But One Use

An Elegy for Common Prayer in the Episcopal Church

Common prayer, in the sense which Anglicans understood it until the second half of the twentieth century, is dead or dying in the Episcopal Church. All that remains is to toss a little dirt on its grave and mutter a few pious words of farewell, which I expect will be done in short order at our next General Convention if anyone deigns to notice the death at all. Now, this may be for the best. It may well enable us to better proclaim the Gospel and form Christians in the multiplicity of contexts in which the church ministers. The ideal of common prayer may have been mistaken to begin with, an exercise of religio-political tyranny which ought today to be condemned by persons of good will. But if we are going to bury common prayer, surely it deserves a eulogy. It is worth, at the very least, attending to what is lost even as we barrel into what we are assured is a bright future.

It’s worth clarifying, first of all, what I mean by ‘common prayer, in the sense which Anglicans understood it’ and sketching what has happened to it such that it can rightly be called dead or dying. In the preface to the first Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer gives as good a definition as any: “And whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm…now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use.” That is, central to Cranmer’s project of liturgical reform was taking the diverse, heterogenous set of liturgies used throughout England and replacing them with a single, universal liturgical standard: the Book of Common Prayer. And so it was, at least in principle, from one end of England to another: priests would say the same words at morning and evening prayer, at the holy communion, in baptizing and burying and marrying. It’s striking just how little variation is allowed in the old  prayerbooks. Officiants could choose opening sentences and additional prayers at morning and evening prayer, and decide between collects for the monarch and choose offertory sentences at the holy communion. That was about it. Otherwise, by the law of the church and of the realm, services were uniform, in the sense of using the exact same words in the same order. One need not indulge in historical fantasy about a period of perfect adherence to the liturgy to feel the force of this commitment. Throughout the land, there was but one Use.

Now, of course, it is not the case that Anglican liturgical practice remained static after the settlement that produced the 1662 Book of Common Prayer until the crisis of the Liturgical Movement or the rise of Anglo-Catholicism. The Scottish and American churches originally related to the Church of England drew, reasonably enough, on the authority granted them in Article XX of the Articles of Religion to put forth their own prayer books upon independence – thus, for example, the American Book of Common Prayer of 1789. Yet the difference between the ‘English’ and ‘Scots-American’ prayer book models can be overstated. While it is indubitably true that the inclusion of the oblation in the American prayer book is significant, it is perhaps better to read it as a difference in emphasis in Eucharistic theology than a sharp division. The text as a whole remained largely the same, if arranged differently. And an Anglican evangelical like Bishop McIlvaine happily used the 1789 American prayerbook, and Pusey similarly found himself able to use the 1662. Perhaps more importantly, the principle of one use was not abrogated in the United States. There was one Holy Communion service with one prayer of consecration, one service for morning and evening prayer, even if all these had differences from the 1662. The fact that the Scottish situation was different reflects the church’s own marginality more than any particular principled stand for liturgical diversity. As Anglicanism continued to expand with Britain’s colonial and missionary endeavors, the story of minimal adaptation remained the same. Lambeth Conference after Lambeth Conference called for the prayer book to remain a shared text among Anglicans worldwide even while granting the admissibility of minimal local variations to aid in evangelistic endeavors. There was one use – one use (albeit with more or less significant variations) shared among Anglicans worldwide, and certainly one use within each given national church.

So what happened to kill common prayer? Part of the story is the rise of Anglo-Catholicism. If the first generation of Oxford Movement divines (or at least those who remained within the Church of England) contented themselves – at least for public worship – with the 1662, their successors did not. The movement saw not only the widespread adoption of ceremonial from either an imaginatively-reconstructed Sarum past or contemporary Roman practice, but also illegal interpolations into Book of Common Prayer services or the wholesale replacement of the Book of Common Prayer by various missals and breviaries. Attempts to curb the movement by means of ecclesiastical tribunal and, in a few celebrated cases, the jail cell failed. Anglo-Catholicism would not win the allegiance of all Anglicanism, but nor could it be extirpated by church or state repression; the result was an uncomfortable toleration. In a real sense, there was no longer one use in all the realm. Perhaps if the Anglo-Catholics had been wholly successful, there would have been one use again, albeit one owing more to Trent or Sarum than Cranmer. But this simply is not what happened. Of course, one must not overstate the case: the proposed English prayer book of 1928 shows that moderate Anglo-Catholics could be content with a single alternative Holy Communion service which still hewed rather close to Cranmer. Moreover, while uncanonical abandonment or amendment of the authorized forms became more and more common, and less and less punished, across global Anglicanism, there remained at the very least a de jure commitment to a single prayer book, with a single set of services, for each church. But it was a significant change all the same.

