From its inception in 1549, the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) has always been a text intertwined with the text of the Bible. Many of the prayers utilize phrases that have been extracted from the Bible. Verses of the Bible are quoted directly (for example, Opening Sentences in the Daily Office and Offertory Sentences in the Eucharist service) and whole [...]
The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has recently released its 2019 Book of Common Prayer (BCP). In the interest of making the new ACNA Book of Common Prayer 2019 accessible, we've put together a Rookie Anglican Guide to the ACNA Prayer Book! FYI: You can order a physical copy here: http://anglicanliturgypress.com/the-shop/. You can access the 2019 BCP digitally (PDF [...]
(NOTE: Read our Rookie Anglican Guide to the ACNA's 2019 BCP here.) The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has released its 2019 Book of Common Prayer! I asked Fr. Ben Jefferies (who worked on the Liturgy Task Force as has written about the 2019 BCP's typography and Daily Office Lectionary) what features of the new Prayer Book were especially [...]
(Read our Rookie Anglican Guide to the ACNA's 2019 BCP here.) The Daily Office Lectionary (DoL) went through several layers of development during the five years of its existence in trial form. The final form as it appears in the Book of Common Prayer (2019) will look quite different to those who are accustomed to the 1979 DoL. Cranmer’s Preface [...]
(Read our Rookie Anglican Guide to the ACNA's 2019 BCP here.) If you went into an Anglican Church in South Africa, and were handed a Prayer Book, it would be in the Xhosa language. Moments after entering, the officiant starts praying, you glance down and your eyes see the following text: Aze ati, Nkosi, vula imilomo yetu. Abantu. Ize ivakalise [...]
You can’t be curious about Anglicanism for very long without running into the Book of Common Prayer—commonly abbreviated as the “BCP” or referred to as the “Prayer Book.” (Looking for specific information about the Anglican Church in North America's 2019 Book of Common Prayer? Read our Rookie Anglican Guide to the ACNA's 2019 BCP here.) Common Prayer? More like complicated [...]
When you drive out to St. John's Island from Charleston, South Carolina, you move through filtered sunlight through overhanding oak branches draped with Spanish moss. The low country is filled with tall grasses and salt marshes. And when you pull up to Camp St. Christopher, at the very point of the barrier island, you are greeted by the figures of [...]
If you’ve been exposed to the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer, whether through our Daily Office Booklets or otherwise, you’ve probably noticed that there are different readings of Scripture each time - usually one from the Psalms, one from the Old Testament, and one from the New Testament. I don’t know about you, but the first time(s) I [...]
Daily Office: Easier Said (Alone) than Done (With a Group)! In the interests of making the Daily Office (Morning and Evening Prayer) more accessible, I've been putting together Daily Office Booklets for a while now. Ideally, with just a Bible and a booklet, you should be able to work your way through both Morning and Evening Prayer on your own [...]
It's finally here! I've finished work on the latest edition of the Rookie Anglican Daily Office Booklet. You can find out more, as well as access the booklet, at https://anglicancompass.com/rookieanglican/dailyofficebooklet/. (To keep things more stable from here on out, that URL will be the home for all future editions of the Daily Office Booklet.) I hope you enjoy the booklet! ~Josh [...]
The Magnificat - also known as the Song of Mary (Luke 1:46-55) - is a canticle used in Evening Prayer. It is featured in certain editions of the Rookie Anglican Daily Office Booklet. Below is an audio file of the easiest way, in my opinion, to chant the canticle. As you can see in the pagescan from the [...]
It’s November now, and as leaves fall from the trees, so the days begin to pass by more quickly and we enter a season of busyness. It is a sad truth that what ought to be a season of rising anticipation often becomes for us a season of dread. We worry about travel, we worry about our schedules, we worry [...]
If you've done the Daily Office more than once or twice, you've probably noticed that certain prayers get repeated for a week, and then change. These prayers are called "the Collects (usually pronounced CO-llects, with the accent on the first syllable) of the Christian Year." What is a "COllect," Anyways? Back in 2015, our founding editor at Anglican Pastor, Greg [...]
The best way to describe my journey to Anglicanism is to say that I stumbled into it. But before I get to the Anglican part, I have to talk about my journey to becoming a Christian. My Christian Journey I grew up in an Indian Hindu family, and my first experience attending church was in high school. A friend invited [...]
This post is a part of Rookie Anglican, a blog dedicated to Making Anglicanism Accessible. A Brief Defense of “Conversion” Stories Sometimes I wish I lived in Church of the first Millennia, before the Great Schism of 1054. Things would be a heck of a lot easier. One could simply say “I’m a Christian” and people would more or less [...]
Author and theologian J. I. Packer says of the Book of Common Prayer's influence on the British people, “Long before the age of fish and chips, the Book of Common Prayer was the Great British invention, nurturing all sorts and conditions of Englishmen and holding the church together with remarkable effectiveness.” Before the Book of Common Prayer, the prayers and [...]
The name of the Book of Common Prayer says it all. First, it is a book. It is held on our hands, taken home to our families, and becomes a part of our lives. Second, it is Common. That is, it is shared by other Anglicans from now and the past, and even by many Christians of other traditions since [...]
