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Worshiping with the Book of Common Prayer

An Introduction to Anglican Worship and the 1662 Prayer Book

What Is the Book of Common Prayer?

The Book of Common Prayer is the prayer book of the Anglican Church. It holds the services we use every Sunday and every day: Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Holy Communion, Baptism, Marriage, Burial, and more. It also contains the Psalms, prayers for every week of the year, and a Catechism that teaches the basics of the faith.

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote the first versions in 1549 and 1552, during the English Reformation. His goal was to lead a whole nation out of medieval Roman Catholic superstition and to Christ and his gospel. To do that, he soaked the church’s worship in Scripture, putting as much of the Bible as possible into the mouths and hearts of ordinary people, in a language they could understand. Cranmer trusted that the word of God, which is “sharper than any twoedged sword” (Hebrews 4:12), would do its own work and convert the nation to Christ. After some careful revisions, the book reached its final, classic form in 1662. As Steven Wedgeworth shows, the 1662 book is essentially the same Reformation worship that the Church of England practiced and defended in Cranmer’s day (Wedgeworth, “The Reformation Character of the 1662 BCP”).

To a remarkable degree, that hope was fulfilled. Through the English Reformation and the widespread use of the Prayer Book, the Scriptures were learned by, and the gospel proclaimed to, millions of people, generation after generation. The Prayer Book’s expression of Scripture has shaped so much of Western Christian culture and literature that it helped fulfill the goal of the earlier reformer William Tyndale, who told a learned clergyman who opposed him: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost” (Foxe, Acts and Monuments).

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is still the standard for worship and doctrine among faithful, Bible-believing Anglicans around the world. The Church of England’s own canons name it, together with the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Ordinal, as a place where the Church’s doctrine is found (Canon A5). The Jerusalem Declaration of the global GAFCON movement upholds the 1662 Prayer Book as “a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer.” It remains the standard in the Anglican provinces of Africa, Asia, and South America, where most of the world’s Anglicans live (Jordan, “The Renewed Ancient Text,” n. 7).

When we worship with the 1662 Prayer Book, we are praying the same prayers as martyrs, missionaries, and millions of ordinary Christians across more than 350 years.

The Gospel Pattern: Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude

The most important thing to know about the Prayer Book is that it was built to preach the gospel. J. I. Packer, one of the great Anglican teachers of the last century, showed that Cranmer’s services follow the same pattern again and again: first we face our sin, then we hear God’s grace in Jesus Christ, and then we respond with faith, praise, and obedience (Packer, The Gospel in the Prayer Book). Many people today remember this pattern with three simple words:

Guilt. We come before God honestly. We admit that we have sinned and cannot save ourselves.
Grace. We hear God’s promise of forgiveness, which comes to us freely because Jesus died for our sins.
Gratitude. Forgiven and welcomed, we respond with thanks, praise, prayer, and a changed life.

This order matters. We do not offer God our good works so that he will forgive us. He forgives us first, and our good works grow out of thankfulness. Ashley Null, a leading expert on Cranmer, sums up Cranmer’s vision this way: “human gratitude clearly flowed from divine grace” (quoted in Cathedral Church of the Advent, A Commentary and Guide to Our Liturgy). Gavin Dunbar, president of the Prayer Book Society of the USA, likewise speaks of the “guilt-grace-gratitude” logic of the 1662 Prayer Book (Dunbar, “A Curate’s Egg”).

The Prayer Book also teaches this gospel almost entirely in the words of the Bible. Its sentences, confessions, prayers, and songs are woven from Scripture. In Morning and Evening Prayer the congregation reads through the whole book of Psalms every month and through most of the Bible every year. The gospel is not just explained to us; we pray it, sing it, and say it until it becomes part of us.

The Pattern of Our Services

Here is how the gospel pattern shapes our main services. In each one, the three steps come in the same order.

Morning and Evening Prayer at a glance

Guilt: opening sentences of Scripture, the call to confession, and the General Confession.
Grace: the Declaration of Absolution and the Lord’s Prayer.
Gratitude: the Psalms, the Bible readings, and the canticles (songs); the Creed; prayers, the Collects, and the General Thanksgiving.

