Another Foray into UK History

If you read the last post and were thinking “What the heck is all this about the 1689 Proposed BCP/Alterations; I though we were in the late 1700s,” there’s a reason and I really did mean 1689.

Here’s a quick reminder exactly where 1689 falls in the course of Great Britain’s history:

Charles I made a series of poor choices—including the attempt to foist a quite catholic prayer book returning to the 1549 structure—upon the Scottish church. These choices led to a series of English Civil Wars that pitted the (caricatures ahead!) French-leaning, hierarchally-minded, ritual-loving Cavaliers of the court against the Calvinist-leaning Roundheads of the Parliamentary forces. Charles I was imprisoned and ultimately executed, leading to the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The prayer book and episcopacy were banned and the puritan/congregational Directory for the Public Worship of God became the official worship resource of the Church of England.

The French-raised Charles II, son of Charles I, was restored to the throne in 1661, and—over the objection of a Puritan delegation—reimposed both bishops and the Book of Common Prayer on the Church of England, but protestant “Dissenters” now became a recognized ecclesial identity apart from the Church. Note: This is the first time we can actually talk about “Anglican” identity and “dissenters”; before this there was simply the Church of England and parties within it. Now, “Anglican” is a choice and a particular identity rather than a legal requirement.

Charles II (like his father) was seen by many as a crypto-Catholic; his brother, James II, was just a straight-up Roman Catholic! When he came to the throne in 1686, the suspicious-minded feared that he would follow in the footsteps of Mary I and force the Church of England under the Roman yoke once again.

At this point, a group of leading Churchmen decided that a liturgical bulwark needed to be erected against a potential wave of Romanism. Their strategy was to create a prayer book that would be acceptable to the majority of protestants in England, Churchmen and Dissenters alike. This was the movement that began the effort to create the prayer book alterations of 1689. This book was very protestant (removing many manual actions like signs of the cross and rooting the Apocrypha out of the lectionaries), and also rationalist (chiefly in deciding which parts of Scripture and the Psalms in particular were “unworthy” of public worship).

However, the work was never completed, the alterations never blossomed into a complete book, and it was never sent to Parliament. Rather, James’ sister Mary and her husband, William of Orange, conducted a protestant coup—also known as the Glorious Revolution—that toppled James from the throne of England and put away fears of popish perfidy.

But, James II was still theoretically King of Scotland…

Although the throne of Scotland was linked with that of England, a certain percentage of Scots—especially those in the Highlands—upheld the Stuart claim to the throne. But there was another problem too, an ecclesiastical one.

The ordination and consecration rites of the 1662 BCP require an oath to the king; the coup of William & Mary created a technical violation of that oath. While most bishops did not feel compelled to support a Catholic sovereign and parliament passed a law absolving clergy of their oaths to the deposed King James, a very small group of bishops—largely in the North of England and the bishops of Scotland—remained loyal to their oaths. It was, they decided, not a matter of law but honor. These became known as the non-juring bishops; Parliament dealt with this situation in 1691 by appointing 6 new bishops to replace the English ones (as the other 3 had died before then). The Church of Scotland was re-established as Presbyterian to punish the non-juring Scots. Many of the Scottish bishops, though, remained Jacobites (supporters of James & the Stuart line) and, no longer bound to the text of the authorized prayer book, began a series of liturgical reforms to bring the liturgy back into conformity with Antiquity.

Ok—here’s where this all gets real. The Jacobite problem did not go away nearly as easily as everyone hoped. Between 1745-1748 a series of laws to excise the Jacobites from any power at all, led to a non-recognition of Scottish orders. That is, as far as the Church of England was concerned, Scottish clergy and bishops—or anyone else ordained or consecrated by Scottish bishops–were not recognized as such within the Church of England.

On the Other Side of the Pond…

As we saw previously—Americans wanted bishops. Accordingly, John Talbot, an English missionary to New Jersey, returned to London and, along with his colleague Robert Welton, were consecrated as bishops by Ralph Taylor, one of the Non-juring bishops. They then came to America, to St. Mary’s in Burlington, New Jersey and Christ Church, Philadelphia respectively, and clandestinely began their episcopal duties. “Clandestinely,” because their consecration had been in 1722, and the British were still in control of the State in the New World. The bishop of London quickly suppressed them, in part out of concern for Jacobite sympathies as well as their unauthorized consecrations; Talbot was dismissed from his missionary post and Talbot was summoned back to England by George I in 1726 (he fled to Portugal instead).

