Using the Book of Common Prayer

You will notice something different about our bulletins starting this week--we're not including the full text of the service, just the outline with page number references to the Book of Common Prayer that you'll find in your pews. (This was, of course, the way it was everywhere until just a few years ago when larger parishes were able to purchase business-class photocopy machines.)

We're doing this for several reasons: Now that we are into a full in-person program year (yeah!), we need to refocus the time that was spent creating a full bulletin each week and re-formatting it for on-line downloading. It is also our responsibility to do all that we can to conserve and protect our natural resources--and it takes a lot of paper each week for us to print everything-paper that all ends up in the recycling bin the same day it is used. Finally, it also takes a lot of money to print all those one-time-use bulletins each week.

But, for me, the most important reason is that using and becoming familiar with the Book of Common Prayer is a beautiful and grace-filled thing. The BCP is what brought me to the Episcopal Church.

The Book of Common Prayer was the first worship book in English, and even today most of the words and phrases and prayers we use have been in continuous use since 1549. The original BCP was written by Thomas Cranmer, the first Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. He based much of it on the prayers and liturgy used at the cathedral in Salisbury since the 11th century. Cranmer’s words have become part of the fabric of our lives, the lives of all English-speaking people. What would a wedding be (a real one, or one in a movie), without his words: “…To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part…”?

The Book of Common Prayer is essentially a book of prayers intertwined with Bible verses. (Some sources have calculated that about 87% of the BCP is composed of Bible verses.) The BCP is the symbol (and, really, the means) of our Anglican unity. We are not a church that has a statement of beliefs that must be affirmed (e.g. Calvinist churches like the Presbyterians have the Westminster Confession). We are not a church that has someone like the Pope who can declare dogmatic statements that must be believed ex cathedra. 

We are, instead, a church the believes the ancient Latin phrase lex orandi, lex credendi — meaning “the law of prayer is the law of belief.” Or, put more simply, we believe that our praying shapes our believing and our living. We pray together, and as we do so week after week, we grow closer to God and to each other, we grow in discipleship, and we grow in our mission to be the bearers of God’s image to the world.

The BCP includes forms for worship and prayer including:

• Daily prayer services for individuals or groups of worshippers (the Daily Office), including the Psalms
• Weekly Eucharistic worship
• Special seasonal services, like Ash Wednesday and Good Friday
• Pastoral services held throughout one’s life, from baptism to a wedding to a funeral
• Ordination services (for a bishop, priest, or deacon)
• Services used to celebrate new ministries or churches
• Prayers and Thanksgivings for special purposes and for any time
• A catechism and some historical documents of the church

As we re-learn how to use our prayer books together, I hope you will feel the same spiritual connection I do, knowing that what you hold is a treasure that has been held by the saints of God in the Church across the centuries and in all places.

Blessings and peace,
Fr. Keith