Holy Communion at a glance

Guilt: the Ten Commandments, the invitation to repent, and the General Confession.
Grace: the Absolution, the Comfortable Words, the Prayer of Consecration, and receiving the bread and wine by faith.
Gratitude: the Lord’s Prayer, offering ourselves to God, the Gloria, and the Blessing.

How this proclaims salvation by grace alone

This pattern is not just a tidy way to arrange a service. It is the gospel itself, acted out in worship every time we gather. The Bible teaches that we are saved “by grace… through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). The Prayer Book puts that truth into the order of the service.

Notice what comes first. We never begin by bringing God our good deeds. We begin by admitting we have none to offer that could earn his favor, because “there is no health in us.” Then God speaks his word of pardon. Only after that do we praise him, pray, and offer ourselves to serve him. Grace always comes before gratitude, never the other way around. This is exactly what the Thirty-Nine Articles teach: we cannot turn to God by our own strength (Article

), we are counted righteous only for the merit of Christ, by faith and not by our works (Article XI ), and good works are the fruit of faith, not the cause of our salvation (Article XII ).

Because every service follows this order, the gospel is preached even before the sermon begins. A visitor who has never heard the good news will hear it in the confession, the absolution, the Comfortable Words, and the prayers. A lifelong believer will be reminded of it again, because Christians need the gospel every day, not just on the day they first believe. Week after week, the liturgy teaches us to rest our whole hope on what Christ has done for us, not on what we do for him.

Morning and Evening Prayer

Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer (also called Mattins and Evensong) are the Prayer Book’s daily services. They have the same basic shape. The opening section of confession was added by the Reformers in 1552. It took the place of private confession to a priest, so that the whole congregation would begin every service by confessing their sins to God together (Neil and Willoughby, The Tutorial Prayer Book, p. 92). From there, each service follows the gospel pattern of guilt, grace, and gratitude.

Guilt. The service opens with a verse of Scripture that calls us to repent, such as “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). The minister then reminds us that “the Scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness.” Kneeling together, we pray the General Confession: “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep… And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.” In this prayer we admit that sin is not a small mistake but a sickness we cannot cure ourselves.

Grace. Then comes the good news. The minister declares that God “pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent, and unfeignedly believe his holy Gospel.” Forgiveness is God’s free gift, received by repentance and faith. Now that we are forgiven, we can pray the prayer Jesus taught his children: “Our Father.” As The Tutorial Prayer Book explains, the minister does not forgive sins by his own power. As a minister of the gospel, he gives penitent sinners the assurance that God has pardoned them (p. 96). The Lord’s Prayer then forms the bridge from confession to praise (p. 98).

Gratitude. Forgiven people want to praise God, so the service turns to worship: “O Lord, open thou our lips. And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise.” We sing the Psalms and hear one reading from the Old Testament and one from the New. After each reading we sing a canticle, a song from Scripture or the early church, such as the Te Deum or the Benedictus in the morning and the Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis in the evening. We stand to confess our faith in the Apostles’ Creed, and we close with prayers. One favorite, the General Thanksgiving, thanks God “above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Holy Communion

Packer pointed out that the Communion service walks through the gospel pattern not once but three times, each time going deeper (Packer, The Gospel in the Prayer Book). In simple terms, it moves like this:

Hearing God’s Word. The service begins with the Collect for Purity, asking God to “cleanse the thoughts of our hearts.” Then the Ten Commandments are read. God’s law shows us our sin, and after each commandment we answer, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” We hear the Epistle and Gospel, confess the Nicene Creed, hear the sermon, and pray for the whole Church and the world.

Guilt. The minister invites those who “truly and earnestly repent” to draw near. We confess our sins in strong, honest words, saying that our sins provoke God’s just “wrath and indignation against us,” and that “the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.”

Grace. God answers our confession with the Absolution and then with the Comfortable Words, four promises from Scripture (Matthew 11:28; John 3:16; 1 Timothy 1:15; 1 John 2:1-2). “Comfortable” here means strengthening. Ashley Null explains that these verses show Jesus, in Cranmer’s understanding, as our defender: “For believers, Jesus is not our judge. He is our defense lawyer” (Null, “Cranmer’s Comfortable Words”). We lift up our hearts and join the angels in the Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy”). Kneeling, we pray the Prayer of Humble Access: “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.” Null notes that this prayer reminds us that the closer we come to God, the more clearly we see how unworthy we are, and how completely we depend on his mercy (Null, “Why the Necessity of the Prayer of Humble Access?”).

