Here is my long-promised update of my (free) Book of Prayers in Common (click on this link to the left for the pdf version)!
epub version
mobi version
Regulars here know that I have been working on this project for a dozen or so years – week by week, providing collects/opening prayers with history and reflection. I have updated the book with a prayer for each week to the end of this year (and into the early part of next year).
In the main, each prayer is a version of the one prayed by the majority of Christians on that day. I suggest that towards a billion people are praying this Sunday’s collect/opening prayer, for example. Most of these prayers are shared across Christian traditions and have been prayed by Christians for well over a millennium. This is common prayer in a very deep sense.
I have been cheered on by many people, especially within NZ Anglicanism, to do better than the sort of collect that the NZ Prayer Book and Lectionary present for this coming Sunday:
Christ of the new covenant,
14th Sunday in Ordinary Time – NZ Prayer Book 2020/2024
give us the happiness to share,
with full measure, pressed down,
shaken together and running over,
all that you give us.
Hear this prayer for your name’s sake.
Amen.
The above is a struggle to comprehend on first reading, nigh on impossible to read together without rehearsal as some communities are wont to do, reminds most people of James Bond and cocktails, asks to give us happiness in order to share, … And, astonishingly, we’ve already had this exact same prayer a couple of months ago!!! And not long before that, we had the “to see: to see” prayer:
Lord, help us to see:
NZ Prayer Book 2020/2024 page 573
to see what is eternally good and true,
and having seen, to go on searching
until we come to the joys of heaven.
This we ask through Jesus Christ our Redeemer.
Amen.
Compare these with this Sunday’s collect/opening prayer provided in the Book of Prayers in Common. This has essentially been prayed for over 13 centuries, and nowadays by the majority of Christians in church this Sunday:
O God,
Book of Prayers in Common
in Christ’s humility,
you stooped down
and raised up the fallen world,
grant to your faithful people a holy joy,
so that those whom you have freed
may delight in you eternally;
through Jesus Christ
who is alive with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Originally, A New Zealand Prayer Book He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa (1989-2005) gave people a choice of three options for each Sunday. So there was generally a reasonable one to choose and use. But the new 2020/2024 publication of that name has removed the choice, providing only one option.
Many people may not realise (liturgical training, study, and formation being at a low ebb) that in NZ Anglicanism (being The Anglican Church of Or!) that you can use a collect from any source. So, you are totally free to draw from this Book of Prayers in Common. [In fact there is no requirement to have a collect at all, or where one would use it if you do have one.]
Whereas all the service changes from the 1989-2005 NZ Prayer Books were authorised through the “twice-round” formulary agreement process, the reduction from three options to one did not. Furthermore, when this change was presented to this year’s General Synod Te Hinota Whanui to begin the formulary agreement process, I have been informed (the minutes are not out yet, and there has not yet been any reporting on liturgical decisions) that this bill did not pass because the Synod did not have the confidence that the collects and readings proposed were a coherent and substantial revision that would be “safe”. In fact, I have already pointed out, they are in breach of an earlier decision.
We now have a bizarre situation: a third of A New Zealand Prayer Book He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa 2020/2024 has been rejected by General Synod Te Hinota Whanui as not being up to the standard expected of agreed formularies.
But wait, there’s more: ten years ago, General Synod Te Hinota Whanui acknowledged that our experimental/trial services were inconsistent with the 1928 Act of Parliament and lacked fundamental authorisation in the first place! With a third of A New Zealand Prayer Book He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa 2020/2024 not being an agreed formulary (in fact voting against beginning to make this such!) NZ Anglicanism effectively has re-created experimental/trial services, and furthermore bound them into a book with the title of A New Zealand Prayer Book He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa.
For those of you interested, I certainly am grateful to Rev’d Toby Behan who has produced a spreadsheet of collects in the 2020 edition of the New Zealand Prayer Book comparing them to the “original Prayer Book” (the 1989-2005 editions). This spreadsheet can be found here. From this work, it seems that about 72 of the agreed collects from the 1989-2005 editions (which are agreed formularies!) are missing in the 2020 (and subsequent) editions.
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