The Five American Prayer Books: A Rookie Anglican Guide
Having spent my childhood in England, I entirely sympathize with American anglophilia: what’s not to love, especially those charming television shows they export? But for Anglicans, a subtle but unhelpful intuition can persist that our Church is somehow a present-day export from the British Isles, as if the ACNA were the ecclesial version of tea and scones. That is not the case, however, and it is important—especially for the anglophiles among us—to disabuse ourselves of this notion. It is wrong on two counts:
First, Anglican worship isn’t rarified or fancy. It might appear so when compared to Sunday morning at First Baptist, but that is because the Baptist church changed how people conceive of worship; Anglicans still do what the early church did.
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Second, the Anglican church is a portion of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, and the catholic church, by definition (“everywhere”), indigenizes everywhere it goes. Yes, Anglican churches in North America trace their institutional genealogy to the Church of England, but they have functioned as an embedded, indigenous church here for centuries. When we think of ‘decolonization’ vis-à-vis liturgy, we often think of African nations in the early twentieth century taking the liturgies brought by colonizers and making them their own. But the first such instance of Prayer Book decolonization took place in the American colonies.
The Beginning of American Anglicanism
Indeed, people often forget that Anglicans came to the American colonies before the waves of Puritans. In June 1579, Sir Francis Drake’s crew, led by their chaplain, celebrated Holy Communion from the 1559 Book of Common Prayer just north of San Francisco. The first Anglican Eucharist in an English colony took place in Cape Henry in Virginia Beach in April 1607, with the Rev. Robert Hunt presiding. Over the next 170 years, the Anglican presence grew and took root in North American soil. By the eve of the American Revolution, every state south of Pennsylvania had the Church of England as its official religion, and 15% of churches in the thirteen colonies belonged to it. The Methodist revival still flowed from within the Anglican churches.
God Save the King?
When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and the Articles of Confederation were provisionally adopted in 1777, Anglicans in the American colonies had a problem on their hands. Well, several problems—but among them, a liturgical one: the Prayer Book from which they prayed their services was, in the main, the 1662 book. And in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (indeed, in all Prayer Books since the first of 1549), they prayed every day in Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer that God would save the King. But now, by the revolutionary acts of the nation’s founders, they were no longer under a king.
For many, especially among the clergy, this proved too much, and they fled back to England as loyalists. But many stayed—historians reckon around half. They could not keep praying for the king, obviously, but they still wanted to pray as the church had always taught them—with the Book of Common Prayer. So the obvious next step was revision. But historically, in the Church, only a synod of ordinary bishops has the authority to make such liturgical changes with legitimate authority, and… there were no bishops in the colonies.
Three American Bishops
For this reason, in 1783, the clergy of Connecticut sent one of their own—a priest named Samuel Seabury—to be consecrated as a bishop. The Church of England would not do it (because he was an American citizen!), but the remnant of the Non-juring Church in Scotland would. Thus, the United States of America received its first bishop—not just its first Anglican bishop, though he was that, but its first bishop of any apostolic descent. (Roman Catholics would receive their own first bishop seven years later.)
The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States gathered as a multistate body for the first time at General Convention in 1785. Along with proposing some revisions to the Prayer Book, they sent William White and Samuel Provoost to be consecrated, and the Bishop of London (who had once exercised nominal ecclesial oversight of the colonies), in an “if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em” move, consented and sent them back to America as consecrated bishops. So the newly minted United States now had three bishops; that meant a synod could at last convene, and Prayer Book revision could now take place legitimately.
Prayer Book Revision in the United States
The final form of the revised Prayer Book was fixed and authorized for use in 1789, making it the first American Book of Common Prayer. This book remained in use for over a century, until a light revision in 1892 produced the second American Prayer Book. The 1892 edition then received a significant revision in 1928, producing the third American Prayer Book, and then a—some would say “drastic”—revision in 1979, the fourth American Prayer Book.
When the Anglican Church in North America called for its own revision, it produced the 2019 Book of Common Prayer, now the fifth American Prayer Book. Bishops in synod authorized each Prayer Book and had the authority to do so. Each Prayer Book is the genetic liturgical descendant of the one that came before. Each has an enormous amount in common with other Books of Common Prayer around the world, and each contains a little something here and there that is somewhat unique to the American tradition.
I shall now commence a brief survey of the different revisions of the American Prayer Books. You can find the texts of all the books themselves at this useful website.
The 1789 Book of Common Prayer
The obvious need to revise the prayers for the king was not the only desired change. Anglicans of a more Deist bent had lobbied for a more “rational” Prayer Book for decades, both in England and in the colonies. This was high noon for the Enlightenment and all its heady ambitions. Additionally, the revivals of the eighteenth century had eroded many denominational distinctives, and many people were content to be “merely Protestant” and not so much “Anglican.”