The Prayer of Consecration then points us to the cross, where Christ made “by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” Christ’s sacrifice is finished. It is never repeated. We receive the bread and wine with these words: “Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.” Christ is truly received, but spiritually and by faith, just as Article XXVIII teaches.

Gratitude. Only after we have received God’s grace do we offer anything to God. Now we pray the Lord’s Prayer and offer “ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice” (Romans 12:1). We do not offer Christ to God; we offer ourselves, in thanks for what Christ has done. The service ends with the joyful Gloria in Excelsis and the blessing: “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds.”

The Gospel Throughout the Prayer Book

The same gospel runs through every part of the Prayer Book, not only the Sunday services.

The Collects. These short weekly prayers teach that we depend on God’s grace for everything: “O God, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant, that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts” (Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity).
The Litany. This great prayer of the church pleads on the basis of Christ’s blood: “spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood.”
Baptism and the Catechism. The Catechism teaches that a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” It says that what God requires of those to be baptized is “Repentance, whereby they forsake sin; and Faith, whereby they stedfastly believe the promises of God.” God’s promise comes first, and faith receives it.
The Burial Service. Even at the grave the gospel is the last word. The service opens with Jesus’ words, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and commits the body “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In every service, the Prayer Book teaches the same truths found in the Thirty-Nine Articles: Scripture is our final authority (Article

), we are justified by faith alone (Article XI ), and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is complete (Article

XXXI

). What the Articles state, the Prayer Book prays.

Why the Words Matter

Updating the language is right

Anglicans believe that worship must be in a language people understand. The Thirty-Nine Articles call it “plainly repugnant to the Word of God” to pray or give the sacraments “in a tongue not understanded of the people” (Article

XXIV

). Cranmer himself translated the Latin services into English for this reason. So it is right and good for the church to update old words and spelling so that worshipers today can understand them.

Lex orandi, lex credendi: we believe what we pray

Anglicans often use a Latin phrase, lex orandi, lex credendi. It means “the law of praying is the law of believing.” Put simply: what a church prays shows what it believes, and what we pray week after week shapes what we come to believe.

The phrase comes from Prosper of Aquitaine, a Christian writer of the fifth century. Remarkably, Prosper first used this idea to defend salvation by grace alone. Some teachers of his day claimed that people could take the first step toward God by their own power. Prosper answered by pointing to the church’s prayers. In its worship the church asks God to give faith to unbelievers and bring back those who have fallen away. That shows the church believes conversion is God’s work from beginning to end (Davie, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, pp. 2-3). From the start, then, this principle was used to proclaim the gospel of grace.

Today, however, the phrase is often turned upside down. Some say it means that the experience of worship comes first, and that doctrine should grow out of whatever the church happens to be praying. On that view, changing the liturgy is a good way to develop new theology. Martin Davie explains that faithful Anglicans have never seen it this way. For us, Scripture, not worship, comes first (Davie, pp. 7-8). The church may arrange its services, but it may not “ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s word written” (Article

That is why the Reformers filled the Prayer Book with Scripture. Its services are made up of Bible readings, paraphrases of Scripture, and summaries of biblical teaching. Davie calls them “an attempt to express biblical theology in liturgical form” (p. 11). The Prayer Book carries authority because it is a faithful witness to the Bible (p. 11). Even Prosper’s argument rested on the Bible, on Paul’s command to pray for all people in 1 Timothy 2:1-4 (p. 12).

So, the principle works in two directions. First, the Bible shapes our prayers. Then our prayers shape us as we pray God’s thoughts after him. A liturgy that faithfully expresses Scripture teaches us the truth every time we pray it. A liturgy that drifts from Scripture teaches error just as steadily. As Davie concludes, a church’s worship must agree with its doctrine, and both must agree with Scripture (p. 38). For example, because the Bible gives no command or promise for praying for the dead, the Reformers removed those prayers from the services (p. 10). The 1662 Burial service prays for those who mourn, not for the one who has died (p. 14).