This brings us to the Liturgical Movement. Certainly I have no intention of disparaging the faithfulness and good intentions of the movement’s leaders, and liturgical scholarship remains indebted to their groundbreaking studies. However, to understand our current liturgical crisis, we need careful and critical reckoning with this movement’s legacy. From the perspective of what turned out to be a more-or-less imaginary uniform patristic liturgical standard, the ‘incomparable liturgy’ was judged and found wanting. Not only were the texts of the 1662 and its cousins deemed inadequate, but the very notion of a single shared set of texts seemed old hat. Liturgy, we were told, was not so much a matter of text but shape – thus, for example, Dom Gregory Dix’s famous proposal of the fourfold shape as the basic form of the Eucharistic liturgy. When churches across the Anglican Communion revised their liturgies in the second half of the twentieth century, there was no longer even lip service to the old commitment of ‘but one use.’ Some churches authorized supplemental resources alongside their Books of Common Prayer, resources which often became more popular than the BCPs to which they were supposed to be secondary alternatives. International Anglican liturgical commissions identified the ‘Anglicanness’ of Anglican liturgy in terms of a shared shape or pattern (one which Anglicans themselves shared with other mainline Christians) rather than any shared text.

Here in the United States, we preserved the model of containing all the authorized services in a single book in our 1979 Book of Common Prayer, but it is a BCP which contains two rites, six eucharistic prayers, provisions for the production of yet more Eucharistic prayers. This is a far cry from uniformity and simplicity of the earlier American prayer book tradition. No longer could one go into any church and expect that, whatever differences in ceremonial and churchmanship there might be, so long as the priests kept their ordination vows the texts for worship would be the same. It is easy to write the various Prayer Book Societies off as collections of reactionary cranks – and indeed a not insignificant number of cranks could be found there – but they were right to see the Liturgical Movement as a revolutionary break with the Anglican past. But for all this, one could still say until recently that the old common prayer tradition still hung on in an attenuated form in the Episcopal Church even after the Liturgical Movement. Unlike, say, the Church of England, which first promulgated the Alternative Service Book along the 1662 BCP and then the ever-expanding Common Worship library of texts, we had one prayer book with our church’s services in it. A large, unwieldy, and somewhat confusing prayer book, perhaps, but one prayer book all the same. In theory, with a prayer book and a Bible, you could worship at any Episcopal Church. When clergy vowed to conform to the worship of the Episcopal Church, it was clear what they were vowing to conform to. Those supplemental resources which were authorized, like the Enriching Our Worship series or same-gender marriage services, were authorized using trial use provisions which were in principle time-limited pending future revision.

And then the 2015 and 2018 General Conventions happened. If you want a cause of death of common prayer in our church, look no further. The 2015 resolution D050 allowed the ‘An Order for Celebrating the Holy Eucharist,’ a shape- rather than text-based outline for developing a Holy Communion service, to be used in the principal worship service. It justified this with a rather strained reading of the relevant rubrics. More to the point, what it meant for the common prayer tradition was nothing short of earthshattering: so long as proper procedures were followed, worshipping communities were no longer bound by the Eucharistic prayers authorized by our church as a whole, but were free to develop their own. It’s not that this was intended to eliminate all oversight; such locally-composed prayers had to be approved by the local ordinary. You no longer had to use one of the prayers in the prayerbook, or other authorized materials. Then, in 2018, a compromise resolution about prayer book revision was put forward, resolution A068. It was intended to address the concerns of those who love our current prayer book and felt apprehensive about revision alongside those who believed strongly that our liturgical materials were in dire need of transformation. It did so by ‘memorializing’ the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, ensuring that it could remain in use in perpetuity, while authorizing the development of additional resources alongside it. The Episcopal Church was now committed to the model of the Church of England or the Anglican Church of Canada, with a prayer book coexisting with other permanently-authorized materials. No more were we to be, even in theory, a church of one shared liturgy.

