This article is based on a talk given at the event “Guarding a Good Deposit: Authentic Anglicanism Today,” hosted by the Prayer Book Society of NSW and St John’s Cathedral Parramatta.
I write as a lay Anglican, and also as an academic historian. I shall firstly address a broad cultural issue which underscores why I believe the Authentic Anglicanism Report is not only timely, but also acutely necessary.1 I shall then offer a reflection on the enduring richness of authentic Anglicanism, which is something we ought to steward. This richness of authentic Anglicanism is correctly summarised in the report in four elements—the primacy of Scripture, the confessional basis of our tradition, the liturgical character that ties our confessional doctrine to our lived practices, and an episcopal governance to safeguard the truth of the faith.
Ahistoricism
I argued recently in my book Priests of History that our contemporary Western culture has an intuitive bent towards ahistoricism.2 I believe we are living in what I term the “Ahistoric Age”, which is beset both by widespread ignorance of history, as well as a sense that the past is irrelevant in our era of rapidly advancing technology and its relentless proffering of opportunities for self-creation. By ahistoricism I do not mean merely the chronological snobbery that C. S. Lewis described almost a century ago. The Ahistoric Age encompasses far more. In the 21st century, the conception of the “good life” consists of being “true to yourself” and of “living your best life”, which is made possible by the acquisition of material goods and pleasurable experiences, and untethering yourself from any larger claim on your life and freedom. The past seems not only irrelevant to the ways we desire to live, but also an oppressive hindrance.
In this context, at least in the West, it ought not surprise us that there is a risk for Christians to become acculturated to this kind of ahistoricism. But the biblical vision of being a Christian is profoundly counter-cultural. In contrast to unrestrained individual freedom, it is a vision of being caught up in God’s sovereign purposes and intentions for our world, and of adoption into Christ’s body—the church, his “chosen people, royal priesthood, his treasured possession” (1 Pet 2:9). “For once, you were not a people, but now you are the people of God” (1 Pet 2:10).
Ahistoricism has very real effects on doctrine, worship, and ministry, as well as on the Christian life and witness. When we do not ground ourselves in the long-established orthodox teachings and habits of discipleship, we become acutely susceptible to embracing our culture’s idols, even unknowingly, precisely because we do not see where we have departed from orthodoxy and orthopraxy.
In contemporary culture, ignorant of the orthodox historical beliefs and practices of the church, the Authentic Anglicanism Report is acutely necessary. In clearly articulating the confessional, liturgical, and episcopal characteristics of our Anglican identity and the primacy of Scripture, it enables us to sharpen our vision and see where our current practices might be embracing cultural idols rather than biblical principles.
Here are some brief illustrations:
First, in terms of the confessional basis of our faith and the primacy of Scripture, there is, globally speaking, what I have termed a “doctrinal drift” today, away from the historical orthodox doctrine, for example in terms of the unanimous historical orthodox doctrine of human sexuality and gender. It is this latter aspect of culture which prompted the Authentic Anglicanism Report.
Second, in terms of the liturgical basis of our worship: Worship of God is now too often replaced with what is effectively entertainment geared around creating an enjoyable experience for a congregation of consumers. Other examples include the disappearance of a prayer of confession of sin, the disappearance of the creeds, and the dramatic reduction of the reading of Scripture. These practices seem to be slipping away almost imperceptibly. Yet the Authentic Anglicanism Report lists quite clearly as one of its major liturgical features, that services “regularly use ancient and biblically-based elements of corporate worship for the edification of the congregation. Such elements include declaring together one of the creeds, (Apostles’, Nicene, or Athanasian), corporate confession and a general ministerial absolution of sin based on the promises of the gospel”.3
In clearly setting out the confessional, liturgical, and episcopal nature of Anglican identity, the Authentic Anglicanism Report enables us to see how our orthodoxy shapes our orthopraxy. The Report sharpens our vision of our faith and culture, and in doing so, it will be a safeguard against cultural idols.
