This is a book about liturgical revision in The Episcopal Church (TEC), so it is focused on the United States and questions around the future of TEC’s Book of Common Prayer (BCP) 1979. The collection was published in 2018 just after TEC’s last General Convention, and a postscript to the preface points to the ‘middle path’ between more minimal and more maximal options for change to the prayer book for which the Convention plumped. The chapters themselves, though, were written without knowledge of how mild or radical TEC’s energies for revision would be. The chapters, all by faculty at some Episcopal seminaries in the United States, are collected together as a self-styled ‘resource’ for ‘discussion’ (p. xvi) and the Dedication page notes ‘thanksgiving for the work of [TEC’s] Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music [SCLM]’, yet it might also be noted that at times the collection pushes against some of the SCLM’s work.
Given that a very high-profile change in TEC liturgy in recent years has been new rites of marriage no longer aligned with traditional gender patterns and now encircling same-sex unions, it is surprising that there is no chapter on marriage. That omission raises the reader’s awareness that the book is depicted as ‘Vol. 1’, though there are no clues as to what might preoccupy further volumes (and nor are there any on the publisher’s website at the time of writing this review). Rather, what is to be found in this collection are chapters on the like of daily office, lectionary, hymnody and funerary. Two chapters focus on Eucharist – including the strongest revisionist tilt in the collection in James Farwell’s plea for expanded anamnesis in eucharistic prayer – and Amy Schifrin’s focus on epiclesis, in an essay sermonic in style yet welcome for its articulation (missing in most other chapters) of the social contexts of whatsoever liturgical practice might be under consideration. Schifrin writes, for example, of ‘children born on the same day in two different places within the same country, and maybe even to parents within the same church body… [growing] up to hate each other’ (p. 124). Baptism also gets two chapters, both by James Turrell, who is surely correct to point out that ‘those drafting the next revision of the prayer book – whenever it comes – will need to decide if they wish to continue in the path set by the 1979 BCP or reject its baptismal pattern and theology’ (p. 71). The BCP 1979’s Baptismal Covenant turns out to be the storm centre of the whole collection (see p. 45 as a clear example), hardly surprising given that the BCP 1979 ‘represented a revolution in the theology of baptism’ (p. 71; cf. e.g. p. 17). That the Baptismal Covenant developed by TEC has migrated not only around the Anglican Communion but to other churches beyond it – albeit often being tweaked along the way – means that some people from other churches, across and outside the Communion, will be interested in this book.
Turrell’s cautious conclusion about revision is that it is best to leave the BCP 1979 as it is and then ‘encourage the clergy and laity to live into its theology more deeply’ (p. 104). Clearly, that theology has been only partially embraced by TEC, but in fact it was only blotchily worked through the 1979 book which suffers from numerous clericalizing rubrics arguably quite at odds with the so-called ‘baptismal ecclesiology’ espoused in some of the book’s other moments. As there are oscillations within the BCP 1979 itself, Turrell’s reserve might run the risk not only of continuing confusion, but pitching many issues – including important ones – into limbo.
Some of those issues do come to the surface in this book, but others seem not in sight at all. Among the former, a good example might be the BCP’s designation of the presider as ‘celebrant’ (albeit left until the last-but-one page of the book, p. 238) – of some relevance, surely, if people are to be convinced of the implications of the baptismal ecclesiology across parts of the BCP 1979? Of the latter, the Baptismal Covenant itself – and especially its ‘so what?’ questions (BCP 1979, pp. 304-305) – invites curiosity about what is missing from this ‘resource’: just for starters, why is Amy Schifrin the only woman among ten writers? Why are questions about ‘translation’ (p. 237) shunted – alongside questions about ‘celebrant’ – to the very last chapter? And why does the multicultural make-up of the church (and society) receive no strenuous attention? I start to wonder when one author discusses ‘tribal markers’ in TEC in which some are said to wish to reappropriate Elizabethan language, prefer an eastward-facing ‘celebrant’, enjoy rubrics, and be suspicious of a number of initiatives of the SCLM (pp. 44-45), while others ‘love the questions included in the baptismal covenant’ and are associated with ‘emend[ing] prayer book material to fix perceived problems of inclusion’ (p. 45). Another author laments ‘liturgical verbiage for current theological and ideological trends’ (p. 14). And while at another point again Andrew McGowan notes that recent resources of the SCLM have included ‘other voices often left unheard’ (p. 67), this is hardly an observation that could be extended to this collection.
The book’s editor Robert Pritchard notes its ‘authors are not of one mind’, yet he says they share a common conviction that ‘care must be taken in contemplating change’ (p. xiv). Furthermore, the cover blurb suggests that the authors also think alike that ‘one source of information for the SCLM in its deliberations should be the community of academically trained liturgical scholars’. To my mind, Bryan Spinks’s chapter, which is on earlier liturgical scholars’ mistakes – and not least the influence of such mistakes on the ‘theologically questionable’ (p. 212) clericalizing of the BCP 1979’s episcopal ordination services – serves as a crucial chastening note that needs to be read right across this resource for discussion, and turned as much to those lurching towards conservative conclusions as those who ‘love the questions’. There are good things here, but I do hope Vol. 2 will search for a wider view of ‘issues in prayer book revision’, one in which liturgists ask some different questions and welcome more voices.