Now—remember again the state-by-state character of the Church after the Revolution. States, and the church bodies within them, tended to work independently unless compelled to work together for a larger purpose. Additionally, the letters between state church leaders and state convention notes reveal a split in emphasis between (broadly) the northern and southern states. The southern states preferred to bind themselves together into a unity with a constitution and shared liturgy, then work together on the problem of the episcopacy: this was the work that Dr. William White had been about, discussed in the previous post. The northern states preferred to address the issue of episcopacy head-on as the bishop would play a large role in determining the constitution and the liturgy; they felt that the southern states and Dr. White’s conventions were going about things in the entirely wrong way.

Some of the clergy of New York and those of Connecticut (the state with the most clergy of any in America) decided in 1783 to send Dr. Samuel Seabury to London for consecration as the Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Connecticut. (I had always assumed that Seabury was the first bishop of the Episcopal Church—but he wasn’t! He has consecrated before “the Episcopal Church” was a thing!) Upon reaching London, he was met with a variety of excuses. If he was to be the Bishop of Connecticut had the civil authorities of the state sent along documentation to that effect? Well, no, because Connecticut’s State Church was Congregationalist. Had he been provided lands or a living by the state or some other means? The Archbishop of Canterbury informed Seabury that without a formal requisition from the State, there was no way he could put a bill before the House of Commons to allow the consecration of American bishops. Various judges and crown lawyers consulted by Seabury suggested that this would not be the case; he was being put off, it seemed.

(In fact, there were concerns on the British side that consecrating bishops might be seen as a breach of the truce, and the Ministry refused to allow bishops to be consecrated without the consent of the American Congress.)

As a result, Seabury says, “I turned my attention to the the remains of the old Scots Episcopal Church, whose consecrations I knew derived from England, and their authority in an ecclesiastical sense, fully equal to the English Bps” (Hist Notes & Docs, 76). There had been earlier correspondence between Seabury and the Scottish bishops, indicating that they would be willing to consecrate him; this correspondence had lapsed as Seabury and others in Connecticut had appealed to both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York. It’s noteworthy that on re-establishing that correspondence and hearing a positive reply from the Scots, Seabury communicated his thanks, told them he’d be arriving around the 10 of November and—furthermore:

As far as I am concerned, or my influence shall extend, nothing shall be omitted to establish the most liberal intercourse and union between the Episcopal Church in Scotland and in Connecticut, so that the Members of both may freely communicate together in all the offices of Religion, on Catholic and Primitive principles.

Hist. Notes & Docs, 231

The end of that last line is particularly significant. I’m ignorant of the prior communication, but it sounds like Seabury here understood that a pre-condition of his consecration was the use of a Eucharistic Prayer based on “Catholic and Primitive principles” which was the language used by the non-jurors and Scots for the liturgical alterations they had been making since their separation from the Church of England.

Dr. Seabury accordingly became Bishop Seabury on Saturday, the 13th of November, 1784 in Aberdeen, receiving consecration from Primus Robert Kilgour, Bishop John Skinner, and Bishop Arthur Petrie. On Monday the 15th of November, a Concordat was signed between the Episcopal Church in Scotland and the Episcopal Church in Connecticut that was agreed to and signed by the assembled bishops of Scotland and Connecticut. Article III declares the two churches to be “in full communion,” Article IV calls for “a conformity in worship and discipline…as is consistent with the different circumstances and customs of nations,” and then there’s Article V which states in part;

…the Scottish Bishops are very far from proscribing to their brethren in this matter, they cannot help ardently wishing that Bishop Seabury would endeavour all he can, consistently with peace and prudence, to make the celebration of this venerable mystery conformable to the most primitive doctrine and practice in that respect, which is the pattern the Church of Scotland has copied after in her Communion office, and which it has been the wish of some of the most eminent divines of the Church of England, that she also had more closely followed than she seems to have done since she gave up her first reformed Liturgy used in the reign of Edward VI. [i.e., the 1549 BCP], between which, and the form used in the Church of Scotland, there is no difference in any point, which the primitive Church reckoned essential to the right ministration of the Holy Eucharist.

