“MODULAR LITURGIES” AS COMMON PRAYER FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series on Anglican Congregationalism and liturgical reform. The first part can be found at this link.
In the mid-2010s, there was a trend in smartphone design of “modular smartphones,” which would have a common base but could have unique modules based on the needs of the user, such as different types of speakers or cameras, but also game controllers, projectors, or even modules that could conduct an eye exam. (1, 2) But, at its core, it would be the same phone as everyone else had. In the Episcopal Church of 2025, we have nine different authorized Eucharistic Prayers (if you don’t include the inclusive language versions of the Rite II prayers), but still, worshipping communities take Eucharistic Prayers from the Iona Community (which is Presbyterian), utilize Wendell Berry’s writings in place of Thomas Cranmer’s, and culturally appropriate texts from the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia. (3) Much like those modular smartphones all had the same base but with different attachments based on consumer need, modular liturgies, as proposed in this article, are liturgies that share the same base of texts, orders, and rhythms, but can have different features (such as registers of language or additional devotions) depending on the needs of the gathered worshipping community in which it is used.
Common prayer is about unity, but also familiarity. A real beauty of the liturgy is found when one becomes so immersed in the ritual and the comfortable words of the liturgy that they don’t have to pick up a BCP or a leaflet - they can let the power of God and God’s Spirit rush over them as they pray. The responses can become ingrained in oneself such that one can feel God in their bones. A unique gift of common prayer is that no matter what Episcopal Church one attends, there will be real familiarity with the responses, the format, a range of available manual actions based on their own experience, and everything else, as long as they’ve been to an Episcopal service before.
The 1979 Book of Common Prayer allows a greater flexibility than its predecessors, not only because of those multiple Eucharistic Prayers, but also because, thanks to a timely amendment at General Convention in 1976 by Bishop Claude Charles Vaché of Southern Virginia, all “personal pronouns and verbs [in Rite II liturgies] may be appropriately changed to conform to the traditional language” of Rite I liturgies. (4) This was affirmed by General Convention in 2024 to allow for it to go from Rite I to Rite II, (5) and versions based on An Australian Prayer Book and Common Worship (from the Church of England) are hosted on the Episcopal Chant database. (6) But what should we do then, for those who want more contemporary prayers, when, if we take into account that we can make Rite I into Rite II and Rite II or Enriching our Worship into Rite I, we have eighteen authorized Eucharistic Prayers and a whole smörgåsbord of options for the Daily Office and other services?
The first thing we would need to do would be to define what the overall poetic tone and textual style of these modern prayers (updated for the 2020s as opposed to “contemporary” for the Rite II and EOW texts) should be, and as a Rite I user in my personal devotions who has attended solid Rite II parishes, I’m not the right person to answer that question. But, instead of coming up with even more rites and rituals that will only be used in a certain number of parishes and never touched in some others, let’s ask the people who want these to propose updated versions, with the help of “the editorial pen of a few poets and prose stylists,” who could include “Spencer Reece, Lauren Winner, … [and Marilynne] Robinson,” amongst others. (7)
There will be times that we need to fully revise our liturgies, whether it is to remove the underlying antisemitism of our Good Friday liturgy (8) or update the language around disability found in the Litany of Penitence on Ash Wednesday. (9) Even Marion Hatchett himself offered a whole list of proposed changes in the 1997 edited collection Leaps and Boundaries: The Prayer Book in the 21st Century. Modularity of language would allow for our continued work of figuring out what, in the words of the Custodian of the Book of Common Prayer J. Neil Alexander, “this [prayer] book is calling us to do” for our common mission. (10)
Modular language and smaller technical fixes would also allow for time – time to live into and appreciate what the 1979 Book has and continues to call us to, but also time for the generation of liturgists, musicians, and rubric nerds who, according to some, count as youth and young adults, to take their place and their leadership role. By the time that the 1979 Book was first presented to General Convention, Marion Hatchett and Howard Galley were not yet 50, Louis Weil was only just 40, and Frank Griswold was still in his 30s. I am not in love with the framing from a 2012 report around revising The Hymnal 1982 that a revision should be “a gift to the next generation” (11) in part because it does not invite the people who will live with that book for decades after it is written to be involved in the process of building it, which should be taken into account at all levels of church leadership and in considering what we should do next liturgically, especially considering that younger Episcopalians tend to prefer more traditional forms of worship.
