You might notice a few small changes to our liturgy in a couple weeks. Along with the return of the choir (hurray!) and new settings for the Gloria (“Glory to God in the highest”), Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy Lord”), and other service music, you might notice that the texts of some of our prayers have changed. If you’re curious to know where these are from or why we’re using them, read on!

Since the English Reformation in the 1540s, one of the hallmarks of Episcopalians and Anglicans has been our emphasis on “common prayer.” Walk into almost any Episcopal church in the country, and you’re likely to recognize nearly the entire service, and to find it on exactly the same pages of the Book of Common Prayer, our primary text for worship.

One of the big questions of the last fifty years in our tradition has been how to balance this emphasis on common worship with the desire for variety and freshness. It’s a fine line, after all, between “familiar” and “boring,” between “known by heart” and “recited by rote.”

Another big question of the last half-century has been how the language we use to address and talk about God in our worship shapes (and maybe distorts) our idea of who God is. Traditionally, Christian theology teaches that God is neither male nor female; these are human categories, not divine ones. But as you’ve probably noticed, our traditional liturgies refer to God almost exclusively using masculine terminology and imagery (he, Father, king, lord, etc.)

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the Episcopal Church published additional worship materials in a series called Enriching Our Worship, which essentially addressed both these issues at once. EOW provided alternative options for much of the liturgy, with an emphasis on “expansive language” for God, i.e., language that expanded our repertoire of terms and images beyond the traditional masculine ones. This ended up providing some really great alternatives for different parts of the service — where the BCP gives two post-communion prayers, EOW adds a third, and so on.

The Eucharistic prayer we’ve been using this summer comes from Enriching Our Worship. This fall, we’re switching back to good old Prayer A from the BCP, but we’ll be using the confession and post-communion prayer from EOW. Throughout the year we’ll likely use different options for other parts of the service as the seasons change.

I hope these new words bring out new facets of your relationship with God. If you love them, I’m so glad! If you hate them—don’t worry. They’ll rotate to something else again soon enough.

Note: These changes in the liturgy will begin on September 18, not this Sunday; I just have something else to write about for the newsletter next week!