Hist. Notes & Docs., 237

Thus—a key part of the transfer of the episcopacy between Scotland and Connecticut was a return to the pattern of Cranmer’s initial 1549 Book of Common Prayer. This is exactly what Bishop Seabury did and here’s how his Communion Office lines up with the previous prayer books:

Sure enough, Seabury’s office follows the 1549 with the exception of the repositioned Invocation. Note the colors now—blue represents the “Catholic and Primitive” pattern while yellow represents the Protestant pattern.

This Communion Office represents a profound change in terms of what the experience of the Eucharistic liturgy would be from its protestant precursors.

However, this came from a Scottish-consecrated American bishop. And therefore one not legally recognized by the Church of England…

The Process

The first major convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the former Colonies took place in Philadelphia from September 27 to October 7, 1785. In attendance were delegates from the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. Representation was not even across these states, of course. At this point there were only two orders, clerical and lay, and the tally of each lay as follows:

State	Clerical Delegates	Lay Delegates
New York	1	1
New Jersey	2	1
Pennsylvania	5	13
Delaware	1	6
Maryland	5	2
Virginia	1	1
South Carolina	1	2

As you can see, location mattered quite a lot in terms of attendance; Pennsylvania had more delegates than the Northern and Southern States combined, and the other two Mid-Atlantic States (Maryland and Delaware) only compounded the regional advantage. Note that each delegation had at least one Clerical and one Lay delegate; this will become important in a moment.

The four main matters on the table were interconnected with one another: the construction of a constitution to govern the church, the necessary alterations to the Book of Common Prayer, a framing of the articles of belief, and a plan to secure the Episcopacy. A central and overriding theme of the previous convention had been a consensus that “said church shall maintain the doctrines of the Gospel, as now held by the Church of England; and shall adhere to the liturgy of the said church” (Journals, ii). Everything depended on producing documents that clearly demonstrated that the Protestant Episcopal Church of the gathered states shared the doctrines, discipline, and liturgy of the church of England in order to secure the consecration of three Americans to begin a valid line of bishops upon the American continent.

Convention got underway on the morning of the 28th, the Rev. Griffiths of Virginia reading prayers and, with one vote per state, Dr. William White of Pennsylvania was elected President. The evening session ran through the various articles of the New York Convention of 1784 approving them and appointed a committee:

…consisting of one Clerical and one Lay Deputy from the Church in each state, to consider of and report such alterations in the Liturgy, as shall render it consistent with the American revolution and the constitutions of the respective states: And such further alterations in the Liturgy, as it may be adviseable for this Convention to recommend to the consideration of the Church here represented.

Journals, 5

Furthermore, a later resolve called for:

…A Committee, to be composed as aforesaid, prepare and report a draft of an ecclesiastical constitution for the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.

Journals, 6

After this resolve, a committee was selected by name and a clarification identified that the liturgical alterations would be carried out by this same committee. Thus, both the Constitution and the Liturgy were prepared by the same 14 people. (It’s unclear what the other 18 were doing…)

The Revisions were completed by October 3rd, services for the 4th of July and the First Tuesday of November as Thanksgiving were completed, a committee consisting of Dr. White (President), Dr. Smith (chair of the Liturgy committee), and Dr. Wharton were to ensuring the printing of the revised Liturgy, publishing with it “such of the reading and singing psalms and such a Kalendar of proper lessons for the different Sundays and Holy-days throughout the year as they may think proper.” (Journals, 15).

Of this revised liturgy, 4,000 copies were printed for distribution within the states, and the sheets were sent to England that 50 copies might be printed there for the consideration of the English bishops.

