The “Anglican Way” Conference of 2024
(PBSC National Chairman the Revd. Canon Dr. Gordon Maitland attended this conference, organized annually by the American Prayer Book Society, and writes about what an enjoyable and inspiring event it was, commenting on two particularly insightful papers that were presented.)
I had the privilege of attending the “Anglican Way” Conference at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Savannah, Georgia, this past March. This is an annual event sponsored by the American Prayer Book Society (a sister Society to our own) and headed by the Revd. Gavin Dunbar, a former Canadian and now the President of the American Society. The PBSC aspires to work in conjunction with our sister American Society more closely in the future as a way of furthering our goals and expanding our outreach.
First, let me say something of the venue of this conference. St. John’s Church in Savannah is a beautiful neo-gothic church in the heart of an equally beautiful city. St. John’s is situated in one of the many downtown parks with its mature trees draped in Spanish moss. It is one of those rare Episcopal churches that uses the 1928 BCP exclusively for its worship. During the course of the conference, one of the worship services was a full choral evensong sung by the choir of St. John’s.
The conference was open to any Anglican who wished to attend. There were laypeople, seminarians, and clergy from the American Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Reformed Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Church of North America in attendance. About a third of the conference speakers were Canadian, so this was something of an international event. Of course, one of the joys of participating in this kind of gathering is meeting new people and socializing with fellow conference attendees. I was delighted to discover that a number of American Prayer Book supporters regularly turn to our website to read articles that have been posted there. It is wonderful to think that our endeavours here in Canada reach beyond our borders.
Of course, at the centre of any conference are the papers presented by the various speakers. These papers were about various aspects of the Prayer Book, its history, and the theology stated and implied in the liturgical rites to be found therein. While all the papers were interesting to one degree or another, I want to highlight two presentations that stood out for me as significant.
The first was by the Revd. Dr. Gary Thorne entitled, “Robert Crouse and Prayer Book Catholicism”. Ever since the Reformation, Anglicans have strongly endorsed a study of the Patristic authors as a way of clarifying and understanding Scripture with the “Mind of the Fathers”, i.e. approaching Scripture with the mindset of the early undivided Church. Building on the work of Dr. Robert Crouse, Dr. Thorne suggested that the “Mind of the Fathers” could be discerned within the ancient ordering of the epistles and gospels of the Eucharistic lectionary in the Book of Common Prayer. In other words, by following the presentation of Scripture in the liturgical and thematic ordering of the epistles and gospels over the course of the seasons, year after year, one can gain an insight as to how the early Church interpreted those Biblical writings. All of this is to suggest that there is more to by found in the Prayer Book lectionary than one might think at first glance, and that the Revised Common Lectionary, while it may superficially present more biblical readings over the course of any given year, does not offer the depth of Patristic wisdom to be found in the ancient ordering of Scripture.
The second paper I want to highlight is the one presented by the Revd. Ben Crosby entitled, “’The godly and decent ordre of the auncient fathers’: Cranmer’s Daily Office, Scripture, and the Liturgical Movement”. This meaty and insightful paper was, overall, a defence of the offices of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer as they are ordered in the Book of Common Prayer. Crosby first showed how mid-twentieth century liturgical scholarship criticized the offices to be found in the Prayer Book as being insufficiently reformed in line with what their scholarship purported to be the early Church offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. According to these “Liturgical Movement” scholars, there were two different kinds of daily offices to by found in the fourth-century Western Church. “Cathedral Offices”, which were celebrated especially in cathedrals, were characterized as having a limited selection of psalms to sing, long intercessions, little or no scripture readings, and dramatic ceremonial features such as processions. By contrast, “Monastic Offices” were characterized by the singing of the entire psalter in course, long readings from the scriptures for meditation, few intercessions, and relatively little in the way of dramatic ceremonial. “Cathedral Offices” were for the laity, while “Monastic Offices” were for monks and nuns. Since the Prayer Book offices were more like “Monastic Offices” than “Cathedral Offices”, Cranmer had clearly failed to revise the daily prayer of the Church in light of modern scholarship, and thus new rites, in line with modern scholarship had to be devised. The latest office book published by the Anglican Church of Canada, Pray Without Ceasing, reflects these trends. If that book is used in conjunction with the Revised Common Lectionary daily readings a person will have an office with a very limited selection of psalmody, short Bible readings, and lots of space for extemporaneous intercessions. The empirical fact that sung Prayer Book Matins and Evensong were actually quite popular with church people before the 1970s was conveniently ignored in the process of modern revision. Crosby showed how much of mid-twentieth century liturgical scholarship was simply wrong, demonstrated how extreme hubris led those liturgical scholars to assume they knew better than any of their forebears (including Thomas Cranmer) as to what was best for the Church, and asked why it was necessary for all the Church’s rites to conform to alleged 4th century exemplars anyways. There was far more in Crosby’s paper than can be summarized here. Sufficient to say, it was one of the best papers at the conference. It has recently been published in “The Anglican Way” journal (Vol. 1 No.8) and can be accessed via this link.
The next Anglican Way Conference will be held at St. John’s in Savannah on February 20 and 21, 2025. The theme of the next conference is entitled, “These Holy Mysteries: What Anglicans Think About the Eucharist”. It should prove to be another interesting and edifying event.