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common prayer |
"...where all can see and be part of the glory of God...." - from the Mission Statement |
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What is The Book of Common Prayer?
During the last century in particular, liturgical scholarship has led to the recovery of fundamental insights about the nature of worship from the earliest days of the church. Those combined with changes in the world impacting the church’s mission, have resulted in substantial alterations to many aspects of Cranmer’s original Prayer Book pattern. Today The Book of Common Prayer exists in many different languages and cultural idioms.
In the United States there have been five versions of the Prayer Book. The current Book of Common Prayer 1979 is expanding to include authorized supplemental materials which are increasingly available in electronic format. The Prayer Book tradition is alive and well. It is growing into an increasingly diverse communion of worshiping communities with a common ancestry. The family resemblance is undeniable.
What is 'common prayer' ? Common prayer defines what it means to be the church. The Prayer Book provides a pattern and resources for structuring our prayer together, but the experience of the prayer itself unites us as believers and followers of Christ. The church gathered for prayer is the church being most truly what it is: the Body of Christ, taken, blessed, broken and given for the life of the world. Different congregations will use the resources of the Prayer Book in different ways. In some congregations worshipers will hold individual copies of the Prayer Book and pray in words that are largely unchanged from the first Prayer Books of the sixteenth century. Other congregations will use service leaflets or computer-projected texts and music recently composed and authorized for the use of the church. Styles of music and ceremonial differ widely throughout the church. Common prayer does not mean absolute liturgical uniformity; it means a variety of gifts gathered into the service of the one Lord Jesus Christ. The common prayer of the Episcopal Church relies on the deep historic structures of the liturgical tradition of the whole church. This tradition is a living one and it continues to evolve. It can do so because in our praying assemblies we encounter the mystery of the dying and rising of the living Christ in whom we are made one. - The Rt. Rev. Jeffery Lee, Bishop of Chicago
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© St. Mark's Episcopal Church. All rights reserved. Episcopal clip art and information used by permission. |
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The
Book of Common Prayer is not really a book. It is a family of books
descending from the first English Prayer Book of 1549. In that
first Prayer Book, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer simplified the complex
liturgical patterns of the medieval church, translated ancient
prayer texts into English, and composed new material incorporating
theological currents of the Reformation. That first book established
a pattern for subsequent revisions of the Prayer Book in the Church
of England and for the Prayer Books which necessarily would be
developed over time for churches of the Anglican Communion in other
countries.