharistic rites in the ACNA’s The Book of Common Prayer 2019.

From my conversations with friends and acquaintances in their thirties, forties, and older I gather long, tedious church services hold no appeal for them either. Some of the people with whom I have talked are churchgoers; others are not. A number of them have attended a church in the past but stopped going to church after became students at the university. The general consensus is that long services are boring. They do not enkindle the worship of the heart.

Now admittedly this survey is not a scientific one. However, the people with whom I have talked are fairly representative of the demographics of the community based upon the last census.

My own informal research prompts me to wonder if the ACNA’s Prayer Book and Liturgy Task Force did any research before they decided on the format for the two eucharistic rites in The Book of Common Prayer 2019. If the task force did, it is not evident in the two rites. Rather than taking advantage of what Edward Lambe Parsons and Bayard Hale Jones in The American Prayer Book: Its Origins and Principles (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937) call “the uniquely Anglican principle of flexibility” and making “their Church’s worship available for ‘all sorts and conditions of men,’ and in all kinds of places,” the task force settled on the same rigid structure for the two rites, a structure that is long on fixed elements and short on optional ones. Not only is the entrance rite is lengthy, so are the two forms for the Prayers of the People and the two Eucharistic Prayers. I illustrated in my article, “A Visit to an ACNA Church and What Happened Afterwards,” how long the service is.

William Sydnor in The Story of the Real Prayer Book (Morehouse Publishing, 1978) notes that Bishop Charles Lewis Slattery in an explanation in the Church press in 1922 sounds as if he was addressing himself to the revision of the American Prayer Book in the seventies.

We are trying to avoid repetitions…and such length of prayer and praise in anyone part of any service that the mind becomes numb and the worship of the heart ceases,,,Everyone ought to ask if he would not be a more collected worshipper if the Prayer of Consecration in the Holy Communion were much shorter than it is.

Fifteen years after Bishop Slattery gave this explanation. Parsons and Jones recognized the need for not only shorter texts but also a “shorter Communion Service.” They wrote seventy two years ago–before the digital age. With the digital age human attention spans have grown shorter than they were two years before the outbreak of World War II.

Unchurched people, even young people who are attracted to liturgical forms of worship, are not going to warm to a liturgy which is based upon the Holy Eucharist Rite I of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer but which lacks its flexibility. For example, in the Holy Eucharist Rite I the Ten Commandments and the Summary of the Law are optional. The Gloria or some other song of praise may be sung in place of the Kyries or the Trisagion or in addition to one of these songs.

They might respond more favorably to a eucharistic liturgy which has a simpler form of greeting in its entrance rite and whose rubrics permit the omission of the Collect for Purity, the Ten Commandments, the Summary of the Law, the Kyries, the Trisagion, and the Gloria or song of praise, which has a variety of forms for the Prayers of the People, and a variety of shorter Eucharistic Prayers. A eucharistic liturgy with these features would be far better suited for the twenty-first century North American mission field than the ACNA’s two eucharistic rites.

The Holy Eucharist Rite I was designed for an older generation that was accustomed to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. It was a generation that was shrinking when the 1979 Book of Common Prayer was adopted. The Holy Eucharist Rite I was not a rite that resonated with the younger generations, including Boomers like myself.

Congregations that have large numbers of children or adults with limited reading skills or which worship in non-traditional settings need only the basic elements of a rite.

Prayer book revision, when it is done well, balances the need for enrichment with the need for brevity. In The Book of Common Prayer 2019 the need for brevity appears to have been neglected. The result is elaborate rites that are too long for today’s church. The length and fussiness of these rites points to need for extensive revision of the ACNA’s Prayer Book 2019 as does their doctrine.

One way that clergy and congregations can get the ball rolling is to make their own alterations to the book’s rites, ignoring the rubrics and where needed modifying the texts of prayers and making other changes. For example, they may wish to substitute for the texts printed in the eucharistic rites simpler greetings and alternative forms for the Prayers of the People as well as shorter Eucharistic Prayers, Invitations to Communion, Words of Administration, and Post-Communion Thanksgivings, which embody the Reformed Protestant doctrine of the 1552-1662 Prayer Books. These unofficial changes will point to the defects and shortcoming of The Book of Common Prayer 2019 and the need for a replacement book.