Anglicanism is . . . 14. Committed to Common Prayer

Nothing is more distinctive to Anglicanism than the Book of Common Prayer. It contains the forms of our public worship and abundant resources for our private prayers. It shapes our imagination. If one wants to know what Anglicans are about, the best thing to do is to join us in worship. But it is also possible to discover what we believe by reading through the Book of Common Prayer (traditionally, many Anglican theologians have suggested paying particular attention to the Baptismal rite, the Eucharistic prayers, and the ordination rites). The emphasis in Anglicanism is on our communion with one another and with God. Common prayer is how we live that out.

“Almighty and everliving God, whose servant Thomas Cranmer, with others, restored the language of the people in the prayers of your Church: Make us always thankful for this heritage; and help us so to pray in the Spirit and with the understanding, that we may worthily magnify your holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

– Lesser Feasts and Fasts, Collect for commemorating the First Book of Common Prayer, 1549
 
“To know what was generally believed in all Ages, the way is to consult the Liturgies, not any private Man's writing. As if you would know how the Church of England serves God, go to the Common-Prayer Book, consult not this nor that Man”
– John Selden (1584-1654), The Table Talk of John Selden
 
“What better method can be adopted to disseminate the truths of the Bible than by dispersing a book which, exhibiting these truths in the affecting language of devotion, impresses them on the heart as well as on the understanding?”
– John Henry Hobart (1775-1830), Address Before the New York Bible and Prayer Book Society
 
“Christian prayer always involves a corporate element, with liturgical prayer—common prayer—as its foundation and fulcrum.”
– Martin Thornton (1915-1986), English Spirituality
 
“There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted: as, among other things, it may plainly appear by the common prayers in the Church, commonly called Divine Service: the first original and ground whereof, if a man would search out by the ancient fathers, he shall find, that the same was not ordained, but of a good purpose, and for a great advancement of godliness: For they so ordered the matter, that all the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof) should be read over once in the year, intending thereby, that the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers of the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation of God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine, and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth. And further, that the people (by daily hearing of holy Scripture read in the Church) should continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true religion.”
– Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), Preface to the First Book of Common Prayer (1549)

“The Poor Liturgy [the Book of Common Prayer] suffers from two extreams, one sort says, it is old superstitious Roman Dotage. The other, it is Schismatically New. This Book endeavours to shew particularly, what Bishop JEWEL (Apol. p. 117.) says in general, 1. That it is agreeable to PRIMITIVE USAGE, and so, not Novel. 2. THAT IT IS A REASONABLE SERVICE, and so, not Superstitious. As for those that love it, and suffer for the love of it, this will shew them Reasons, why they should suffer on, and love it still more and more. To end, if the Reader will cast his Eye upon the sad Confusions in point of prayer, (wherein are such contradictions made as God Almighty cannot grant) and lay them as Rubbish under these Fundamental Considerations; First, How many Set Forms (of Petition, Blessing, and Praise) be recorded in the Old and New Testament, used both in the Church Militant and Triumphant; Secondly, How much of the Liturgy is very Scripture; Thirdly, How admirable a Thing Unity, Unity in Time, Form, &c. is; Fourthly, How many Millions of poor souls are in the world; ignorant, infirm by nature, age, accidents, (as blindness, deafness, loss of speech, &c.) which respectively may receive help by Set Forms, but cannot so well (or not at all) by extemporary voluntary effusions, and then upon all these will build what he reads in this Book; he will, if not be convinced to joyn in Communion with, yet perhaps be so sweetned, as more readily to pardon those, who still abiding in their former judgments, and being more confirmed hereby, do use THE ANCIENT FORM.”
– Anthony Sparrow (1612-1685) A Rationale Upon the Book of Common Prayer
 
“Cranmer lived in the middle of controversies where striking for a kill was the aim of most debaters. Now of course we must beware of misunderstanding or modernising. He was not by any stretch of the imagination a man who had no care for the truth, a man who thought that any and every expression of Christian doctrine was equally valid; he could be fierce and lucidly uncompromising when up against an opponent like Bishop Gardiner. Yet even as a controversialist he shows signs of this penitent scrupulosity in language: yes, this is the truth, this is what obedience to the Word demands – but , when we have clarified what we must on no account say, we still have to come with patience and painstaking slowness to crafting what we do say. Our task is not to lay down some overwhelmingly simple formula but to suggest and guide, to build up the structure that will lead us from this angle and that towards the one luminous reality. ‘Full, perfect and sufficient’ – each word to the superficial ear capable of being replaced by either of the others, yet each with its own resonance, its own direction into the mystery, and, as we gradually realise, not one of them in fact dispensable.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), The Word of God Is Not Bound, The Prayer Book Society of Canada website
 