Changing the theology is not

But updating the language is very different from changing the teaching. As Robin Jordan puts it, you cannot change even a small part of a liturgy’s text without affecting its doctrine (Jordan, “What’s Wrong with the 1928 Book of Common Prayer?”). If the words of a prayer change what it teaches about sin, grace, or the cross, then the church’s faith will slowly change too.

The shape fallacy

Many modern prayer books have been built on an idea that Samuel Bray calls the shape fallacy (also called the form fallacy). A fallacy is a mistake in reasoning. The shape fallacy is the mistake of thinking that a service is mainly its outline, or “shape,” and not its actual words. If you believe that, then you can keep the outline of a service and rewrite the words however you like, and still claim it is the same service.

Here is an example. Imagine someone takes a letter your grandfather wrote, keeps the greeting, the three paragraphs, and the signature, but rewrites every sentence to say something new. The outline is the same, but it is no longer your grandfather’s letter. In the same way, a new prayer book can follow the outline of the 1662 services while teaching something quite different.

This idea came mainly from Gregory Dix’s 1945 book The Shape of the Liturgy. Dix claimed that all early Communion services shared the same four actions, and that this shape mattered more than the words. Later scholars have shown that his history was badly mistaken, but by then his idea had already guided prayer book revision around the world. Bray points out that “shape” became a useful way to tell people that a new book was both new and old at the same time; the preface to the ACNA’s 2019 Prayer Book uses the word “shape” or a related word five times (Bray, “The Shape Fallacy”). The 1662 Prayer Book, by contrast, gives us mostly words, a fixed text that teaches the gospel clearly. Bray calls for a return to the Prayer Book as “a text that stays put.” A fixed text also protects ordinary church members from having their worship changed at the whim of the clergy.

How later prayer books changed the theology

The 1928, 1979, and 2019 American prayer books each changed not only the language of the 1662 services but also their teaching. Here are some examples.

The 1928 Book of Common Prayer (Episcopal Church)

It weakened the call to repentance in Morning and Evening Prayer by moving most of the opening sentences about sin to the season of Lent, and it allowed the confession and absolution to be left out of Evening Prayer.
It added prayers for the dead to the Communion service.
Its Prayer of Consecration offers the bread and wine to God and asks the Holy Spirit to come upon them. Cranmer had removed both ideas because they suggest that the bread and wine themselves are changed, or that the service is a sacrifice offered to God.
In the Baptism service it dropped the reminder that all people are “conceived and born in sin.”

(Jordan, “What’s Wrong with the 1928 Book of Common Prayer?”)

Where it led: opening the door to Anglo-Catholicism. The 1928 book was written when the Anglo-Catholic and Broad Church parties controlled the Episcopal Church. In 1925 its General Convention even voted to remove the Thirty-Nine Articles from the Prayer Book; the attempt failed only because the church’s constitution required a second vote, and the plan was quietly dropped in 1928 (Jordan, “What’s Wrong with the 1928 Book of Common Prayer?”). The Rev. Canon Dr. Henry Jansma, Canon Theologian of the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word, writes that by the early twentieth century the Episcopal Church had become “fully High Church, Tractarian, and Liberal” (Jansma, “1776 and All That,” p. 3). The 1928 book gave that shift an official voice. For the first time since the Reformation, an American Anglican prayer book prayed for the dead, asking God to “grant them continual growth in thy love and service,” and asked God to “bless and sanctify, with thy Word and Holy Spirit, these thy gifts” of bread and wine, “which we now offer unto thee” ( The Book of Common Prayer [1928], Holy Communion: Prayer for the Church and Prayer of Consecration; Jordan, “What’s Wrong with the 1928 Book of Common Prayer?”). These are teachings the Articles reject (Articles XXII, XXVIII, and

XXXI

). Remember lex orandi, lex credendi: once these ideas were printed in the Prayer Book, they were taught to the whole church every Sunday. Many Americans today think of the 1928 book as “the traditional prayer book,” but it had already moved a long way from the Reformation faith of 1662.

The 1979 Book of Common Prayer (Episcopal Church)

Its modern-language confession leaves out “there is no health in us” and “miserable offenders,” treating sin as a problem far less serious than the deep sickness the 1662 confession describes. A weaker view of sin leads to a weaker view of why Christ had to die for us (Jansma, “We Believe What We Pray”).
It moved the Thirty-Nine Articles to a back section called “Historical Documents.”
It followed Dix’s shape theory in its Communion services, as most twentieth-century revisions did (Bray, “The Shape Fallacy,” citing the Anglican scholar Matthew Olver).

