Customer Reviews

Book of Common Worship

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I bought this book for a Theology class I took during college, but have used it since as a guide for daily devotions. Its prayers take on a natural rhythm throughout the year, and I feel connected to a larger tradition knowing that others use this same book to guide their own daily worship. For professional worship wonks and lay persons alike, this volume should have a prized position in any library.

I am an ordained minister in the Wesleyan theological background and we do not have a resource like this. I bought this and was skeptical but after I received it and used it, it is a must have for all minister's libraries. It already has helped my daily walk with the Lord in the daily prayer. And has awesome services for many different situations.

This book was marked as used, what I received was a new book. It had never even been opened. This book is a must have for any one that leads a Presbyterian worship service. It has been of great value and help to me.

Prebyterians have among the most splendid and solemnly beautiful officially sanctioned liturgies in all of Western Christendom. It is galling how little resort to it there is in Presbyterian parishes. This prompted me to write some comments elsewhere, directed towards Roman Catholics, about this matter, which I adapt here for Amazon's entry for the Book of Common Worship on its WWW site. Here goes!

The "now you see it, now you don't" kind of worship practice of putative "liturgical Protestantism" is maddening! Taking the Reformed denomination known as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as example, one knows that few churches in Christendom have liturgy as fine, balanced, full, and lovely as what is contained in the best options for worship in these Presbyterians' current service book (giving, retired librarian that I am, a fairly full ISBD citation of it):

Book of Common Worship / prepared by the Theology and Worship Ministry Unit, for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. -- Louisville, Ky. : Westminster-John Knox Press, 1993. -- viii, 1107 p. -- ISBN: 0-664-21991-8.

So much fine thought, liturgical scholarship, and labour went into the production of this splendid liturgical book, yet so little is it in use in all of its beauty and gracefulness in Presbyterian congregations. Many Roman Catholics would yearn to have such full and essentially traditionalist liturgy as that of the "Book of Common Worship", whether in the 1993 form of it, or in the lovely and more compact, earlier editions (especially that of 1946), rather than the inherent and comparative shallowness of the stripped-down Novus Ordo's banal Latin and especially vernacular liturgies which have been inflicted on Roman Catholics since 1970, where reason and tradition do not prevail (as they seldom do, alas, in modern Catholic diocesan and parish life) as they surely can when using and cherishing, as a blessèd resort, the 1962 "Missale Romanum" (which, by the way, is the true "liturgy of Vatican II") instead of 1970's Catholic liturgical atrocity!

Most Presbyterian congregations choose to use their magnificent liturgy only in "dribs and drabs", a little bit of authorised liturgy here, mixed with lots of "do-it-yourself" low-brow improvisation elsewhere. The only P.C.U.S.A. parish at which I experienced this Presbyterian liturgy in all of its splendour was at a parish in Kansas City, Mo., when I was visiting that exciting metropolis for a conference.

Even Anglicans and Lutherans are departing more and more from the liturgical norms of their denominations. Granted, modernist liturgies have supplanted, in many parishes, the traditional "Book of Common Prayer" (Anglican, 1662 U.K., 1928 U.S., or 1962 Canada) and "Common Worship Service" (Lutheran, having been incorporated in various Lutheran serivce books and hymnal worship sections), both of which use Abp. Cranmer's extraordinarily beautiful liturgical English of the 16th century. The modernist liturgies do not compel the loyalty to them that the traditional Anglican and Lutheran liturgies in English did, but even the newer services are better than the free-for-all worship styles for which many Anglican and Lutheran parishes supplant far better official liturgies, modernist and traditional alike! The Presbyterians, at least, have gone from strength to strenth in their official liturgical revisions, unlike most Proestants, and what a shame it is that the published results are too little in worship use in their local churches!

Oh, well, there is no accounting for taste, and the increasingly faithless attitude of "liturgical Protestants" towards worship norms, dumping them for sectarian happy-clappy free-form "informality", is part-and-parcel of the tyrranous reign of trendiness, willful individualism, and lack of respect for tradition, (even for their own traditions!) of Protestantism. More and more, one often cannot discern a truly Protestant church (Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed/Presbyterian) from mere sects (Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists, Campbellites, et alia), at least so far as how they carry out their worship and collective life!

Anyway, for a real contrast to what tends, alas, to prevail in North American Protestant worship, obtain the Presbyterians' "Book of Common Worship"! Even many Canadian Presbyterian churches use it, at least in part, in preference to their own rather inferior current edition of the "Book of Common Worship". The official American Presbyterian liturgies' provisions, be it noted, are very edifying for use in one's personal devotions (as I have so used them at times), quite apart from their superiority in public worship!