The Contents

The base text for the 1786 Proposed Book was the 1774 Oxford printing of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. However, as the preface of the Proposed Book makes clear, it was greatly influenced by the aborted alterations of the 1689 BCP. Indeed, the preface sets out the 13 points of dispute that the 1689 alteration attempted to make and states “By comparing the following book, as now offered to the Church, with this preface and the notes annexed, it will appear that most of the amendments or alterations which had the sanction of the great Divines of 1689 have been adopted, with such others as are thought reasonable and expedient” (1786 PrBCP, vii). Dr. Smith’s sermon preached at the Convention on the prayer book changes delivers an encomium on the 1689 commissioners going so far as to identify the greatest of the lay influencers as “the great Lord [Francis] Bacon, the father of almost all reformation and improvement in modern philosophy and science” (Liturgae Americanae, xvi). The implication is that the 1689 proposals and their inclusion in the 1786 BCP reflect a prayer book birthed consciously in the New Age of Reason.

The Communion Office appears surprisingly early in the book—right after the Prayers & Thanksgivings that follow the Daily Office. Liturgae Americanae presents a parallel in 4 columns; on one page is the Standard Edition of 1892 and the Standard Edition of 1790 (supplemented as needed by the editions from 1793-1871). On the facing page is the Proposed Book of 1786 and the 1775 Edition of the 1662 BCP. By looking at this page containing the 1786 and 1775/1662 it’s easy to see the differences:

• Omission of the initial Lord’s Prayer
• Omission of the two Collects for the King following the 10 Commandments
• The Creed
• In the Prayers for the whole state of Christ’s Church the substitution of “Rulers and Governors” for language about “Kings and Princes”
• The Gloria in excelsis is shortened by cutting out the “Thou that takest away” sections
• A number of the concluding rubrics including the Black Rubric on kneeling not meaning adoration are also dropped.

Thus, the liturgy can be diagrammed in relation to its predecessor very simply:

The Result

There was dissatisfaction with the Proposed Book on both sides of the Atlantic. The more important side—the English one—was shocked at the omission of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds and also the alteration of the Apostles’ Creed which changed Christ’s descent to hell to “the place of departed spirits.” Another non-prayer book issue was the notion in the Constitution that laymen would have anything to do with the discipline of a bishop. However, after a variety of assurances that the omission of the Nicene Creed was accidental only and that the Apostles’ Creed wording would be replaced and “departed spirits” relegated to a footnote, the Church of England agreed that the Protestant Episcopal Church in the various states was in continuity with its own doctrine and discipline.

Accordingly, three men—Samuel Proovost of New York, William White of Pennsylvania, and David Griffith of Virginia—were identified as the three who would be sent to England to be consecrated as bishops. Griffiths fell ill, though, and was unable to make the journey. Despite that circumstance, Proovost and White left for England in July, 1786. After a good deal of conversations, meetings, and Parliament passing an act allowing the consecration as bishop of non-Englishmen who did not swear allegiance to the king, Proovost and White were consecrated in the chapel at Lambeth on February 4th, 1787, and arrived home on Easter of that same year.

The English episcopacy had come to America. But—with only two bishops; one more would be needed for valid consecrations in the New World…

[Disclaimer: As most folks here know, I am a New Testament scholar by training and a patristist/medievalist by inclination. I do not claim to be an authority on colonial America or the early Republic. I have perused some key second sources and primary sources on this matter, chiefly the early Journals of the General Conventions and the reminiscences of Bp. William White. So—caveat lector.]

Churchmen (as Anglicans were then known) were found in most of the American Colonies before the Revolution with a greater concentration in the Mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies. Although present in the North, the Congregationalist churches were stronger there. Nine of the 13 colonies had established state churches receiving support from taxpayers; they break down as follows:

Anglican	Puritan/Congregationalist	None
Virginia	Massachusetts	Rhode Island
Maryland	Connecticut	Pennsylvania
North Carolina	New Hampshire	Delaware
South Carolina		New Jersey
Georgia
New York

After the Battle of Yorktown at the end of 1781, it became clear to all that the Colonies were going to win their independence from the British Crown. Dr. William White, a leading Churchman of Pennsylvania, began writing regarding what the Protestant Episcopal Church would look like at the conclusion of the war and under the new regime. The Treaty of Paris concluded hostilities and opened the way for “what came next” in September of 1783.