Between 1785 and 1789, the Episcopal Church engaged in much debate among the conventions of the different states and the three bishops. At first, the bishops campaigned on the front lines for change, but as the process went on, they appeared to have changed their minds. Bishop Seabury, in particular, had received his consecration from the non-jurors on the condition that he study the Scottish communion rite (which had an Epiclesis, a mixed chalice, and a number of Laudian “high” elements) and use it in the colonies. His initial correspondence on Prayer Book revision in Connecticut does not indicate that he took it very seriously, but at some point, he became a conservative force in the revision process and a staunch advocate for these Scottish Prayer Book elements.
The revisions carried out at the General Convention of 1789 ended up looking tame compared with what had initially been on the table, but along with replacing “King” with “President” in the daily prayers, the major changes largely moved in a rationalist direction. The revisers changed rubrics to sound less “catholic” and removed the Apocrypha from the Daily Office lectionary. Thanks to Seabury, the Scottish epiclesis did make it into the prayer of consecration in the Eucharist, but this was one of the very few changes in a “catholic” direction. Early printings of the 1789 also contained a number of metrical psalms and a few hymns. Exactly what belonged in a Book of Common Prayer did not become standard right away.
The 1892 Book of Common Prayer
The ‘Catholic Revival’ that began at Oxford in the 1830s found fertile soil in the Episcopal Church. Indeed, its effect on the Episcopal Church may count as one of the movement’s greatest successes. The Oxford Movement (1830–1851) was largely about theology, but it led to an increased love for and appreciation of ancient ritual that accorded with this theology; thus, we can call the second phase of the movement Ritualism. Roman Catholic scholars also joined the effort, and an ecumenical recovery of patristic and medieval liturgy—called ‘the Liturgical Movement’—was born.
A New England priest named William Reed Huntington, the genius behind the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, spearheaded this movement’s insights regarding Prayer Book revision. He lived to see only a very modest reception of the liturgical treasures newly recovered in the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, which included the restoration of the Apocrypha to the Daily Office readings. But the door had cracked open, and it would fling wide in the next generation.
The 1928 Book of Common Prayer
In 1789, just two bishops attended the General Convention that ratified the first Prayer Book (Seabury and White; Provoost was sick). In 1928, the House of Bishops numbered 147, and 114 were present at the General Convention that approved the newest revision to the Book of Common Prayer. The 1928 book substantially realized the liturgical movement’s desires. To give just one instance, it reinstated prayers for the departed in the midst of Holy Communion—a staple of ancient liturgies that had been cut since 1552. It also moved the location of some prayers to align more closely with more catholic sensibilities about the Eucharist. It offers further evidence of the Oxford Movement’s success in America. We could say much more about the 1928 book, but for many Episcopalians, it became the Prayer Book par excellence.
The 1979 Book of Common Prayer
Proposals for a new “modern” Prayer Book began soon after World War II, in the ‘Prayer Book Studies.’ These culminated in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. As liturgical scholar Fr. Arnold Klukas points out, it was more “revolutionary” than “evolutionary,” unlike earlier Prayer Book revisions. The inclusion of a few very hippy-sounding prayers and a little squishy theology here and there was too much for many Episcopalians. There were some great new additions—such as Holy Week rites, a rite for Confession, and the like—but the new-fangled and the odd (I’m looking at you, Prayer C) drew most of the attention. Still, this was our Prayer Book for almost forty years, and it profoundly shaped the lives and hearts of most Anglicans over fifty today.
The 2019 Book of Common Prayer
When the ACNA formed in response to Global South bishops calling for a new province after The Episcopal Church neither repented nor responded to church discipline from Canterbury in 2003–2005, the new province felt the need for a new Prayer Book—one that could be “ours,” one pruned of some of the oddities of the 1979 book, one that returned closer to the center of the stream of the American Prayer Book tradition while also recovering some elements of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer that the first American Prayer Book had lost.
Conclusion
As we have seen, neither the ACNA nor the Book of Common Prayer in our hands today is a present-day import from England. Our Prayer Book, like our Church, has been a native, naturalized inhabitant since 1789. Across five major revisions, the American Prayer Book has a genius all its own—it has a unique catholic and ecumenical flavor when compared with its English predecessor. It has guided our great-grandparents, and, God willing, it will guide our great-grandchildren as Christians—Anglican Christians —seeking to bear faithful witness from sea to shining sea.
Image: photo by Jacob Davis.
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