All Things Seen & Unseen

"A Prayer Book for Australia" Anglican worship is typically ordered by the use of a prayer book. In fact, Anglicanism may be said to be recognisably Anglican because of its use of set forms of worship based on a prayer book usually found in the pew for worshippers to use. In Australia, Anglicans used the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) (1662) until 1978 when the first modernised An Australian Prayer Book (AAPB) was produced.  The Prayer Book was again revised in 1995 to make its language more inclusive; hence A Prayer Book for Australia (APBA) is now commonly used in most parishes using a prayer book today. (The BCP is still in use in some Australian parishes and is still part of Church practice by church law in the Anglican Church of Australia.) Though some still call the Anglican Church of Australia 'The Church of England', the Anglican Church of Australia was constituted in 1981. However, the history of the English church is relevant to Australia because of the fact ...

The Book of Common Prayer (BCP)--'common' means 'public' in this context--came out of the fires of the English Reformation and its words have found their way into the English language and into the liturgies of other denominations. We speak of 'the world, the flesh and the devil' which we might imagine is a Biblical phrase but no, it's found in the prayer book during the time of Edward VI (1549) composed by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Archbishop: Thomas Cranmer Cranmer was a genius without doubt, a learned scholar and not a combatant but he was used to translate the former Roman Catholic liturgical forms from Latin into English and purge them from their Romish errors. However, he was no mere translator but an active shaper of the religious consciousness of the English people. He was responsible for the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552 ). The definitive BCP of the period was appointed for use in the Church of England in 1662. I've...