Holy Week is the high mark of the church’s liturgical year. In it, we celebrate Jesus’ final week in Jerusalem, from his arrival on Palm Sunday to his death on Good Friday. Then, we celebrate his resurrection on Easter Sunday, with all the momentous events in between. There are many ways to commemorate the week,…
An Introduction to The Daily Office Podcast
Finding time for prayer can be really difficult. I’m an Anglican priest (which means I pray for a living, right?), and I know that as well as anybody. It feels like, as our culture of work takes over our lives more and more, we have to fight tooth and nail to spend time with the…
How to Pray the Collect Way: Let’s Go Deeper than Grocery List Prayers
You pray more often than you realize Prayer is far more common than we realize, that is, if we take the meditations of the Book of Psalms as a guide. There we encounter the Bible’s own prayerbook but what we discover often are meanderings and ponderings of the one praying. We might call these prayers…
AWANA Burnout? How the Daily Office Helped Me Love Scripture Memorization Again
What do Pioneers, Native Americans, a strange stick figure called Sparkie, Little bear Cubs, and Scripture memorization have in common? AWANA!—at least if you grew up in some churches in the early to late 90s. AWANA indelibly shaped my experience of church and early Christian formation. Every Wednesday night, I would get walloped by dodgeballs,…
Too Tired to Pray: What I Learned About Prayer When Words Wouldn’t Come
The day no words would come Whenever I’m with my family and I make a dumb joke, my parents like to roast me by saying that they look forward to eventually writing in my baby book the first time I tell a good joke. If this mythical baby book that has been dangled over my…
Reading Scripture Together: Recapturing Thomas Cranmer’s Vision
In 2008 Phyllis Tickle made the important observation that about every 500 years, a significant transformation takes place in the Church. She points to the arrival of Jesus in the first century, the collapse of the Roman empire five-hundred years later in the late 5th century, the Great Schism five-hundred years after that in 1054,…
Lessons in Omission: Why Are Some Chapters Missing in the Daily Office Lectionary?
Many folks accustomed to reading Bible-in-a-year plans are delighted to find out that the Book of Common Prayer (2019) has a Daily Office lectionary that leads the faithful Anglican to read through the whole Bible in a year—at least, most of it. Those same folks are sometimes a little dismayed to then find out that…
The Consolations of Compline in Quarantine (and Beyond)
In the shadow of a global pandemic and the uncertainty it has brought to every aspect of life, I have found myself drawn again and again to the Compline service in the Book of Common Prayer. I have especially found deep comfort in the service’s collects and prayers, which deftly blend a realism about the…
How to Pray as a Family at Home
Family Prayer, sometimes called Family Worship, is a cornerstone activity of the Christian family’s life. In it, we come together to sing, read Scripture, and pray. Yet, this activity can feel daunting and unfamiliar. What do we read? What do we pray? How long should it be? How often should we do Family Prayer? My…
Should We Pray Written Prayers? Didn’t Jesus Tell Us Not to Repeat Prayers?
Jesus teaches us how to pray by example and by explicit teaching. Embedded within the Sermon on the Mount written in the Gospel according to Matthew, there is an instruction from Jesus that seems to speak directly against repeating our prayers to God. “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For…
Praying Around the Table: Making a Prayer Space in your Home
Now that the family is together every day and worship is virtual, families begin to wonder how to keep their children growing in the faith. Family devotions begin to seem more necessary. But how to begin? How to keep everyone’s attention? Maybe you’ve tried before, but things didn’t seem to work. You want family devotions…
What Do Anglicans Believe about Scripture, Prayer, and Worship? A Brief Overview of Anglican Spirituality
The following is an excerpt from the Anglican Church in North America’s catechism, To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism (Crossway, 2020), pp. 81–87. You can download a PDF of the entire catechism here. A Rule of Prayer: Scripture, Prayer, and Worship 224. What is a “rule” of prayer? A rule of prayer is a regular discipline by…