Stewardship of a rich heritage
I began on a sobering note, critiquing what I see as the ahistoricism of contemporary culture, its influence on parts of the church, and therefore why we need to understand authentic Anglicanism. Now, however, I can be more sanguine. Anglicans are stewards of a rich heritage which reflects something of the Lord’s goodness, truth, and beauty. There are two aspects of this heritage to which I want to draw our attention. The first is that the Prayer Book is a book of the people and has been embraced through the centuries because of its remarkable ability to use its confessional nature to ground its liturgy. The second is the enduring ability of authentic Anglicanism to instantiate itself in culture without losing its confessional, liturgical, and episcopal character.
Part of the genius of Cranmer was that the confessional basis of the Church of England was not only contained in the Thirty-Nine Articles but taught and lived out through the liturgical nature of The Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer intended that the Prayer Book would teach theology through its practices. Doctrine and liturgy, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, worked together, hand in hand with the aim of doxology—the praise and glory of God. This unity was central to Cranmer’s intention that the Prayer Book would help disciple people by enabling them not only to understand the word of God, but to embody this understanding in their meaningful participation in worship and the habits, practices, and disciplines of the church.
This was why, for example, the lectionary was so important. Cranmer’s preface to the 1549 edition, repeated in subsequent editions, made clear that Prayer Book’s intention was to have “the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof) “ read over once in the yeare”, so that Ministers “be stirred up in godliness themselves” and … “that the people by daily hearying of holy scripture read in the Churche should continuallye profite more and more in the knowledge of God and be the more inflame with the love of his true religion.”4 We see this unity of theology and practice throughout the Prayer Book.
Aside from the lectionary, it contained Scripture-soaked liturgy for the Daily Office (in morning and evening prayer), services for the practice of the Sacraments—The Lord’s Supper and Baptism—with careful attention to the theology and doctrine of these Sacraments which allows us to clearly distinguish Anglican confessional doctrine from that of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, as well as from the purely materialistic worldview of the contemporary culture. It also contains the complete Psalter, a catechism, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the creeds, and a list of feast and fast days. Its rhythms have helped people structure their lives—their days with the Daily Office, their years through the seasons of the church calendar, and indeed their own life-seasons (I think here of the prayer for the churching of women, or prayers for the sick, and prayers for the dying, and the liturgies for marriage, baptism, and the commination service for the penitent).
The genius of Cranmer’s fusion of doctrine and liturgy, in my view, is that it enabled The Book of Common Prayer to be embraced and cherished by the people of the Church of England—both lay and clergy. It became, as the historian Judith Maltby has correctly shown, a book of the people—to aid them in their pursuit of godliness, as well as to uphold the sound order and governance of the church.5 It was accessible in a way that the pre-Reformation Catholic missals were not, not least because the Prayer Book was in English, but also because of its wide printing and publication in folio, quarto, and octavo for different purposes: from public worship (folios were distributed to churches), to smaller, and more affordable, editions for personal devotion, all the way down to the duodecimo size. It was to be used not only in churches, but also privately and in families. It was used on the battlefields of the Somme, and on ships in the New Hebrides. It was used in the workhouses of Victorian London, in Edwardian orphanages and prisons, and of course in the prison colony of New South Wales. It was taken into the colonies of North America, to the South Pacific on missions, and to India and Africa.
