I recently attended a service that followed the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. I am a priest who never knew the 1928 Prayer Book: The so-called new Prayer Book was proposed one year after I was born, and made official when I was four. For me, and many Episcopalians today, there is only one Book of Common Prayer – and that one was published in 1979.

I’ve never understood what all the hubbub was about with the 1979 Prayer Book. Even after studying the 1928 book and its predecessors, I thought the biggest improvement in ’79 was that they cleaned up the font and layout. My opinion changed, however, when I worshiped for the first time using the 1928 Prayer Book. I’d like to say I “participated” in the service, but that verb never came to mind. I found the experience bookish, clergy-centered, tedious and vastly more concerned with saying the right things than experiencing what it means to be a living member of the Body of Christ. Heading home that day, I was proud to be a member of a church that takes the revisions highlighted in our current Prayer Book to heart.

The 1979 Prayer Book is a new wineskin, to borrow scriptural language, that bears the fruit of a vineyard planted and nurtured ages ago. I understand the fear people must have felt when trial supplements and, later, the current version were introduced. We even witness some of that anxiety today when people talk about the possibility of a 2012 Prayer Book (even though that idea has never been fully supported, financially or otherwise). 

I believe we’ll never need another Prayer Book. I’m not saying that BCP 1979 is perfect as it is; on the contrary, there are some glaring compromises and rubrics in that 31-year-old text that are being amended now and will continue to be amended. Nor am I saying we don’t deserve new prayers for a new age; on the contrary, the church is enriched by the supplements we receive. I’m saying one key piece of the revisions that resulted in our current Prayer Book was that we published a book that, in essence, ended all Anglican reliance on Prayer Books. And that, in my opinion, is a good and holy thing.

Our current Prayer Book is a catalogue of prayer resources. It offers a host of rich prayers and even two (some say three) different rites, respecting the distinctness of local tradition and congregational practice. No longer is the Prayer Book the set, standard, and ’stablished form – a reminder that the 16th century original had more to do with the High Middle Ages than the body of believers in the New Testament. (A well-run empire requires uniformity, after all.) The 1928 book was the last of its kind, and I understand the loss people felt: no longer do we just turn the pages, one after another; no longer does the priest, up there, run the service; no longer are all the readings and collects printed between the covers; no longer does it all seem to be neatly, tightly, uniformly packaged together. No, the 1979 book doesn’t work in the same way as its predecessors. Now, the Prayer Book allows – and, indeed, encourages – local faith communities to worship in their own cultural context, while not losing the core principles of Anglican Christian heritage. We may not be uniform, but if we take seriously the revisions in 1979 we might get closer to the One-ness for which Jesus prayed.

Our current Prayer Book focuses on discipleship, not just attendance. Worshiping according to the previous book, I became aware that I was not there to participate. It was all conducted “up there” by trained professionals. An emphasis on attendance and duty worked well for many years, or so I’ve heard. Membership was about attendance, and so long as people kept showing up, we were fine.

The 20th century revisions reminded us that membership is not only about attendance.  Membership is about discipleship. Holy Baptism is the first sacrament in the current Prayer Book, teaching us we are members of a mystical union, not a local charter organization, and that we practice our membership in something to which we are intimately wed and yet rests just beyond our grasp, called Holy Communion. The chief criteria for being “in” is not whether we’re able to say the right things in front of a bishop. Now we’re talking about the ways we live our lives. Our catholic and apostolic faith carries with it the expectation that we will practice that faith regularly, do good often, love others in the same way we love ourselves and respect the dignity of every human person. Our Prayer Book calls us to discipleship, and I, for one, would be loathe to go back to a neatly packaged liturgy that followed its own internal logic and failed to respond to the cries for justice just outside our sacristy windows.

The 1979 American Book of Common Prayer is truly a book to end all books. Once we practice the faith it proclaims we simply cannot go back to another way of doing things. And yet it’s up to us to kindle these bold faith claims and remember it’s not just a newer version of the old.

A wise priest once told me that the roots of the current struggle in our Anglican Communion have to do with the fact that we intentionally broke with tradition and did a new thing in 1976 and 1979. The more I understand about our current Prayer Book – and the more I experience those who want nothing more than to dash back to 1928 – the more I believe he is exactly right.  And if he is right, let us by the grace of God actually live up to those standards: no longer turning pages in a neat and orderly fashion, as if the world exists in a chancel, but loving God, serving others without condition, and proclaiming ourselves disciples, first. As it turns out, we’ve never needed a Prayer Book to do that.

The Rev. Greg Syler is rector of St. George’s, Valley Lee.