Common Prayer Unites Us

More than anything else, it's what makes us Episcopalians.

One of the most distinctive things about Episcopalians is the way we worship. Our worship is primarily based on the written prayers and directions found in The Book of Common Prayer ("BCP"). You’ll see copies of the BCP sitting in the pews alongside the hymnals at an Episcopal church, though many congregations (including Good Shepherd) print particular parts of the BCP in paper bulletins for people to use at each service.

Like much else about Episcopalians, the custom of using a common form of worship from a prayer book originates during the Reformation. When sixteenth-century Christians in England couldn’t decide whether they would be Roman Catholic or Protestant, and when politics dragged the debate down into a horrendous cycle of violence, the Church of England decided that it was less important to believe all the same things than it was to pray together in the same way.

The present-day prayer book is the Episcopal version of this common pattern for worship. The conviction behind the book is that “praying shapes believing.” Thus, the BCP is our church’s legacy, a way of being both Catholic and Protestant, a system that helps worshipers feel at home wherever they encounter other Anglicans and pray with them in community. It also contains many options for individual and family prayer.