Rediscover prayer book riches
Ian Hunter
CW Guest Columnist
iahunter@uwo.ca
Statistics Canada has provided recent data confirming what every priest and minister has known for a long time, namely that church attendance is plummeting.
Today less than one in four Canadians between the ages of 25 and 34 attends church as often as once a month. Two thirds of Canadians of all ages seldom attend church. Even among older Canadians (55 and older), once the church’s loyal constituency, regular attendance is dropping.
Why?
Apparently not because of any less interest in matters spiritual. Public levels of belief in God have remained virtually unchanged. Books on New Age religion and spirituality sell briskly. It is estimated that 140 million Internet pages are devoted to religion. So, if the spiritual hunger exists, why is the contemporary church so conspicuously unable to satisfy it?
Some say the church’s structures are fortress-like, unwelcoming to newcomers. Others say the church is dogmatic or moralistic, although it would be hard to find much evidence to support this claim among Canada’s Protestant denominations.
More likely the problem is not rigidity, morality or dogmatism but lack of it. Perhaps the church has so conformed to contemporary expectations that it no longer speaks with a prophetic voice about the absolute and eternal. G.K. Chesterton once remarked: "He who marries the spirit of the age will soon find himself a widower." Could it be that Canadian churches have become widowers?
Consider the Anglican Church.
Common worship
For centuries the defining feature of Anglican worship was that it was "common"—universal. One could worship anywhere in the English-speaking world and expect worship to be conducted in a language that conveyed the numinous.
Why? Because the liturgy would have been based on Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (BCP). William Shakespeare knew the prayer book well; it appeared 15 years before he was born.
Even as late as 1962, the Canadian Book of Common Prayer was dedicated (in the preface) "to the reverent and seemly worship of Almighty God."
But what satisfied centuries of worshippers was seen as inadequate in the 1970s. Trendy priests abandoned the prayer book for a green book infelicitously called The Book of Alternative Services (BAS).
The green book featured politically correct prose, a palsy-walsy approach to the Almighty and liturgies written by and for the tone deaf. The dumbing down of theology evident throughout the BAS sat easily with recent graduates from Anglican colleges, institutions where ideology mostly trumped theology.
The precipitate decline in Anglican attendance coincides with the coming of the BAS. Parishioners, who had once come to church hungry for transcendence now found enforced jollity and egalitarian claptrap the order of the day and so they voted with their feet.
Alternative liturgies
In the ‘70s the Church of England also went in for alternative liturgies. This led to a petition protesting the willful abandonment of the Book of Common Prayer; it was signed by the likes of Iris Murdoch, A. J. P. Taylor, Philip Larkin and John Gielgud.
"We are concerned," the petitioners wrote, "for the wellspring of expressive power in the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, the great originals of English life and language, informing piety and inspiring justice."
They warned of the consequences, and predicted the dwindling attendance that would accompany "such a terrible act of forgetting."
Of course their petition had no discernible impact on church headquarters; the trendies went ahead and sowed the wind and have now reaped the whirlwind of empty churches. When the Book of Common Prayer was driven to the fringes, to be retrieved occasionally to appease geezers, the Anglican Church lost what had once made its worship distinctive.
Toronto journalist Sue Careless has written a new book called Discovering the Book of Common Prayer (ABC Publishing, 2003). To a generation unfamiliar with the treasure house of the BCP, Careless explains how it came into existence and how it may be used for meditation and prayer. As P. D. James points out in her introduction, the BCP has "solaced, sustained, rebuked and exalted" Christians for more than four centuries in language "almost worthy of the God it celebrates."
It is typical of both the Anglican Church and our age that the Book of Common Prayer should so stupidly have been cast aside. Kudos to Sue Careless for assisting people to rediscover its riches.
Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University.
