Bishop Chip Edgar served on the committee that produced the 2019 Book of Common Prayer. In February, 2025, he was at Nashotah House for its induction into their Underwood Prayer Book Collection. The Rev. Ben Jeffries, who’d served as Secretary of the Prayer Book Committee, gave the following address at the service of induction and Bp Edgar thought, “That is a brilliant, easy-to-access summary of Prayer Book revision from Cranmer all the way up to 2019. It’s a tour de force!”
Bishop Edgar asked Jeffries if we could reprint his talk here and was given the handwritten manuscript on the spot. Deacon Joyce Harder transcribed it and we reprint it here, with slight edits for readability, with permission. In addition, after the talk we printed a short Q&A with Bishop Edgar about the development of our 2019 Prayer Book.
“Let your moderation be known to all men,” saith St. Paul in the Authorized Version of Philippians.
GK Chesterton, while he was still an Anglican, once quipped, “Moderation is not a compromise; moderation is a passion, the passion of great judges.”
The astonishing success of the Book of Common Prayer for the better part of these five centuries is a result of the passion the revisers have had for moderation.
Not every revision has been equally moderate, nor have the most moderate revisions been accepted by all—peace to the Cornish Rebels of 1549—but where the Prayer Book has been great, where it has taken root and flourished and guided countless millions to Christ Jesus, it has done so because of its splendid moderation. Where it has kept the “two kinds of churchmen”—Archbishop Laud’s phrase—worshiping the same Triune God under the same church roof, it has done so because of passionate moderation. The moderation of the Prayer Book is the spiritual source of Anglican unity.
Archbishop Cranmer exercised the same moderation in 1549 when he personally no longer believed in the Real Presence, but penned a Eucharistic liturgy that remained capacious of it.
Occasional blips of immoderation by God’s Providence did not endure: the 1552 Prayer Book, immoderate in its tilt toward the continental doctrine, lasted only eight months.
Moderation was returned by Queen Elizabeth and Archbishop Matthew Parker, that genius of moderation who kept the door open for the High churchmen to continue in the English fold.
The additions of 1604 clarified a handful of ambiguities that were liable to be interpreted immoderately.
The patience of the Bishops at Savoy led to moderation in the 1662 Prayer Book, as well as a moderate adjustment for the shifting cultural landscape—the inclusion of a liturgy of baptism for those of riper years, for instance.
We must remember that the Puritan theologians who rejected the 1662 did so not chiefly because of its theological content, which was moderate enough that many of them could have borne with it, but the way it was immoderately enforced by the 1662 Act of Uniformity.
The witness of Edward Reynolds, the author of the prayer we know as “The General Thanksgiving” in the Daily Office, is salient here. Reynolds was a theologian of the Westminster Assembly, Dean of Christ Church in Oxford under Cromwell, and then Bishop of Norwich in 1661 until his death in 1676.
Moderation is not a compromise.
Reynolds’ signature is on the manuscript copy of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer presented at Convocation that year. (By the way, the discovery of this manuscript edition is what suggested the idea of our College of Bishops signing a unique, pre-press edition of the 2019 Book of Common Prayer which is being presented here today.)
In the North American colonies, we see again the magnificent triumph of moderation. In the first few years of drafting prior to the 1789 Prayer Book, Bishop Samuel Seabury was of like mind with the others charged with revision—of radical, “enlightened” alteration—but as he sank his teeth into it, he apparently realized all that was at stake—all the treasures of our Catholic heritage. The 1789 Prayer Book ended up implementing only a fraction of the proposed changes, and Bishop Seabury then became its champion. In what might be the faintest praise ever given to the American Book of Common Prayer, which is yet praise, Dr. Pusey says, “Even the pared and maimed Prayer Book of the church in the United States still affords Tractarianism a home.”
Moderation is a passion.
This experience—of initially being zealous for change, but upon inquiry discovering the great and moderate gems of the Prayer Book—was a storyline that repeated itself in the creation of the BCP 2019. Initial zeal for significant overhaul and novelty—tempered by a passion for moderation.
In the Catholic revival at Oxford in the 1830s, the Tractarians did not call for a new Prayer Book; they didn’t need one. The moderation of 1662 equipped and enabled the whole project.
In the States, William Reed Huntington’s exceeding moderation allowed for the half-step of the 1892 Prayer Book, on its way to the Prayer Book of 1928, for the more fulsome incorporation of the riches of our Catholic heritage.
The revisers of the 1979 edition of the Book of Common Prayer tipped their hand on the question of moderation by publishing the provisional 1973 draft in a ZEBRA patterned cover. To be sure, the 1979 contributed many meaningful things to Prayer Book tradition, including contemporary “Englishing,” a healthy injection of seasonally changing el ements, a eucharistic shape that harmonizes with the ecumenical consensus on ancient liturgical forms, an explicit liturgy for auricular confession, and a robust Holy Week, to name but a few.
