Shortly after the Episcopal Church’s triennial General
Convention (GC) adjourned this past summer, an Ethical Musings’ reader sent me this
opinion on the move by GC to initiate a process to revise the Book of Common
Prayer:
The TFLPBR (Task Force for Liturgy
and Prayer Book Revision) reminds me of the Task Force to Reimagine the
Episcopal Church (TREC), which laid an egg and deservedly faded from sight.
TFLPBR will take forever to get organized and the debate over its work will be
endless. Even if you and I live long lives, there’s a significantly probability
that 1979 will remain the official book when we will have passed on. Meanwhile,
public worship in TEC is being balkanized across diocesan boundaries (and
perhaps within individual dioceses) by experimentation, supplemental liturgies,
etc. One has to ask whether GC and the other decision-making apparatus of TEC
are utterly dysfunctional.
So far, the reader’s predictions seem on target.
Furthermore, congregations increasingly rely on having their
full liturgy, sometimes with hymns, in a leaflet given to each attendee. Some congregations
use the same leaflet for a season (e.g., Advent or Lent) while others print a
new leaflet for each service. In a small but growing minority of places, the
leaflet is available electronically on worshippers’ smartphones or tablets.
More importantly, the Episcopal Church continues to shrink.
Membership and average Sunday attendance (ASA) are both declining. The percentage
of Episcopal Congregations with an ASA of 100 or less has increased from 71% to
72%. Prayer Book revision will not reverse those trends.
We are a Church that prays together rather than believes
together. The move away from a common liturgy, however, seems impossible to
stop in an era of electronic resources and congregations increasingly utilizing
a leaflet with the worship liturgy in lieu of direct dependence on the Book of
Common Prayer. Ostrich like behavior that attempts to ignore the reality of widespread
practices and growing reliance on electronic rather than printed resources is
not helpful.
Eliminating printed leaflets and electronically available
liturgies, forcing people to return to juggling the Prayer Book, hymnal(s), Scripture
insert (or Bible), and a leaflet is at best ill-advised if not impossible. Over
half of today’s Episcopalians are not cradle Episcopalians. Expecting worshippers
to engage in a juggling act is off-putting for visitors and counterproductive in
reversing years of declining attendance and membership. For better or worse,
locally printed leaflets electronically available liturgies inherently invite
local adaptations, authorized or otherwise.
The problem of proliferating liturgies and locally adapted
or developed resources is observable in many Anglican Communion provinces
including both Canterbury and York.
Instead of engaging in a futile rearguard action to
recapture what once was, the TFLPBR should begin a conversation about to
preserve our tradition of common prayer in the twenty-first century. I’ve yet
to see any constructive suggestions to move the Episcopal Church or Anglican
Communion in that direction. The longer we collectively postpone that
conversation, the greater the chance that whatever solutions are identified will
be too little, too late, and our valued tradition of common prayer will be
lost.