The liturgical scholar Shawn Strout has argued that Cranmer’s principles of reform, found in his preface to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, boil down to the clarity of scripture, use of the vernacular, and, most importantly, the one use across England. As he notes, “the desire for one use may not have been just for the sake of clarity but also for the sake of distinctiveness. A national church, especially one separating from the Roman Catholic Church, would have to distinguish itself from other churches. The 1549 Book of Common Prayer and its subsequent revisions became that distinguishing feature.” (12) One book, one rite, one prayer. One concept that holds our liturgical life together. Would Cranmer be aghast to find out about our nine different Eucharistic Prayers and the fact that still we reach outside of our books for more? As I’ve alluded to in prior paragraphs, modularity allows us to live into Cranmer’s vision of one rite or one center as something that we discern and hold in common, but while still with appropriate contextual changes as needed.
In an article for Earth & Altar this past July, I reflected on how the common saying “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity” might affect the understanding in the Episcopal Church how what those essentials might be and how we don’t want many on a doctrinal level. (13) It is important to note that all clergy, at their ordinations, swear an oath to “conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church,” (14) and if we continue to expand our authorized liturgical offerings, at some point, the center will no longer hold (arguably it no longer does, considering that a vital rubric regarding a dominical sacrament is arguably the most frequently-broken canon). (15)
In the words of Rowan Williams, “We are an ordered Church, and an ordered Church means a Church in which the fancies, preferences and egos of those in authority are controlled.” (16) Through a modular approach to liturgical texts and language registers, there can be freedom in consistency and consistency in freedom, sharing texts across the diversity of our tradition while remaining in common prayer with each other and our God.
I am deeply indebted to, amongst many others, the Rev. K. D. Joyce for thinking this through with me.
Harry McCracken, “Project Ara: Inside Google’s Bold Gambit to Make Smartphones Modular,” Time, February 26, 2014, http://techland.time.com/2014/02/26/google-project-ara-modular-smartphone/.
For more on why their liturgies are so culturally specific and should not be appropriated, see: Christopher Douglas-Huriwai, “Haumi e! Hui e! Taiki e!: Towards a Contextual, Indigenised Liturgy,” Earth & Altar, January 7, 2020, https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/haumi-e-hui-e-taiki-e-towards-a-contextual-indigenised-liturgy.
Book of Common Prayer 1979, 14. This then allowed for the creation of the Anglican Service Book, which is freely available in PDF form online, but does have many additional items and devotions that are not part of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.
Resolution 2024-A113, “Affirm Flexibility of Idiom for Authorized Liturgies,” https://www.episcopalarchives.org/files/gc_resolutions/2024-A113.pdf.
Episcopal Chant, “Eucharistic Prayers,” https://episcopalchant.com/eucharist/eucharistic_prayers.html.
Matthew S. C. Olver, “Containing the Uncontainable: An Analysis of Expansive Language in the Episcopal Church, 1987-2018,” Anglican Theological Review 103(1), 42-43. His entire set of principles for liturgical text about God, found on these pages, are worth reading for anyone involved in the task of liturgical revision.
See: Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, “Why Good Friday was dangerous for Jews in the Middle Ages and how that changed,” The Conversation (blog), April 15, 2019, https://theconversation.com/why-good-friday-was-dangerous-for-jews-in-the-middle-ages-and-how-that-changed-114896.
See: K.D. Joyce, “Tradition and Revision in Ash Wednesday Liturgy,” Earth & Altar, February 25, 2020, https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/tradition-and-revision-in-ash-wednesday-liturgy.
J. Neil Alexander, “Embrace the Happy Occasion: Prayer Book Revision in Light of Yesterday’s Principles, Today’s Questions, and Tomorrow’s Possibilities,” in Leaps and Boundaries: The Prayer Book in the 21st Century, eds. Paul V. Marshall and Lesley A. Northup, (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1997), 183.
Church Pension Group, The Hymnal Revision Feasibility Study, 2012, 65.
Shawn Strout, “Thomas Cranmer’s Reform of the Sanctorale Calendar,” Anglican & Episcopal History 87(3), 320-324.
Richard Pryor, ““In Essentials, Unity”: A Call for Confessional Anglicanism,” Earth & Altar, July 17, 2025, https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/in-essentials-unity.
Book of Common Prayer 1979, 526.
See: James D. Prendergast, “The Debate over Open Communion in the Episcopal Church: Ecclesiastical Disobedience or Lawlessness?,” Ecclesiastical Law Journal 16(1), 32-46.
Rowan Williams, “An Appreciation of the Ecclesiastical Law Society on the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of its Foundation,” Ecclesiastical Law Journal 14(3), 324.
