laudable Practice

Lord God our Father,  through our Saviour Jesus Christ you have assured your children of eternal life and in baptism have made us one with him. Deliver us from the death of sin and raise us to new life in your love, in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. For some it might be surprising that the post-Communion prayer from the Church of Ireland BCP 2004 - shared with the CofE's Common Worship - for the 'Second Sunday of Easter' (i.e. Low Sunday) can bring us to think about the sacramental theology of Calvin. The issue came to mind when this prayer was said on Sunday past, as I am aware that for a certain strain of contemporary evangelicalism in the CofI this reference to Baptism is, to put it charitably, problematic. (We will leave aside, for the moment, the fact that the subscription required of all clergy in the CofI declares that "the doctrine of the Church of Ireland" as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer is ...

Over the years, laudable Practice has regularly critiqued many aspects of late 20th and early 21st century liturgical revision.  Frequently, the Church of Ireland's Book of Common Prayer 2004 and The Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer 1979 have been the targets of such criticism. This post seeks to provide some balance to those criticisms.  As previously stated, counter-revolution is not conservative , and that includes liturgical counter-revolution .  1979 and 2004 are now settled parts of the Episcopal/Anglican experience in the United States and Ireland: a counter-revolutionary rejection of 1979 and 2004 would not be authentically conservative or traditional.   What is more, in the same way that my personal experience of officiating and participating according to 2004 has shaped my critiques of it, so too that experience has also provided a basis for valuing aspects of 2004.  Likewise, those times when I have worshipped in TEC have been accordin...