Now, do recall that the period between 1781 and 1789 as the era of ACPU—the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union—which created a bond amongst the fledgling states with a relatively weak federal government. The Constitution would not appear until1789. This is important, because in these first years of organization, states held a stronger sense of their own autonomy and jurisdiction than they would later.

With the coming and eventual ending of the Revolution and the political thoughts thereof, changes occurred with respect to the state-funded churches. New York and North Carolina abolished the state establishment of their churches in 1777 and 1776 respectively. Six states continued to fund churches with taxpayer funds within the ACPU era and beyond; these break down into two groups—those who continued to fund a single denomination, and those who enabled taxpayers to direct funds to any Protestant Church:

State	Denomination	Disestablished
Massachusetts	Congregationalist	1833
Connecticut	Congregationalist	1818
New Hampshire	Congregationalist	1819
South Carolina	Christian Protestant religion	1790
Georgia	Protestant	1798
Maryland	Christian religion	1810

Virginia suspended its support of the Anglican Church early in the Revolutionary War, but legislators fought in the 1780’s whether there should be a tax supporting all Christian churches. Jefferson and Madison succeeded in passing a religious liberty law in 1786 that official separated Church and State.

The reason why all of this matters to us in talking about the 1789 Communion Office is twofold: first, it provides a clearer sense of the general religious character of the new states; second, it sheds light on a dynamic that was to impact the prayer book—bishops.

Bishops were a divisive issue in early America (which came as a surprise to me!), and the strongest opponents of bishops were not even Churchmen. The reason for this opposition makes a lot more sense if we consider the British context; in England, bishops automatically became members of the House of Lords—the upper chamber of legislative assembly. Following that model, would Protestant Episcopal bishops automatically become members of the state senate for any states that had an established church? This is why William White’s writings from 1782 initially suggested that bishops might not be needed in a post-Revolutionary Anglican church.

Despite these external discussions, the Churchmen in America began to assemble themselves in 1784. Some clergy from New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania assembled in May, 1784 and called for a larger convention in October of that year. This convention convened in New York City, passed some basic organizational principles and called for an even larger convention the next year to be held in Philadelphia. A key article of those organizational principles was article 4:

4. That the said church shall maintain the doctrines of the Gospel,
as now held by the Church of England; and shall adhere to
the liturgy of the said church, as far as shall be consistent with the
American revolution, and the constitutions of the respective states .

Journals of the General Conventions, ii

Thus, the official liturgy of the Protestant Episcopal Church remained the 1662 Book of Common Prayer with as-yet unspecified alterations to make it amenable to the American context.

The called Convention would assemble in Philadelphia in September-October, 1785 and take up the major questions of the church, chief among them, the necessary alterations that would result in the Proposed Prayer Book of 1786 to which we shall turn in the next post.

Quick Rehearsal of English History

Let’s do a recap of how the first two English prayer books came about, because they set up the two fundamental structural choices offered to Anglicans regarding the shape of the Communion Office.

Henry VIII came to the throne of a Catholic England in 1509; the most common liturgy of the day was the Latin-language Sarum Rite although other Latin uses were also used around the kingdom.

The rise of the New Learning in Europe had many people in many countries questioning many things including the nature of the Church and State.

Martin Luther started an enduring Protestant movement on the Continent with the posting of his 95 Theses in 1517; Jean Calvin broke with the Roman Church around 1530, bringing his ideas to the Continental reformation.

Henry was against both of these and wrote against Luther’s views on the sacraments, receiving the title “Defender of the Faith” from the Pope, still a title held by English monarchs.

In 1532, Henry VII made a structural break with the Roman Church, but was very conservative liturgically and theologically. In the 1540’s he declared the official liturgical books of the Church of England to be the Latin Sarum Missal and Breviary along with a bilingual Latin/English Primer.

Yes, the first official liturgies of the Church of England were in Latin…

On the death of Henry, his son Edward the 6^th came to the throne under the influence of very protestant regents.