The past four hundred years of history are rich with illustrations of men, women, and children relying on the Prayer Book to direct them to God’s word and to help them structure their lives. In 1641 on the eve of the English Civil Wars, a petition in support of The Book of Common Prayer was circulated and presented to the House of Lords. Its signatories identified strongly with the Prayer Book, holding it to be an essential part of ordinary life, across the social order in England. It is important to underscore the significance of this point—the Prayer Book traversed class and social boundaries. The petition claimed, “There is scarce any Family or Person that can read but are furnish’d with the Books of Common Prayer; in the conscionable use whereof, many Christian Hearts have found unspeakable joy and Comfort”.6
In the early eighteenth century, a physician in Somerset, Claver Morris, often recorded in his diary the way he would attend morning or evening prayer, celebrate the Lord’s Supper and then hear somebody “share a Testimonial” before singing hymns and sharing a meal with others from his congregation.7 The Prayer Book shaped his life and faith. A century later, alongside her Bible, Jane Austen’s Prayer Book was a companion throughout her life. Austen attended both morning prayer and evening prayer in her local parish on Sundays. If she were unable to attend evening prayer at church, she prayed Evening Prayer from her Prayer Book at home. Scholars have noted how important the Prayer Book was to Austen’s faith and writing. No doubt this is due in part to its literary beauty, which draws together the vernacular and sublime. Its familiar cadences “to have and to hold”, and “the devices and desires of our own hearts” are cherished by many ordinary people. It is little wonder that its idiom and imagery also shaped the prose and poetry of George Herbert and T.S. Eliot.
The second aspect of this rich heritage is that the Prayer Book has a remarkable ability to maintain the enduring character of Anglican identity and yet be translated and accommodated to different cultures across history and throughout the world. We know from Acts 17 and other places in Scripture that all forms of Christian corporate life will be situated in their surrounding culture. There is a dialectic of the unity of the church, and the particularity of culture.
As the Authentic Anglicanism Report states, we no longer insist upon an established church. Yet authentic Anglicanism has been embraced in Africa and in other parts of the world without losing its essential confessional, liturgical, and episcopal character. In fact, one of the remarkable illustrations of the degree to which the Prayer Book is truly a book of the people is the way in which indigenous men and women from Africa and India to the South Pacific adopted and translated the Prayer Book. They made it their own.
Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1809–1891), the first African Anglican bishop of West Africa, was born in 1809 in Yoruba country, what is now Nigeria. After being captured as a child by Fulani slave traders, he was liberated by the Royal Navy and taken to Sierra Leone where he was cared for, and educated by, the Church Missionary Society. He became a Christian and was baptised at the age of 16. Samuel worked as missionary to his own people back in Yoruba country, a task for which his linguistic gifts suited him well. He not only translated parts of the Bible into Yoruba, but also in 1843, The Book of Common Prayer. In 1864 he was consecrated as the first African bishop of the Anglican Church. Crowther received a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford and in later life met Queen Victoria, to whom he recited the Lord’s Prayer in Yoruba. Samuel Crowther’s commemoration is celebrated by our brothers and sisters in the Anglican Church of Nigeria.
Samuel Ajayi Crowther is just one of many Anglicans across the globe who have translated The Book of Common Prayerinto their own languages, and who use it in their church and family life. Crowther’s translation of the 1662 Prayer Book into Yoruba helped form the basis of the Anglican Church of Nigeria’s 1996 Book of Common Prayer, which remains current. The Prayer Book has also been translated into various languages of the member churches of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, including the Anglican Church of Kenya, whose 2002 Our Modern Services is based upon the 1662 Prayer Book.
This illustrates something of the robustness and endurance of authentic Anglicanism, which stems from the fact that, as the Report states, “doctrine determines practice”. That is, its confessional character shapes its liturgy as well as its episcopal governance. And yet it is able to do this in such a way that means that the Prayer Book can also be adapted to cultures without losing its integrity—confessional, liturgical, or otherwise. The Prayer Book, I would suggest, embodies something of the biblical dialectic at the heart of the unity and particularity of Christ’s body. I am encouraged by the Report’s clarity about the confessional, liturgical, and episcopal nature of Anglican identity. I believe that being clear about our orthodoxy and orthopraxy is more necessary today than perhaps it has ever been.
This article was originally published in the ACR’s Easter 2026 Journal.
- Sydney Diocesan Doctrine Commission, “Authentic Anglicanism” (2025). ↩︎
- Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age (Zondervan, 2024). ↩︎
- Authentic Anglicanism Report, 5.3. ↩︎
- Thomas Cranmer, Preface, The Book of Common Prayer, 1549. ↩︎
- See Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge University Press, 2000). ↩︎
- Ibid., p.151. ↩︎
- Cited in Priests of History, p.139. ↩︎