In the last months, the Task Force for Liturgical and Prayer Book Revision, a body established by the 2018 General Convention to draw up plans for the liturgical revision ordered by Resolution A068, released their blue book report for the next General Convention. There is much to commend about the report. The Episcopal Church, whatever its detractors may say, clearly remains committed to a generous credal orthodoxy in its official liturgies. The Task Force called for any new liturgical materials to be approved by General Convention much like prayer book revision would be. The proposed additional Eucharistic prayers they released as examples were, if varying in quality, hardly horrifying. And yet. The report makes clear that what they envision for the future of the Episcopal Church is not even the model of the Anglican Church of Canada, with a Book of Common Prayer and a Book of Alternative Services, but something closer to the Church of England model with a Book of Common Prayer and an ever-expanding digital library of additional authorized liturgies. Unless this proposal gets voted down and another one passed – which I find somewhat unlikely – we will not be a people of one liturgical book, or even two liturgical books, any longer. The number of authorized liturgies in addition to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer will presumably expand over time, in more-or-less perpetuity. When you darken the doors of an Episcopal Church, there will be no telling what worship might look like, unless one has an encyclopedic knowledge of the library of authorized liturgies. Common prayer is dead, and we have killed it.

If you’re still with me at this point, presumably you find the above account a plausible narrative of the broad sweep of Anglican liturgical history. But I haven’t yet demonstrated that the death of common prayer is something to be mourned. After all, one might read this history not as one of declension but of liberation, of freeing ourselves from the shackles imposed by Cranmer and finally enabling ourselves to create contextually appropriate liturgies. One might argue that the standardization of Christian liturgies within ecclesiastical jurisdictions was a distinctly early modern project anyway, one inextricable from violent processes of state-building. One might protest that pre-Reformation England got on just fine with a proliferation of uses and so will we. One might also say that given the internal diversity of Anglican church bodies and – if one wants to indulge in some armchair cultural criticism – the celebration of authenticity, variety, and novelty characteristic of late capitalist modernity, the old model of one use is simply no longer workable. The recent decisions of the Episcopal Church may be seen as an attempt to ensure at least some oversight and accountability occur, to regularize a situation of liturgical anarchy that already exists and that there is no will to change. This may all be true. As a matter of political pragmatics I am fairly compelled by the argument that the genie cannot be put back into the proverbial bottle and that a high degree of liturgical variation is here to stay. But I believe that the loss of common prayer has real consequences for matters of doctrine, for ascetical practice, and ultimately for our unity as a church. These are consequences which, I believe, ought to be mourned.

First, for doctrine. Anglicans in general, and Episcopalians in particular, tend to put a great deal of emphasis on our liturgies as the standards for our doctrine. Lex credendi, lex orandi and all that. Indeed, for Episcopalians, the prayer book simply is our source of distinctive doctrine, alongside the ecumenical creeds we share with Christians globally and the Bible. It’s perhaps worth saying that the prayer book was not originally intended to bear the entire weight of defining Anglican doctrine; it existed always alongside the Articles of Religion and the Homilies, even if various Anglican divines weighted these formularies differently. But for us in the Episcopal Church, we have said that it is our authorized liturgical materials which define what Episcopalians believe. You may think this is a mistake – indeed, I do think it is a mistake – but it is the practice of my church, and one which makes this liturgical shift all the more momentous. Already in the 1979 BCP, the theological span between, say, Eucharistic Prayer 1 and Eucharistic Prayer D is not inconsiderable. But at least they were in the same book together, at least any Episcopalian could pick up a prayer book and see the range of acceptable doctrine for our church. Now, an expanding digital library of new resources will be authorized. If our canonical definition of doctrine is not amended to include them, this means that for those of our worshipping communities which use only the new resources, their lex orandi will not necessarily be the lex credendi. If the definition of doctrine is amended, then what counts as our church’s doctrine will become a much more expansive and diffuse set of documents. To be sure, there is a commitment that the Trinitarian and Baptismal and Eucharistic doctrines of the 1979 prayer book be retained in new liturgical materials, but even if that is attainable it leaves a lot of doctrinal loci undefined! For clergy vowing to adhere to the Episcopal Church’s doctrine, for newcomers interested in answers about the Episcopal faith, the question of what our church believes will only become muddier.