Where it led: opening the door to liberalism and “choose your own” worship.

The 1979 book was a product of the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement. It offered two whole sets of services, Rite I in traditional language and Rite II in modern language, with six different Communion prayers between them, and many other options (The Book of Common Prayer [1979], Holy Eucharist: Rite One and Rite Two). For the first time, a congregation could choose among services that expressed noticeably different theologies. At the same time, its confessions softened the Bible’s teaching about sin, and its new Baptismal Covenant became a starting point for new teaching. In 2000, for example, the Episcopal Church’s General Convention grounded its approach to same-sex relationships in the Baptismal Covenant (General Convention Resolution A065, 2000). Dunbar notes that the Baptismal Covenant’s promise to “respect the dignity of every human being” has been frequently cited as grounds for socially progressive innovations (Dunbar, “A Curate’s Egg”). Jansma places the 1979 revision within a wider wave of doctrinal and moral change in the Episcopal Church in the last quarter of the twentieth century (Jansma, “1776 and All That,” pp. 5-6). With the Articles moved to an appendix and the services open to choice, nothing in the Prayer Book any longer held the church to “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3), built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2:20). The result has been the Episcopal Church’s departure from the historic Christian faith.

The 2019 Book of Common Prayer (Anglican Church in North America)

The 2019 book says it is based on the 1662 Prayer Book, and in many places it does use 1662 material. But in important places it changes 1662’s theology, even in its Communion service called the “Anglican Standard Text.”

Morning Prayer. The confession adds the words “apart from your grace” before “there is no health in us,” and drops “miserable offenders.” Henry Jansma explains that this softens our confession of sin and raises our standing before God before we have even heard the absolution, which upsets Cranmer’s gospel order (Jansma, “‘There is no health in us’”). Steven Wedgeworth points out that the 2019 version also removes the word “But” that turns the prayer from our sin to God’s mercy (“there is no health in us: But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us”). That little word marks the turn from guilt to grace, and the grace belongs after it, not before (Wedgeworth, “Comparing Anglican Confessions of Sin”). Samuel Bray, quoted by Gavin Dunbar, observes that it is doubtful any confession in the Bible hedges itself this way; the tax collector in the temple simply prayed, “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13) (Dunbar, “A Curate’s Egg”). The 2019 book even permits “apart from your grace” to be added to the Prayer of Humble Access (Jansma, p. 1, n. 1).
The Communion confession. The 2019 confession at Holy Communion drops the line “the remembrance of them is grievous unto us” and softens God’s “wrath and indignation” to “righteous anger.” Wedgeworth notes that even the 1979 book’s traditional-language service had left this confession unchanged (Wedgeworth, “Comparing Anglican Confessions of Sin”).
Offering the memorial before God. After the words of Jesus, the 2019 prayer says that the minister and people make the memorial before God “with these holy gifts.” The 1662 prayer has no such offering. Jesus told us to eat and drink in remembrance of him; he did not tell us to present the bread and wine to God (Jordan, “What’s Wrong with the 1928 Book of Common Prayer?”). In fact, the 2019 wording is almost word for word the 1549 prayer that Cranmer took out in 1552. The Tutorial Prayer Book explains that the words about making a memorial before God were removed “as unscriptural,” and the rest of the prayer was moved to after Communion (pp. 273, 349-350). When the bishops revised the Prayer Book in 1662, they were asked to put this memorial back, along with a calling of the Holy Spirit on the bread and wine and the singing of the Agnus Dei during Communion. They rejected all of these proposals (p. 266). The 2019 book brings back what the 1662 revisers deliberately refused.
Calling the Spirit down on the bread and wine. The 2019 prayer asks God “to bless and sanctify, with your Word and Holy Spirit, these gifts of bread and wine.” This comes from the 1928 book, not from 1662. The 1662 prayer asks instead that we, receiving the bread and wine by faith, may be partakers of Christ’s body and blood. The difference is about where God’s work happens: in the elements, or in the hearts of believers. The 2019 book admits this itself in a footnote stating that the paragraph does not occur in the 1662 Prayer Book (Dunbar, “A Curate’s Egg”). (Dunbar himself approves of where the 2019 book places this prayer, but the paragraph is still not 1662.)
Offering ourselves before receiving. In 1662, the prayer offering “ourselves, our souls and bodies” comes after Communion, as our grateful response. In the 2019 Standard Text it is part of the Prayer of Consecration, said before we receive. That blurs the order of grace first, gratitude second. The Tutorial Prayer Book shows that the Reformers moved this prayer from before Communion to after it on purpose, so that no one could mistake it for an offering of the bread and wine (pp. 349-350).
Praying for the dead. The 1662 prayer for the Church only thanks God for those who have died in the faith and asks for grace to follow their example. The 2019 prayer adds a request that God’s will for the departed may be fulfilled. The Tutorial Prayer Book notes that the 1662 revisers deliberately put “praise in place of prayer” for the faithful departed (p. 315), and that they rejected a proposal to include the dead in this prayer (p. 266).
Other additions. It adds “And with your spirit” to the opening dialogue and “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” to the Sanctus. Cranmer had left out both. Bray notes that the second confuses the heavenly focus of the Sanctus (Bray, “The Shape Fallacy”).
Rearranging the order. Dunbar shows that the 2019 “Anglican Standard Text” is not really the 1662 service at all. It is mostly the 1928 American service rearranged to fit the outline of the 1979 book. Doing this, he says, shows a lack of understanding of the guilt-grace-gratitude logic of 1662. For example, the exchange of the Peace now comes right after the confession, absolution, and Comfortable Words, interrupting the movement of the soul toward God at just the wrong moment (Dunbar, “A Curate’s Egg”).

