July 2nd Spirit Shot!
This Sunday, Holy Spirit Episcopal Church will use the 1789 Book of Common Prayer for our 10 am worship.
The American Revolution and the Book of Common Prayer
What do you do when you are a member of the Church of England and your local government has declared independence from England? This was the question facing Anglicans in the American colonies on July 4th, 1776. The vast majority of priests were loyalists during the American Revolution; many of them fled to the northern colonies in Canada. Those who stayed faced a problem: the 1662 Prayer Book was specifically designed to be used by the English, including prayers for the monarch every Sunday, and an oath of loyalty to the monarch as part of the ordination process. What do you do when your primary liturgical text contains references to a now-foreign king? How do you ordain priests when they cannot take an oath to another country’s leader? The answer came in fits and starts. Some priests physically tore out the page containing “A Prayer for the King’s Majesty.” Others simply ignored that part of the liturgy, or replaced “God save the King” with “God save the state.” Sensing a need for an American bishop, Connecticut sent a former loyalist priest to England with the hopes that the English bishops might be willing to make an American priest a bishop if that priest had been on their side. This priest, Samuel Seabury, would become the first American bishop, but because he would not take an oath of allegiance to the king, his ordination didn’t come at the hands of English bishops. Instead, the Americans turned to another group who used a Book of Common Prayer who had their own issues with England: The Scottish Episcopal Church. Newly consecrated Bishop Samuel Seabury returned to the United States and helped shepherd the newly formed Protestant Episcopal Church as they created their own version of the Book of Common Prayer, which borrowed from both the English and Scottish versions, in addition to prayers useful in the democratic republic, such as prayers for the work of the Congress. The result of this work was the 1789 Book of Common Prayer, which was the official prayer book of The Episcopal Church for the next century. As we commemorate the two-hundred fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, our eucharistic liturgy follows the Book of Common Prayer service that was made necessary by that declaration. Because the 1789 Prayer Book did not contain a specific liturgy for Independence Day, our service is the same as a congregation in the new United States of America would have used on the Sunday closest to the 4th of July. We are grateful to The Rt. Rev. Jeff Fisher, Bishop Suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, for suggesting this service as a possible commemoration of the nation’s two-hundred fiftieth anniversary.