Secondly, for ascetical practice. The ascetical ideal for Anglican worship has long been that one ‘reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests’ the liturgy over time, much like one takes in the Scriptures upon which our liturgy has historically been based. The sameness of the liturgy, its lack of variety, is a strength rather than a weakness, for it enables a lifetime of rumination upon the Gospel it proclaims and enacts. One doesn’t, in this mode, approach the liturgy with an eye towards determining what ought to be changed; one doesn’t expect novelty. One comes to the liturgy as something given, a stable lifelong anchor for prayer and devotion. It may be imperfect, yes, but the value of liturgical stability for fostering a life of prayer is worth putting up with those imperfections. Liturgy, Anglicans have long believed, quietly but truly forms you over time like water running over a stone – and liturgy which is constantly changing, constantly being updated, is no longer stable is less able to do this. This is not to say, of course, that one need be committed to 1662-esque levels of invariability, or that some changes may not be worth changing the prayer book for. Indeed, I firmly support revision of the 1979 BCP to make our wedding liturgy usable by same-gender couples and adjust our catechism accordingly. And, of course, there remains nothing stopping an individual or even a parish from making a private decision to use, to the extent possible, invariable forms to help the liturgy function ascetically in the old model. But to make a private choice among a large set of options is different than encountering the liturgy as merely given. And to establish the norm of constant production of additional liturgical material (a norm which does, at least in my experience, lead to the embrace of increasing variation at the parochial level) is to cast aside how ascetical formation through the liturgy has been supposed to work, indeed has worked, throughout Anglican history.

Finally, for unity. You could, in theory, go into any Episcopal parish across the United States and beyond and find the same prayer book (albeit in some cases in translation), the same collects and psalms and readings, the same liturgies. We have historically not only made the prayer book a source for doctrine but also a bond of unity. We have no historic confessional statement which is legally binding upon us like most Protestant and many of our fellow Anglican churches do, no magisterium like the Roman Catholics. What we in the Episcopal Church have had tying us together, beyond a triennial General Convention which most congregants gladly ignore and various organs for episcopal or churchwide cooperation, is the prayer book. And proudly so! “We may believe different things, but we pray together” has long been a rallying cry for a sort of latitudinarian Episcopalian. Going forward, this will no longer be true even in theory. Between the 2015 and the 2018 provisions, there is nothing stopping congregations from having widely different liturgies – and indeed 2015 allows congregations to have liturgies tailored to that individual congregation, and used nowhere else in the whole church! Over the course of Episcopal Church history, the allowances for increasing doctrinal variation over time, especially starting in the late 19th century, has meant that doctrine no longer ties us together in any but the most diffuse way. Now we will see increasing allowances for liturgical variation too. Is simply a shared polity enough to keep us together? Most probably, but this is a decidedly different form of unity than Episcopalians have historically celebrated.

The death of common prayer will not mean the death of the Episcopal Church. I’m at least willing to entertain the possibility that we may prove to be better off without it. But its passing is something momentous, something that marks the denouement of a long process of change of what Anglican liturgy means, of what an Anglican church is, of what it means to be an Anglican. And it’s a change that will have real consequences for our doctrine, for our ascetical practice, for our locus of unity. If you want to attempt, at this late date, a resuscitation (perhaps more like a resurrection!) of the common prayer tradition, you have my aid. But even if you do not, of your charity please linger with me for a moment at its deathbed. If you cannot yourself mourn its passing, at the very least please try to see why many of us do.

NB: The account of Anglican liturgical history here is drawn largely from a soon-to-be delivered conference paper of my own, which I hope to have published somewhere or other, and Sam Bray’s excellent “The Shape Fallacy: The Book of Common Prayer as Text,” which can be found here: https://davenantinstitute.org/the-shape-fallacy-the-book-of-common-prayer-as-text/