The Beauty of the Prayer Book

There is a certain amount of cultural recoil from the concept of fixed forms of church service which I believe ignores the benefits of a well thought out, Scripturally based liturgy. Certainly, when overlaid too much by the traditions of men, liturgy can become burdensome, but when the Book of Common Prayer was first compiled in the 1500s, a deliberate attempt was made to both simplify, and reform the doctrine of the services.

The first point that I would like to make about the Prayer Book services is that the language is strongly Biblical. Most of the content of the Prayer Book is either quotations from the Bible, or else allusions to it. This means that our prayers speak with the language and the theology of the Bible.

Second, you hear a lot of the Bible in our services. Morning and Evening Prayer both contain at least one Psalm, and two longish readings from Scripture, one from the Old Testament, and the other from the New. The Communion service contains two shorter passages, both usually from the New Testament, the first coming the from Epistles, the other from the Gospels. These follow the traditional sequence of lessons which goes back to at least the 700sAD.

Third, the Prayer Book teaches Christian doctrine. Not only do we hear the prayers and the Scriptures, but we use one of the Creeds at nearly every regular service. The Nicene Creed (325/381AD) whose seventeen hundredth birthday is this year is used at the Communion service, and the Apostles' Creed, the ancient Baptismal Creed of the Western Church, is used at Morning and Evening Prayer.

Fourth, using a set form of service gives our worship a certain objectivity where prayer, praise, Scripture, and preaching are balanced into a harmonious whole. The minister can only vary the service within specified limits by the choice of hymns, or which canticles (songs of praise) he uses during the service. In the latter case, his choice is limited by what is given in the Prayer Book, so at Morning Prayer he may chose to have said or sung the Te Deum (a fourth century hymn) and the Jubilate (Ps 100) instead of the Benedictus es (from the Apocrypha), and the Benedictus (from St Luke's Gospel) but he cannot go beyond those choices. You will note that all those options come from either the Bible or the Early Church.

Fifth - having a set form of worship enables to the congregation to take part in the service. At the communion service, in addition to the hymns, the congregation also says the Kyrie eleison, the Creed, the General Confession, the Sanctus, Lord's Prayer, and Gloria in Excelsis as well as various responses. This marks them active participants, not passive spectators in the Church's worship.

I hope these considerations will help you see liturgical worship in a positive light, even if you do not already do so.