“There is no such sharp break between the Book of Common Prayer (1549) and earlier liturgical prose as there is between Tyndale and the medieval translators of scripture. It is an anonymous and corporate work in which Cranmer bore the chief part, and it is almost wholly traditional in matter though some of the excellences of its style are new. It has two main sources. One of these is that form of the Latin service used during the Middle Ages in the diocese of Salisbury and known as the Use of Sarum. The other is the long series of books of devotion called hours or primers which had sometimes appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in English as well as in Latin and which after a long interval are again found in English from 1534 onwards — reflecting, of course, many doctrinal changes. . . Sometimes, but very sparingly, the compilers borrowed from the recent liturgical experiments of the continental Reformers Some prayers they translated from the Greek, and some they added of their own, but these were closely modelled on scripture They wished their book to be praised not for original genius but for catholicity and antiquity, and it is in fact the ripe fruit of centuries of worship.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama
 
“The one corporate vernacular devotion of Catholic times of which we have certain knowledge—the Bidding of the Sunday Bedes [prayers prayed before the Eucharist] —shows already this homely, practical, incarnational temper of English piety, its close and determined association of religion with all the events and anxieties of daily life. This devotion is really a detailed family intercession for the necessities of that daily life, and for all who have a claim on their fellow Christians’ prayer; for ‘true tythers’ and ‘true tyllers’, for all the ‘grains and fruits sowed, set, or done on the earth’ for merchants, seamen, and travellers, for all who have given to the Church for God’s service ‘any behests’—'book, bell, chalice or vestment, surplice, altar-cloth or towel’ and for the donor of that day’s ‘holy bread’—for the sick, all ‘women in Our Lady’s bands,’ and for all departed Christian souls. After each bidding, the people said the Lord’s Prayer in silence. The Reformers, ruthlessly expelling the sacrificial element from the Mass, reducing with a heavy hand the symbolic setting of expressive worship, and in general stripping the mediaeval colour from English religious life, yet left in such devotions as these the deepest roots of that religious life, the homely and filial dependence on the Providence of God, almost untouched.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), Worship
 
“The great outlines and chief values of the traditional Christian cultus were faithfully conserved in [the Book of Common Prayer]; and it developed under the religious leaders of the Caroline Church—Lancelot Andrewes, Laud, Jeremy Taylor, and their associates—that sober but Catholic English tradition, based on the Divine Office and the Eucharist, and faithful to the ancient disciplines of ordered prayer, fasting, and communion, which survived the disasters of the Puritan dominance and subsequent periods of reaction and of indifference, and is now again recognized as the classic norm of Anglican worship.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), Worship
 
“The Book itself is the product of a phase of violent struggle within the Church between Catholic tradition and Protestant reform. It bears marks of the struggle everywhere - even in the vague and careless rubrics, where the parson is sometimes called ‘the priest’ and sometimes ‘the minister’ – as though the reform had been hastily made by people who were not very good proof-readers. Yet the outline of the original structure still persists, though a good deal pruned, cut up, and dislocated. There was never any break with tradition so violent as to destroy altogether the liturgical framework which preserved continuity of form between the pre-Reformation and the post-Reformation worship of the Church.”
– Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957), Worship in the Anglican Church
 
“Mr. Duncon found him [George Herbert] weak, and at that time lying on his bed, or on a pallet; but at his seeing Mr. Duncon he raised himself vigorously, saluted him, and with some earnestness enquired the health of his brother Farrer; of which Mr. Duncon satisfied him, and after some discourse of Mr. Farrer’s holy life, and the manner of his constant serving God, he said to Mr. Duncon,—'Sir, I see by your habit that you are a Priest, and I desire you to pray with me:’ which being granted, Mr. Duncon asked him, ‘What prayers?’ To which Mr. Herbert’s answer was, ‘O, Sir! the prayers of my Mother, the Church of England; no other prayers are equal to them! But at this time, I beg of you to pray only the Litany, for I am weak and faint:’ and Mr. Duncon did so.”
– Izaak Walton (1593-1683), The Life of Mr. George Herbert
 
