Whether we are losing the daily office is a question Anglicans might have been asking since at least the 18th century. Growing urbanization marked the beginning of the end of the Church of England’s initial success in embedding participation in Morning and Evening Prayer, as set out in the Book of Common Prayer, in the cultural rhythms of a still predominantly agricultural society.
It had been one of the great aims of Cranmer’s 16th-century reforms to establish a version of the daily office that would contribute decisively to the formation of a Christian society in regular, sustained, and prayerful attention to God’s Word. This was to be the bedrock of Anglican liturgy, with other services built upon its foundation; hence its appearance as the primary focus in Cranmer’s Preface to the Book of Common Prayer, and its position as the first set of liturgical texts in what followed.
But that’s not how it probably feels to most Anglicans today, certainly here in England. In the parish where I work, we offer the daily office at various points in the week online and in our church buildings, in simple said forms and adorned with beautiful music in choral Evensong on a Sunday afternoon. But attendance is low. Most church members, clearly, have learned to live—and pray—without it.
It’s never been easier to join in. The Church of England’s website provides simple access to the texts for the office every day, while some time ago it invested in the Daily Prayer app that provides instant versions for smartphone and tablet users. Even before COVID-19, church leadership started to create audio versions of each service, uploaded to the website and the app, so one can participate by listening to fellow Christians’ voices. I know that for some people, who find it hard to pray the daily office without being part of a congregation, that’s been tremendously helpful.
The new ways that have emerged of accessing the daily office are undoubtedly significant, not least because one of the abiding criticisms of it as a spiritual and liturgical practice is that it remains essentially elitist. One strand in that criticism has been that it requires a degree of expertise in navigating your way round lectionary tables and variations to collects, refrains, and so forth—far more so in modern rites than in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, which represented a deliberate simplification as well as reframing the medieval texts he inherited (something about which he offered strong words in the Preface). That’s why websites and apps appear so helpful—they seem to cut all that out. Someone else has done the complicated navigation for us!
There’s a price to be paid, however. My experience in recent years of being with Anglican ordinands and others trying to master the daily office is that they don’t seem to comprehend that websites and apps present “maximal” versions of the services, from which users may make decisions about what to omit. Consider the psalms. In the Church of England’s versions, refrains, psalm collects, and the Gloria Patri appear together at the end without any guidance about how to integrate them or indeed whether it is wise to include them all. There are clear instructions about all this in the Notes that preface the services in the printed Common Worship: Daily Prayer, which set out what elements are essential and what may be modified or omitted. When people only access services online, they’ll never find those notes.
The accusation against the daily office of continuing elitism—despite the efforts of Cranmer and more recent liturgical reformers—isn’t just about accessibility, however. Another strand is the argument that it requires a time commitment of 40 to 50 minutes a day, in two sections, ideally at regular times. That will always be difficult for people in modern societies unless they are “paid to pray” in one way or another, or have the luxury of more leisure time and more dependable schedules than most can afford, given essential duties of household support and earning incomes. But does that argument ultimately rest on the assumption that praise, prayer, and reading of the Scriptures are not “essential” for our daily lives as followers of Christ?
Perhaps the most fundamental objection to Cranmer’s aspiration of popularizing what had increasingly become, in the Middle Ages, the practice only of clerics and those in religious orders is that it requires a certain level of theological formation to benefit from its main ingredients: sustained psalm recitation and continuous reading of biblical books from the Old and New Testaments, in sometimes lengthy sections, with no explanation or interpretation.
Even though modern lectionaries tend to omit some psalms and passages deemed unsuitable for praying today, and don’t cover the whole of the Old Testament, the result may still look far too dense to be of spiritual benefit to most Christians, who need less text at one time, or some kind of commentary to help them digest Holy Scripture. Again, though, I can’t help wondering if such objections betray a certain impatience. Part of the point of the daily office is to weave a texture of Christian formation over years, even decades, of reciting and hearing the same scriptural texts.
Two final comments. First, the loss of the daily office as a normal dimension of Anglican spirituality and liturgy is reflected in the way that people who are new to it bring with them “default” settings from other contexts. I have observed those used to a relatively formal Anglican Eucharist ask people to stand for the second lesson if it’s from one of the Gospels, or use responses that belong in the Eucharist (“This is the Word of the Lord”), or fail to grasp the function of the Collect here as the summing up of the intercessions.
Those accustomed to less formal styles of worship, on the other hand, may want to introduce and comment on different elements of the service, not trusting the liturgy to do its work as we recite it prayerfully together.
In either case, the daily office can appear as a rather perplexing if not simply unsatisfactory alternative to the principal form of public worship churchgoers have previously known.
Finally, I prefer to pray the office with a book in my hand, rather than an electronic screen, when I can. I’m very grateful to those who funded and maintain the Church of England’s webpage and app, and regularly use them when I’m traveling or away from home. But I find it strange to be in a congregation in which everyone reads from a screen. Am I betraying my age? I’m not sure.
A prayer book is something I only open to pray, or to learn something about prayer. To turn to it is to remember what I have come to do. A phone or tablet is used for myriad tasks, and it offers custom settings. Can the Anglican ideal of “common” prayer survive the death of the prayer book?
The Rev. Dr. Jeremy Worthen is the Team Rector of Ashford in the Diocese of Canterbury. He previously worked in ministerial formation and in supporting national ecumenical and theological work.
