Introduction
The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is the liturgical heart of the Church of England – and indeed of the entire Anglican Communion across the world. It demonstrates within its pages the fullness of what the Church believes and it is in itself one of the most effective ways of teaching the Christian Faith. People learn more of God as they regularly say or sing the words that Christians have used down the ages, and this is even more important now, in an era where the vast majority know nothing of God, Jesus, prayer or the Bible and the threats of deadly disease and economic disaster seem never far away.
The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is permeated from end to end by the words of Holy Scripture and the liturgical prayers of the early Church. It follows much the same framework as the service books of the Middle Ages, but it displays a perfect balance of Word and Sacrament, a balance unique in Christendom and in this sense truly Catholic, surely deserving of special praise since it was compiled at a very time when this delicate balance had been wrecked. Rome was obsessed with the Sacraments and Geneva was obsessed with the Word. Cranmer’s lasting achievement was to create a worship book for Evangelical Catholicism, that kept all that was best of the services of the Middle Ages, while illustrating and enriching them at every point with the words of Holy Scripture.
It is worth bearing in mind that this Prayer Book was taken first to North America and then to Asia, Africa and South America, where it provided the ancestral spine from which all local liturgical developments have sprouted. But both around the world and in the Anglican Churches of England, Wales and Scotland, the sixties and later decades inspired a rash of liturgical revision, which was advertised as an attempt to make the language of worship more intelligible and accessible to people with narrower linguistic knowledge and shorter attention spans. This was a wholly commendable objective in itself.
However, liturgical revision incorporated another hidden and less praiseworthy intention. Many Anglicans in the universities and in the higher echelons of the Church had been worried since the beginning of the 20th century about some of the more muscular words about the Last Things and the more robust tenor of Prayer Book language around sin, repentance, saving faith and the duties of the Christian life contained within its services.
When the Church of England began its great programme of liturgical revision in the1960s, it embarked upon introducing a subtly different content within services, where many of the ancient words and phrases could be quietly discarded and newer theological “insights” unobtrusively incorporated. One of the early casualties and perhaps the most obvious was the loss of the Ten Commandments, summarily jettisoned from the penitential introduction to the Holy Communion service. This was a clear indication of where things would be heading, although it is amazing that this was so little appreciated at the time, even by those who should have known better.
BCP 2020 is therefore an attempt to reinstate 1662 to its honoured place among the Anglican Churches of the world and maybe to offer it as a gift to a wider ecumenical audience. Some services have been shortened to avoid linguistic overload and all language has been carefully modernised where necessary. Doctrine has been maintained and in only one case, the Baptism of Infants, has a liturgy been completely remodelled to reflect the pastoral realities and needs of young families in what is now a massively ignorant and unbelieving world.
Thus this effort is humbly offered in the service of Almighty God and His faithful Church here on earth and hopefully, as a tool in the conversion of many new people to Jesus Christ, who alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
