Ordinary Means for Ordinary Times
Last week we had our new(ish) members class. One thing that I talked about was the Book of Common Prayer 2019 and the Prayer Book more generally. Why would we use a prayer book? What are the intentions behind using one Sunday after Sunday, and perhaps every day in our Christian lives (The Daily Office)?
Over the last couple of weeks I have been reading Zac Hick’s book, Worship by Faith Alone, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Reformation of Liturgy. In his book he lists eight categories that speak to what the English reformer Thomas Cranmer wanted to achieve when creating the Book of Common Prayer. The first thing to note is that it was Thomas Cranmer’s intention to unite all of England in a form of worship that was deeply biblically and gospel-centered. Chiefly, the goal of the liturgy is to invite us into gospel-centered worship in order to form a gospel-centered community. Cranmer’s categories for liturgical change included:
- Catechesis: Catechesis simply means instruction by word of mouth. It was Cranmer’s intention to bring biblical literacy to the people. Biblical understanding was a great need in his day, it remains a great need in ours.
- Affective Persuasion: An additional point of the liturgy is to stir our hearts and inflame them with a love for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each week it is my hope that the liturgy would stir hearts, that we would experience God’s goodness, and that we would grow in our love for God and neighbor.
- Missional Intelligibility: The liturgy has a plain and simple beauty that is understandable for those who hear, hopefully drawing us into the good news of Jesus Christ.
- Participation: We come to church to participate. We are all caught up in the cosmic drama that is Christ’s story and the coming of his kingdom. We gather together each and every week to bring an offering of thanksgiving, and we come to become something. We are, as John H. Westerhoff reminds us, “A community of practice.”
- Unification: Worship is an exercise in unity, we come to practice oneness despite our differences. As the Apostle Paul writes to the church at Ephesus, “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4-6).
- Simplification: Similar to Missional Intelligibility it was Cranmer’s desire that the liturgy be understood by anyone who attended.
- Antiquity: For Cranmer it was essential that the Prayer Book be rooted in church history, and those patterns of worship that stretched back to the early church.
- Scripturality: It was also crucial that the liturgy be biblical. Hicks notes, “fidelity to the scriptures was Cranmer’s chief criterion.” 2 Our liturgy is indeed scripture based and scripture saturated.
I hope these categories are helpful to you as we gather each week to worship using the Book of Common Prayer as we might be asking, “What means does God use to strengthen and sustain our faith in the day to day?” Although we may have bought into the idea that the new and novel the resplendent and radiant are what we need to keep our faith vibrant, what if God has invited us in to the long, mundane, and sometimes tedious trail?
What if we are invited into habits of the heart that help make us honest, humble, and ultimately holy? You have heard the old adage that anything worth doing takes time. Although we live in a culture that has an allergy to ritual and repetition, perhaps this is exactly where character is formed, where faith endures, and where Christ is cultivated within us. In this ordinary time, I continue to invite us to us use the Book of Common Prayer, which can be for us a “strong and faithful guide to keep us focused on the Word of God and, above all, on the One to whom that word bears witness: Jesus Christ (John 5:39).”