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer led a committee of bishops, both traditional and protestant in the production the first English liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, in 1549. The basis of this book was liturgical work that Cranmer had done under Henry VIII and followed Henry’s traditional beliefs. As a result, this first Communion Office with in the 1549 BCP was a very traditional one, closely following the Sarum Rite but with a number of Lutheran leaning changes.

Due to criticism from Martin Bucer, Peter the Martyr, other Calvinist reformers and English protestants who didn’t feel that the first prayer book had gone far enough, Cranmer and a different group of English bishops produced a second effort three years later incorporating a variety of Calvinist revisions to the Communion Office and other portions of the prayer book.

The differences between these two initial books set up the two options that Anglicans would build from in the succeeding centuries:

Comparing the Contents

In order to get the clearest possible sense of what these two options contained with reference to the Communion Office and how they compared with what came before, here’s a line-up of the major liturgical elements of the Communion Office of the Latin Sarum Rite, the 1549 BCP and the 1552 BCP:

The color-coding here identifies the placement of elements in the traditional pattern in blue and protestant placements in yellow.

The wild thing here is that Cranmer did not substantially change the words of the service. While he did add a number of things, the text remained mostly the same. But he moved key elements around that had important theological ramifications.

The single biggest change in the experience of the 1552 Communion Office is that the reception of the elements come immediately after the Institution Narrative. So, after a vestigial Invocation (that I can’t call a true Invocation of the Holy Spirit on the gifts) and the Words of Institution, the bread (having been broken within the Words of Institution) and wine are then distributed to the people. The Oblation and rest of the Canon could be said after the reception or else the Post-Communion Prayer could be said.

The Lord’s Prayer was moved after the reception of the elements, not before, lest anyone think that the “daily bread” being requested was the Eucharist. The Prayer of Humble Access was moved to the very beginning and prayed by the priest alone so that it would be said before the reception of the elements but separated from it.

Finally, the Gloria in excelsis was moved to the very end of the service. I don’t recall reading any good reasons why this was done, but I have my own theories. One of Calvin’s challenges with the traditional Communion Office was his concern about the actual location of the Body of Christ. Christ had ascended, and was therefore in heaven. Thus, he interpreted the phrase “Lift up your hearts” to mean, spiritually ascend into heaven where Christ is.

Now, in the theological logic of the traditional rite, the congregation’s entire worship is conducted within the presence of the whole heavenly host—and a primary signal for that is opening with one of the classic songs of the angels: the Gloria in excelsis. The other angelic hymn is the Sanctus which takes place in the Communion Office after the opening dialogue to “Lift up your hearts,” and after the invocation to join with all the hosts of heaven. My read is that the Gloria in excelsis was moved to the end of the rite in service of Calvin’s notion that the congregation is not in a heavenly place until that spiritual ascent that begins with the Communion Office’s opening dialogue.

Making the Choice

Mary I suppressed the1552 Book of Common Prayer when she returned England back to the Roman fold. When her sister Elizabeth made the Church of England separate again, the rite of the 1552 book was mostly restored. A few pieces of verbiage from the 1549 book were put back in, but structurally, it followed 1552.

Even after the English Civil Wars and their suppression of the Book of Common Prayer in favor of the much more Calvinist Directory for the Public Worship of God, the Restoration of the monarchy brought back in the prayer book that would become the official liturgy of the British Empire as it spread across the world, the 1662 BCP. By looking at its contents in comparison to the first two books, it’s clear to see what happened:

The structure of the 1552 Communion Office proved decisive and this Calvinist arrangement is what the Colonists would have used from the first English foundations in America through the American Revolution.

Having discussed the two discontinuities that a present Episcopal worshipper would experience encountering the 1789 Communion Office, it’s time to point out the continuity–and it’s a pretty obvious one. As a commenter here noted when I posted the texts, it’s amazing how close the common content is between these two prayer books separated by almost 200 years.

The text of Rite I is substantially the same as the contents of the 1789 rite. Yes, there are some minor differences in phrasing or wording, but for the most part I could rely on my memory of Rite I to supply the texts I needed to say.

There’s not a whole lot left to say on this point.

