Good news! We’ve completed the latest edition of the Daily Office Booklet. Beginning to pray the Daily Office is a great way to start the New Year. This edition will guide you through Morning and Evening Prayer, using the lectionary readings from January through April 2026. As always, we’ve rendered PDFs for you to print in both booklet and…
Behold This Thy Family: Cranmer’s Good Friday Collects
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who led the development of the Book of Common Prayer, crafted collects for Good Friday with a special emphasis on the church as the family of God. There are three collects for the day, the only occasion for which Cranmer appointed more than one. The first asks God to “behold this thy…
The History of the Christmas Collects
We expect the Christmas Collects to celebrate the birth of Jesus, and they do. But they also surprise us by repeatedly applying the birth of Christ to the life of the Christian believer. Because he is light, we can know light. Because he was born, we can be born again. Because he shared the life…
Illumine the World: Reflections on the Midday Collects
The ordering for Midday Prayer can serve as a great way to refocus on something other than our own problems and to work on bending ourselves back out instead of staying bent in.
The History of the Lent Collects
The theme of the Lent collects is human sinfulness and our need for God. We “acknowledge our wretchedness.” We are “tempted,” and our resistance is “weak.” We have “no power in ourselves to help ourselves.” We have “disordered affections” and “unruly wills.” And so, what we need above all is “new and contrite hearts,” for…
The Collect For Purity: A Rookie Anglican Guide
The Collect for Purity is one of the gems of Anglican liturgy. It is a prayer both appealing at first glance and also one that invites a depth of reflection: on preparing the heart for worship, on the Trinity, and on the Catholic and Reformed aspects of Anglicanism. It is good we have so much…
The History of the Advent Collects
The four Advent collects offer both a concise introduction to the season and a rich overview of the grace God offers to sinners.
The History of the Easter Week Collects
Easter is a long season of feasting, lasting a full 50 days. And the celebration is especially pronounced in the first week after Easter, often called Easter Week or Bright Week. For more on the season of Easter, check out our Rookie Anglican Guide to Eastertide. In this post we outline the history of the…
The History of the Holy Week Collects
In this post we outline the history of the Holy Week Collects, which are found on pages 607-609 of the Book of Common Prayer 2019. In researching this topic, we drew especially from commentaries by Massey Hamilton Shepherd, Jr., Marion J. Hatchett, and C. Frederick Barbee and Paul F. M. Zahl. What is a collect? A collect is…