“I believe there is no liturgy in the World, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more of a solid, scriptural, rational Piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England. And though the main of it was compiled considerably more than two hundred years ago, yet is the language of it, not only pure, but strong and elegant in the highest degree.”
– John Wesley (1703-1791), Preface to The Sunday Service of the Methodists; With Other Occasional Services, 1788
 
“The English Book of Common Prayer is not merely a permissive liturgy, like the Prayer Books of the Lutheran and Calvinist Churches. It forms, with the Bible or Lectionary, the authorized Missal and Breviary of the English branch of the Catholic Church. Its use is obligatory, and its contents declare in unmistakable terms the adherence of that Church to the great Catholic tradition of Christendom and the general conformity of its worship to the primitive ritual type.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), Worship
 
“The liturgical services for Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, Churching of Women, the Visiting of the Sick and Burial of the Dead, witness to the continuing desire of the Church to sanctify and weave into her worship every circumstance of human life. The Prayer Book is therefore in itself a Catholic document; though a Catholic document which has been subdued to the penetrating influence of the Reform, and bears many marks of the vicissitudes through which it has passed.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), Worship
 
“Early in June, 1940, I went to St. Deniol’s Library to meet Mr. Vidler, and at the very first Matins at the little chapel I knew that I had come home. I had not attended an Anglican service before. I was fifty years old. I was not a raw youth to be impressed. I came with a lifetime of suffering, and found that ‘I was in the spirit’, deep called to deep. Late that first night I sat up reading, for the first time in my life, The Book of Common Prayer. ‘How is it’, I asked myself, ‘that I have never read this before?’ I found the Prayer Book to be more exciting at that first reading than any novel. I experienced a sense of ecstasy, I knew that I had found my spiritual place of abiding, that my buffered, storm-tossed barque had reached its haven.”
– David Richard Davies (1889-1958), In Search of Myself [wikiquote.org, Book of Common Prayer]

“In the Daily Office we are lifted beyond the contemporary . . . praying with the church across the ages and with the communion of God’s saints.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Christian Priest Today
 
“One of my earliest loves was the Book of Common Prayer. I was seduced by it, by its beautiful words and the sense of history.”
– P. D. James (1920-2014), P. D. James, interview with Victoria McKee, The Times Magazine, 22 May 1993
 
“My love for the Prayer Book began in very early childhood, before I could read – when I could only listen to it. Of course, it was the only book used then. . .
 
There is so much history, romance, and great beauty in it. And the prayers like the General Thanksgiving and the prayers after Communion are so superb that they meet my need in praying much better than my own words do, and I still use them in private prayer.”
– P. D. James (1920-2014), quoted in Remembering P.D. James, The Prayer Book Society of Canada website
 

“One could argue that Cranmer’s chief reason for implementing standard liturgies was to provide a venue in which the Bible could be more widely and thoroughly known.”
– Alan Jacobs (1958 - ), The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography
 
“But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God.”
– Lauren Winner (1976 - ), Mudhouse Sabbath

“Sam McDaniel, a 27-year-old assistant organist and choirmaster in the Diocese of West Tennessee, said he appreciates how Episcopal liturgy is less individualistic than his Baptist upbringing. He names the prayer book as a central aspect of why he became an Episcopalian in his early 20s.

‘Where else would I go that’s going to have the same respect for tradition and that sort of thing while still also being open to listening to how God is speaking today to us?’ McDaniel said.”

– Logan Crews, Book of Common Prayer draws Gen Z to the Anglican, Episcopal Tradition, Episcopal News Service, posted April 28, 2026

“Anglican Christians often speak about the Book of Common Prayer as ‘the Bible arranged for worship’. . . if the BCP is the defining document of our theological tradition, then it turns out that we do have a distinctive and significant theology to lay claim to, because to arrange Scripture as the BCP does — to place parts of it alongside other parts and thus invite reflection on their relationship, their resonance one to another — is itself inescapably, and wonderfully, theological. And it is theological in a particularly potent and important way.”

– Wesley Hill, The Trinitarian Theology of Morning Prayer, Covenant, TLC’s Online Journal, November 20, 2018

“If you ask an Anglican what it means to belong to the church, the answer might well be, ‘Come and worship with us.’ Being an Anglican means doing what the church does ― and what the church does, first and foremost, is worship the living God. It is out of our common worship that out understanding of God proceed and our ethical and moral decision-making take shape.”

– Jeffery Lee (1957 - ), Opening the Prayer Book

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