Except, maybe, that an investigation like this reveals how different the Rite II material is from Rite I and the prayers we had been using for some 500 years. I’m all in favor of liturgical scholarship and liturgical advance, but I do feel like we lost something of our Anglican heritage in relegating our primary means of continuity to Rite I and not having even one prayer in Rite II partaking of a modernized and updated form of the classical Anglican rite.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—if we want a focus on baptismal ecclesiology you can’t get more of it than the language of us abiding in Christ and him in us which has been stripped from our current rites along with the notion of self-oblation.

Now we’ll turn to the past for a bit and look at the sources of the 1789 Communion Office. The title of the presentation these posts are based on was “The 1789 Communion Office: A Surprising Liturgy Now and Then.” We’ve covered the “Now” part; now we’ll turn to why an early American congregation would have found this so surprising.

The second discontinuity experienced in the 1789 Communion Office for a worshipper familiar with the current prayer book is twofold; first, there a quite a number of elements placed in a different order from the present, and second, there are a few insertions we don’t have within our current rites. It’s easiest to present these changes in a chart:

By orienting the main liturgical elements by means of some common standard pieces, you can see where the dislocations occur. As you can see, both the 1928 and the 1979 American BCPs shift the service elements as both received input from successive waves of liturgical studies and theological shifts within the Anglican Communion and the Ecumenical Movement. I often remark that a lot of modern Episcopalians consider the 1928 BCP to be a very traditional book based on its use by traditionalists inside and outside of the Episcopal Church. However, it changed things in a number of ways and was fairly radical within the family of American BCPs. There is no doubt, however, that the 1979 BCP did bring some major changes driven by the Liturgical Renewal Movement and its ecumenical insistence on a return to 4th century ideals.

Here’s a version of the above chart that clearly marks the changes and when they appeared:

The first moving block shifts the Prayers of the People, the Exhortation, and the Confession & Absolution after the Offertory, functionally shifting it outside of the Communion Office proper. This movement elevates these prayers to be their own section, and, through juxtaposition, makes them a response to the readings and sermon within the Service of the Word

The second moving block–accomplished in the 1928 BCP–was the collecting of both the Lord’s Prayer and the Prayer of Humble Access after the Consecratory Canon and immediately before the Reception of the elements. This is an important theological change which I am going to put off describing because it will make much more sense when we get to our discussion of the sources of the 1789 BCP–so put a pin in that for the moment.

The third moving block is the yeeting of the Gloria in excelsis back to the beginning of the service. This current placement conforms to the classical place of the Gloria and, I suggest, undoes a key Calvinist theologically motivated structural move. Again, more on this in a later post.

There are a few new items that do not make this chart, focused as it is on the Communion Service Proper. The initial Lord’s Prayer will be a surprise to everyone, but the Ten Commandments will only surprise Rite II congregants as Rite I retains the option to use this in our present book. This is then followed by Christ’s Summary of the Law which is the Rite I either/or with the Decalogue. The concluding prayer to follow both the laws and commandments does not appear in our prayer book in either rite.

Within the Communion Office itself the main new item will be the Exhortation to Communion. There are three different Exhortations in the 1789 BCP: the first to be read the week before the Eucharist will be celebrated and warning the congregants who wish to receive to prepare themselves, the second to be used if the congregation is negligent in receiving the Eucharist, and the third–the one included in my post containing the text of the office–for use in the service where the Eucharist is being celebrated. For reference, large parishes would usually celebrate the Eucharist on the first Sunday of each Month and on Festivals (Christmas & Easter), smaller and country parishes would usually celebrate in quarterly, but there were regional variations that impacted this as well. Laity were expected to receive a minimum of 3 times a year. The 1928 BCP retained these three Exhortations, but moved them after the service as an optional item.

For most modern worshippers experiencing the 1789 service, the Exhortation will be a new experience. However it may not be or need not be… Our current book has an Exhortation on page 316-7 that can serve as a lead-in to Confession & Absolution with either the Penitential Office at the start of a service or in its traditional place between the Prayers of the People and the Confession & Absolution. (I will say, that I’ve never experienced it in all of my years of church-going though.)

So–that’s the second discontinuity between the 1789 Communion Office and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, a reordering of elements and the inclusion of unfamiliar liturgical elements (even those that are retained though rarely used in the present book).