Who is the average US user of a Cranmerian communion service?

(It's not who you likely think!)

Imagine, for a moment, the average worshipper at a traditional prayer book communion service in the United States. Let’s take ‘traditional prayer book communion service’ here to mean a service that uses Cranmer’s text with minor adaptations, up to and including something like the 1979 BCP’s Rite I. What would that person look like?

If you’re anything like me, your first guess would probably be either an older lifelong Episcopalian at the early morning Rite I said service at a standard Episcopal church or a member (quite possibly younger, and if so almost certainly a convert) of a self-consciously traditional Rite I/1928 BCP parish. In either case the average communicant would be almost certainly white and upper-middle or upper class. If you spend your time in Anglican/Episcopal circles, it’s a reasonable guess. It’s also wrong.

In fact, the average communicant at a prayer book communion service is a Black Methodist: the communion orders found in the Rituals of the African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Christian Methodist Episcopal churches (and also reprinted in their various hymnals) are all essentially the second half of Cranmer’s communion service starting around the invitation to confession. There are some rearrangements and rewordings, but for anyone who knows the prayer book it is immediately recognizable.

Take, for an example, the Lord’s Supper liturgy in the 2021 AMEZ Book of Discipline, which you can read here; go to page 439 of the PDF (417 of the pagination). The service goes like this, with the text itself all lightly revised Cranmer (mostly a matter of replacing ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ with ‘you’:

• Offertory sentences

• Invitation to confession (incorporating part of the Comfortable Words)

• General confession

• Absolution

• Collect for Purity

• Prayer of Humble Access

• Prayer of Consecration

• Preface and Sanctus

• Administration of Communion

• Lord’s Prayer

• Postcommunion Prayer

• Gloria

• Benediction

Looks familiar, no?

Now, this shouldn’t entirely be a surprise. Wesley’s Sunday Service – the first liturgy for American Methodists – was a light adaptation of the 1662 prayer book. Once upon a time US Methodists of all stripes used it for celebrating communion, and indeed a roughly ‘Cranmerian’ service can be still found in the UMC Book of Worship as Service of Word and Table IV, although it seems to be little used today.

But unlike the UMC, the AME, AMEZ, and CME have continued to celebrate the Lord’s Supper according to the traditional Wesleyan – which is to say, Cranmerian – rite. And to be clear, this isn’t just a matter of keeping the liturgy printed in the Ritual but not actually using it. If you search on YouTube for an AME/AMEZ/CME communion service, you can find numerous examples of the service being celebrated – including some examples of communicants ‘drawing near with faith’ and kneeling around the table for the communion service! Here are a few examples, keyed to the beginning of the communion service proper. Given that these churches together are significantly larger than US Anglicans/Episcopalians and that the users of traditional prayer book communion rites are a minority within US Anglicanism, we can confidently say that the typical worshipper a prayer book communion service is a Black Methodist.

I think there are a few things to learn from this.

First, it is worth reflecting on why Black Methodists largely do not show up in the conversation (whether scholarly or ecclesial) about Anglican or Anglican-derived liturgy in the United States. Bluntly put, it is a sign of the sadly fractured nature of the visible church in America – a fracture inflected by racism – that I learned about Black Methodist communion liturgies through reading these churches’ hymnals and browsing YouTube rather than actually attending such services in person, even though I’ve lived in cities with large Black Methodist churches. And it speaks to the particular focuses (myopias) of liturgical studies as a discipline that relatively little scholarship on Black church worship has been engaged with seriously outside of Black church studies, at least as far as I can tell. In short, it seems to me that we are dealing with denominational and academic snobbery mixed with the history and present reality of anti-Black racism. This is cause to, as the prayer book tells us, make our humble confession to almighty God, meekly kneeling upon our knees.

Second, this fact troubles the assertions sometimes made in Episcopal Church circles that an affinity for the old communion service is necessarily elitist, that its language about God and sin are somehow white supremacist, that the ‘Tudor deity’ needs to be dethroned for our church to embrace ‘becoming Beloved Community’ or otherwise resisting racism. But in fact, Cranmer’s service is used by these churches committed unequivocally to Black liberation and flourishing, churches which evidently have not felt a need to reject it!

Third, this should expand our sense of how prayer book worship can or should look. Both Anglican proponents and opponents of Cranmer’s service often have a very particular picture of what prayer book worship is, of the sort of music or gesture or sermon style that accompanies it. But there is nothing preventing Gospel music being used as part of a prayer book service, vamping on an electronic organ or guitar as background music to the confession and absolution, ‘Amens’ and ‘Alleluias’ and ‘Praise the Lords’ being offered by the congregation during the prayer of consecration. And in fact, this is a more common way of celebrating Cranmer’s communion order in the US than with a pipe organ and English anthems sung by a surpliced choir. Now I’m rather fond of pipe organs, English anthems, and surpliced choirs. But there is nothing stopping us Anglicans from being willing to experiment, to learn from other traditions of prayer book worship to shape our own.

And so, as someone committed to the classical prayer book tradition, and to a classical, Formularies-normed Anglicanism more broadly, I want to think about how I can be in conversation with, worship alongside, and learn from these fellow Christians who, like me, have been formed by Cranmer’s Holy Communion service – who comprise the largest and most important inheritors of this service in the contemporary US church. I think a conversation about the future of Cranmer’s liturgy in the United States is incomplete without them. And I hope that we will all pray and work for the day when we are restored to communion with each other, when we can draw near with faith around the same Table to keep – in the words of the 2021 AMEZ Ritual – the perpetual memory of Jesus’ precious death and his coming again that our Lord instituted and commanded us to continue.