Do prayer books still matter?  At St Mary’s we are used to Sunday service sheets where everything is laid out for us and we are literally all on the same page – very much in keeping with Archbishop Cranmer’s Reformation desire to have a standard service accessible to all.   By making sure there was a common structure and pattern to the service, Cranmer hoped to draw together the worshipping community across the whole of England.  Set out in the Book of Common Prayer, the practices and devotions of the Church of England could be shared by all. True, there were some who felt constrained by the set, written forms, wanting more scope for the Spirit to guide their worship and prayer. Gradually more alternatives were included, balancing some individual choice with a sense of unity – as we see in the pages of Common Worship today (and even in the app!).

Prayer books are powerful, over time they help create a common community, they help to cement and shape its values and its experience of the divine.  But they can also be divisive, if their words and structure do not seem to reflect that community’s relationship with God.  At Christ Church we have an amazing collection of prayer books, most well-loved, others less so – one from the 1630s even helped to spark Civil War... Seen together they show how shared prayers and liturgy can unite us and sometimes divide us, and from next week we will be displaying them in the Upper Library.  Everyone is welcome to come and see these physical embodiments of our historic, dramatic, culture of prayer. (More details soon at www.chch.ox.ac.uk.)