But as well as these good additions there were a good many more that were not bad but immoderate. To use Fr. Arnold Klukas’ phrase, they were revolutionary instead of evolutionary. Moreover, the language of the liturgies had in many places excised the “weighty words”—and as Dr. Packer so memorably put it, “Weighty actions call for weighty words.”
This brings us at last to the 2019 revision of the Book of Common Prayer and the first of the four guiding principles given by Archbishop Duncan as Chair of the Liturgy Task Force that drafted it: Continuity.
Moderation insists on continuity. A task which was quickly realized to have a recursive quality to it—since the 1979 BCP had been embedded in the Anglican experience for 40 years by then. So, the art of pruning back what was immoderate in the 1979 BCP must still be done moderately, lest it be itself immoderately reactionary. Thus, one way of historically locating the 2019 BCP is to take Rite I out of the 1979, put it in “you/your” instead of “thee/thine”, and walk half-way back to 1662, while making space for our Royalist Canadian brethren for it to work for them as well.
* Thus was a Daily Office lectionary indexed to the calendar year and reading continuously through Scripture restored.
* Thus many of the Cranmerian collects were restored.
* Thus was the Cranmerian ordering of the reasons for Holy Matrimony restored.
And in my opinion, a crowning gem of the BCP 2019
* The New Coverdale Psalter.
WH Auden was famously thwarted in his desires when he served on the psalter committee of the 1979 Prayer Book. He wrote, “All I can do is to try and persuade the scholars not to alter Coverdale unless there is a definite mistranslation… All I know is that Coverdale reads like poetry, and the modern versions don’t.” Unlike the final form of the 1979 Psalter, this is exactly what the New Coverdale attempts—“Not to alter Coverdale,” with translation checked by Frs. Travis Bott and John Crutchfield, and Dr. Erika Moore. A fine illustration of two of Archbishop Duncan’s other guiding words—Memorability and Musicality, as well as an exercise in moderation.
The final guiding principle was Clarity. This meant among other things shoring up the liturgies of Baptism and Confirmation with language from the 1662 Prayer Book that had been displaced in the 1979 Prayer Book, as well as adding new language in the few places where misunderstanding was common, such as “apart from your grace” before “there is no health in us.” And also simplifying from seven Eucharistic Canons in the 1979 BCP down to two, and having only one Old Testament option in the Sunday lectionary, not two, etc.
But it also meant clarity in the structural presentation—at every level. The enormous influx of Anglican-curious Evangelicals since the days of Robert Webber mean that more and more Christians are opening up a Book of Common Prayer for the first time in their living room and not in a parish church. This means that ease of access for the new user is a new priority.
A 2018 Barna survey revealed that 32% of “practicing Christian America” had engaged with a Book of Common Prayer in the past month. Thirty-two percent! This partly accounts for how a denomination of only 128,000 has sold over 70,000 copies of its Prayer Book!
So, as a meaningful contribution to the Book of Common Prayer tradition in North America:
* Seasonal propers are placed in the appendices following the second of the two Eucharistic liturgies to minimize page-flipping in the midst of prayer.
* Explanations preface each liturgy.
* All elements are given clear titles for ease of visual reference.
* Things used the most are at the front of the book.
* Also, like how the 1662 Prayer Book had to reframe Baptism after 20 years of Puritan reign—in an ecclesial context where Confirmation had taken on vastly different shapes—the 2019 Prayer Book calls for all comers to receive the laying on of a Bishop’s hands.
And in all these things, where the 2019 Prayer Book succeeds, it succeeds in moderation, hopefully clarifying and rescinding the BCP 1979 to be more moderate. In the six years that the 2019 Prayer Book has been out, it has done much to fund unity in the ACNA. This unity received advance support from the enormous province-wide reception of feedback that went into the final editing, and was latterly helped by not being an enforced Prayer Book.
Learning from the Great Ejection of 1662, the idea behind the BCP 2019 is that it would be sufficiently self-commending that Anglicans in the ACNA would want to use it, and therefore it would need no Act of Uniformity, which has generally been the case.
A moderate offering of a moderate Prayer Book.
Lastly, I wish to conclude this overview by highlighting two elements of the 2019 Prayer Book that have not received much attention, but in which I take great delight.
The first is the number of collects and Occasional Prayers in which Archbishop Duncan proposed the alteration of “them” language to “us” language, so that the church that prays with the BCP 2019 doesn’t pray that God would send them—other people—out to do his mission, but would send us. Look for this change and you’ll see it all over the place.
The second is the number of places in which Dr. JI Packer proposed the insertion of the word “fullness” before the Kingdom of God. A powerful reminder that eternal life in Jesus Christ’s Kingdom has already begun and becomes more fully realized when we die–as Dr. Packer himself did in July of 2020 with the 2019 Book of Common Prayer in his hands, having just prayed with Bishop Darrell Critch.
The 19th century Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, once called the Torah a “portable fatherland.” The Book of Common Prayer, since it has been affordable to individuals since 1662 has likewise, as the Bible arranged for prayer, been a portable fatherland to countless millions. May our BCP 2019 continue this noble, moderate tradition for generations to come.