The Anglican Church of Canada joins the Church of England, the Scottish Episcopal Church, The Episcopal Church (USA), and others in placing their liturgical texts online. The goals are to assist liturgy planners and to encourage future web-based work of liturgical text development.
Every week many worship planners spend hours on their computers, researching and formatting liturgical texts for bulletins and screens. To support and facilitate this work, the Anglican Church of Canada’s General Synod is now releasing its primary worship texts for free download.
The following texts can now be downloaded as PDFs:
The Book of Alternative Services (BAS) despite its name “alternative,” has become the primary worship text for Sunday services and other major liturgical celebrations of the Anglican Church of Canada. 2010 marks the 25th anniversary of its publication.
For All the Saints is a resource to accompany the Calendar of Holy Persons in the BAS. It includes propers for memorials, commemorations, and saints’ days, along with biographical information and primary source readings.
Occasional Celebrations is a collection of resources for certain pastoral and seasonal occasional services, including additional funeral rites, celebrations of new ministries, and home blessing rites.
Supplementary Eucharistic Prayers, Services of the Word, and Night Prayer is the most substantial addition to the BAS. Authorized by General Synod in 2001, it contains additional rites for Sunday services.
Selected liturgies are also available in French.
You must read this license before installing, copying, or otherwise using this web resource.
This information is drawn from here and here.
As well as any other comments, I would welcome any links to similar resources, other provinces, etc. This might be built up to a substantial resource collection on this site.
In the year after the first printing of the Book of Alternative Services, Michael Ingham published Rites for a new age: understanding the Book of alternative services. The book grew out of the experience with the BAS of his parish at the time, St Francis-in-the-Wood, West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In the Preface to the 3rd printing, the copy I have, Michael says that it is meant to be a study of the thematic content of the new rites in the BAS.
The BAS has been probably as controversial in Canada as was the introduction of TEC’s 1979 BCP. Michael was expecting Canada’s 1962 BCP and the BAS to be equally used through out the ACoC, but the BAS seems the dominant resource used today.
When I bought my copy Michael was Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver, BC, a position he held for about two years before he was elected bishop of the Diocese of New Westminster.
Published by the Anglican Book Centre, the Anglican Church of Canada’s publishing house, the book now seems to be out of print.
Thanks David. I don’t own this book – I will hunt it down. I own the BAS which I think in many ways excellent.
Father Bosco, you may also be interested in this electronic publication if you do not have it;
http://www.abcpublishing.com/site/a-concise-but-comprehensive-guide-to-planning-the-eucharist-according-to-the-book-of-alternative-services
And the price cannot be beat! Free. It is on the downloads page, linked in the upper left.
Thanks so much David. I was unaware of this resource. I am looking forward to reading it. My own (similar) work Celebrating Eucharist may be beginning to wear at some points – but I hope that it too is a helpful planning resource. Just as “Make Preparation” is available free online, so is Celebrating Eucharist. I’m not sure how much our regular readers get to look at comments – so possibly a post in the future should highlight “Make Preparation”. Both Make Preparation and Celebrating Eucharist, I am sure, can be useful outside of their original Canadian and NZ contexts. Thanks again.