These problems are serious enough that at least one ACNA diocese, the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word, has authorized its own edition of the Standard Text that puts back the 1662 wording of the Prayer of Consecration and the 1662 order of the service ( Holy Communion Anglican Standard Text [1662 Order]). The 2019 book’s own rules allow this: a rubric permits the Standard Text to be “conformed to its original content and ordering, as in the 1662.” Archdeacon Andrew Brashier has published such a version for parishes to use (Brashier, “The 1662 Option”). But this is not a solution. It is further evidence of the problem. A book that lets one parish pray the theology of 1662 while the parish down the road prays the opposite from the same pages is not a book of common prayer expressing one shared faith.

Where it leads: a liturgical buffet. Sadly, the ACNA’s 2019 book continues the 1979 approach of offering many choices. It provides two different Communion services (the “Anglican Standard Text” and the “Renewed Ancient Text”), many alternative texts, and optional additions such as the Agnus Dei and the invitation “Behold the Lamb of God,” which historically go with showing the consecrated bread to the people for adoration (Jordan, “The Renewed Ancient Text”). Robin Jordan concludes that, in many ways, it works like a modern Anglican Missal (Jordan, “The Renewed Ancient Text,” Part IV). Like a buffet table, it lets each congregation build a service to fit its own theology: one parish can assemble a fairly Reformed service, while another, using the same book, can assemble one that leans toward the Roman Mass. The Rev. Richard Lepage describes this as a move from a truly common liturgy to a “choose your own liturgy” approach, which divides Anglicans into ever more “streams” with differing and even contradictory beliefs (Lepage, “Faith, Simplicity and Unity”). Jansma notes that ACNA’s leaders embraced this “three streams” approach and with it accepted an erosion of Reformation teaching about God, human nature, and salvation (Jansma, “1776 and All That,” p. 18). As the prophet Amos asks, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” (Amos 3:3). Dunbar reaches the same conclusion. He describes the 2019 book as pulled in incompatible directions by the 1979 book, the 1662 book, and the ACNA’s “three streams” approach. Because the clergy choose among so many options, he argues, it is no longer true “common prayer” binding clergy and people to one law of worship, but a collection of resources used at the minister’s discretion. That, he notes, is a return to the clericalism the Reformers rejected (Dunbar, “A Curate’s Egg”). Wedgeworth likewise concludes that, despite its claims, the 2019 book is basically a revision of the 1979 book (Wedgeworth, “Comparing Anglican Confessions of Sin”).

One faith, one Prayer Book

The 1662 Prayer Book worked very differently. It was never meant to stand alone. Together with the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Books of Homilies, and the Ordinal, it gave the Anglican Church one settled center: one confession of faith, one form of worship, and one standard for ordaining ministers (Bray, “The Shape Fallacy”). Every minister had to subscribe to the Articles and use the Prayer Book as written. Because every congregation prayed the same words, and those words agreed with the Articles, the same biblical faith was taught in every parish, from a cathedral in London to a mission church in Africa. For centuries this shaped a single, unified, “conforming” Anglicanism, with “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5). That is the unity we want to recover by returning to the 1662 Prayer Book. As Brashier reminds us, less than a hundred years ago most Anglicans around the world were united by this single Prayer Book. Today the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches, like GAFCON, still names the Thirty-Nine Articles, the 1662 Prayer Book, and the Ordinal as its doctrinal standards (Brashier, “The 1662 Option”).

Why We Use the IVP 1662 International Edition

For all these reasons, our church uses the earlier editions of The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition, edited by Samuel Bray and Drew Keane and published by IVP. This edition does exactly what a faithful update should do. It updates spelling and punctuation, replaces a few words that are truly out of date, and replaces the prayers for the British royal family with prayers for civil leaders that can be used in any country. But it keeps the text, the order, and the theology of the 1662 Prayer Book (IVP, “International Edition FAQ”). Other churches that use it have chosen it for the same reasons: its clarity about the gospel, its simplicity, and the strength and beauty of its language (Christ Church Anglican, “Prayer Book 101”). Dunbar likewise concludes that the International Edition is a much better option for Anglicans in North America than either the 1979 or the 2019 book (Dunbar, “A Curate’s Egg”).

C. S. Lewis, whose own faith was shaped by this Prayer Book, said that a liturgy works best when we know it so well that we no longer have to think about it: “A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice” ( Letters to Malcolm). Then our attention can rest where it belongs, on God and on the gospel of his grace in Jesus Christ.

Sources

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Cathedral Church of the Advent, Birmingham.
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Davie, Martin.
Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: Liturgy, Doctrine and Scripture in History and Today.

London: The Latimer Trust, 2019. ISBN 978-1-906327-54-5.
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Foxe, John. Acts and Monuments (“Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”). London: John Day, 1563.
GAFCON. The Jerusalem Declaration (2008), clause 6.
General Convention of the Episcopal Church. Resolution A065, “Issues Related to Committed Same-Sex Relationships.” 73rd General Convention, 2000.
Holy Communion Anglican Standard Text [1662 Order]. Anglican Diocese of the Living Word.
InterVarsity Press. “Book of Common Prayer International Edition: Free Resources and FAQ.” ivpress.com.
Jansma, Henry. “1776 and All That: American Anglicans at 250.” 2026.
Jansma, Henry. “We Believe What We Pray: The Case Against the 1979 BCP.” 2015, rev. 2019.
Jansma, Henry. “What Did Cranmer Think He Was Doing? ‘There is no health in us.’” Anglican Diocese of the Living Word, Trinitytide 2021. (The main title echoes Buchanan’s booklet listed above.)
Jordan, Robin G. “The Renewed Ancient Text” (article series), with introduction by Richard Lepage.
Jordan, Robin G. “What’s Wrong with the 1928 Book of Common Prayer?” 2008.
Lepage, Richard. “Faith, Simplicity and Unity: Amos 3:3 in Anglican Liturgy.” Introduction to Jordan, “The Renewed Ancient Text.”
Lewis, C. S. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. 1964.
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The Tutorial Prayer Book for the Teacher, the Student, and the General Reader.

London: Harrison Trust, 1912; rev. 1913.
Null, Ashley. “Cranmer’s Comfortable Words.” Faith & Worship 77 (Peter Toon Memorial Lecture, 2014).
Null, Ashley. “Why the Necessity of the Prayer of Humble Access?” 2017.
Packer, J. I. The Gospel in the Prayer Book. 1966; repr. InterVarsity Press.
Wedgeworth, Steven. “Comparing Anglican Confessions of Sin: What Got Edited Out and When.” The Reformed Conformist (Substack), June 9, 2026.
Wedgeworth, Steven. “The Reformation Character of the 1662 BCP.” Ad Fontes.
The Book of Common Prayer (1662) and The Book of Common Prayer (2019), Anglican Church in North America.
The Book of Common Prayer (1928). Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.

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