What does the Book of Common Prayer Say About Bishops, Priests and Deacons?

The Revd Professor John Kater explains why ministry belongs to all Christians.

Anglicans around the world see the Book of Common Prayer not only as their guide to how to worship, but as a summary of the ‘Anglican Way’ of being Christian: what we believe about God, the Church and ourselves. It has been part of the Anglican heritage ever since Henry VIII declared the independence of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, and his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, began crafting what that new and reformed expression of the church would be like. The most significant changes happened not during Henry’s time but during the reign of his son, the boy king Edward VI, when Cranmer produced the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, and a second, reformed version in 1552.

Cranmer retained the medieval Church’s structure of ordained ministry – deacons, priests and bishops – but he radically changed the understanding of what their ministry was. Roman Catholics believed that in the Eucharist, the priest re-offered the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and through repeating the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, the bread and wine of the Eucharist were transformed -transubstantiated – into the body and blood of Christ. Cranmer did everything he could to eliminate these ideas, even insisting that altars be replaced by tables in England’s churches. Clergy were understood to be ministers of God’s Word and Sacraments, but the Word – the Bible – definitely took priority. The traditional vestments associated with the clergy were forbidden, and the statues and crucifixes that decorated English churches were removed or destroyed. The monarch was affirmed as the ‘Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England’ with the power to appoint bishops. Bishops were to govern the Church but also sat in the House of Lords. Priests were to be pastors, caring for their congregations and preaching God’s Word. Deacons were meant to be ‘apprentice priests’, assisting their superiors in the service and also reporting any cases of need among the congregation so that the Church could respond. The Church was conceived as a hierarchy, with the laypeople at the bottom, then deacons, then priests, then bishops, and finally the monarch as the Church’s head. That hierarchy was believed to be God-given; a prayer at the ordination of deacons asked that God would make them “modest, humble, and constant in their ministration” and “so well behave themselves in this inferior office, that they may be found worthy to be called unto the higher ministries in thy Church.” Ordination to all three ministries was the prerogative of the bishop, who laid his hands on the candidate’s head and granted them the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands. This was the pattern prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer around the globe from Cranmer’s time well into the 20th century.

What is remarkable is that while Anglican clergy were ordained in the same way wherever they practiced their ministry, over time vastly different ways of exercising their ministry evolved. Evangelical Anglicans in England and elsewhere attempted to keep Cranmer’s understanding of the Church and its emphasis on the Word of God, though only English Anglicans still considered the monarch the Church’s ‘supreme governor.’  Anglo-Catholics, meanwhile, had returned to many of the Roman Catholic Church’s beliefs and practices, with Solemn Mass, Catholic vestments, and incense, stressing the sacraments, rather than the scriptures, as the primary way Christians relate to God. As British colonies spread around the world, missionary clergy were called to be evangelists to enslaved people in their American colonies and to tribal peoples in America, Africa, and the South Pacific, as well as in settings with cultures and religious traditions thousands of years old, such as India and China. Often the missionaries confused preaching the Gospel with reproducing the culture of their homeland, but inevitably clergy in a global Anglican Communion developed practices and customs far removed from how Thomas Cranmer had conceived it.  

The 20^th century, however, began what has turned into something of a revolution around the Communion, and also among other Christian traditions. The Liturgical Movement, which began in the Roman Catholic Church, soon involved scholars and clergy from other traditions, especially Anglicans.  While the movement began by examining how worship had evolved under the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages, it soon began exploring not only how our early Christian ancestors worshipped but how worship had been changed, even distorted. Their initial efforts taught the churches that worship had belonged not just to the clergy but was something that involved the whole Christian community together. Soon altars were pulled away from the wall so that the presider could face the congregation, and laypeople began reading the scriptures, leading the congregation’s prayers and even administering the sacrament. These changes have now become commonplace.  

But the exploration of our ancestors’ worship eventually led scholars to re-examine how the Church understood itself before the changes during the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages distorted its understanding.  The most dramatic discovery was that the early church considered ministry as something that belonged to all baptised people, not just the clergy. Being baptised gives every Christian spiritual gifts to be used in furthering God’s purposes in the world – at home, at work, at school, in our neighbourhood, wherever Christians find themselves, they are called to be ministers, helping to make this world what God meant it to be. Rather than defining the Church, its clergy were meant to serve the whole Body of Christ: bishops were meant to oversee the community, priests to offer teaching and pastoral care and especially to minister the sacraments so that the rest of the community was strengthened and encouraged in its ministry in the world. Deacons were called, not as apprentice priests, but as a separate order meant to help the whole congregation in its work of tending to the hurting and needy people around us.

This is a radically new image of what the Church is, but it is also a very old image, the way early Christians understood the Church: not as a pyramid with laypeople at the bottom, then deacons, priests and bishops, but a people committed to serving God’s purposes in their daily life, encouraged and supported by the bishops who oversee the community to see that it is working at its best, by the priests who nurture and strengthen them, and by the deacons who call their attention to how they can be agents of change and healing in a broken world.

This image of the Church is finding expression in many of the new versions of the Book of Common Prayer that Anglicans are using around the world. For example, in New Zealand, the ordination service begins when the bishop tells the congregation: “Christ is head of the Church; he alone is the source of all Christian ministry. Through the ages it is Christ who has called men and women to serve. By the Holy Spirit all who believe and are baptised receive a ministry to proclaim Jesus as Saviour and Lord, and to love and serve the people with whom they live and work. In Christ they are to bring redemption, to reconcile and to make whole. They are to be salt for the earth; they are to be light to the world.”

In many churches, the ordination no longer consists of the bishop giving the Holy Spirit to the person being ordained  – “Receive the Holy Spirit for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God” –  but rather praying that God will give the Spirit to the person to be able to fulfill the ministry to which the Church calls him or her. In the Church of England, the bishop prays: “Send down the Holy Spirit on your servant for the office and work of a deacon in your Church. Through your Spirit, heavenly Father, give these your servants grace and power to fulfil their ministry.” And at English ordinations, the congregation responds: “We welcome you as fellow servants in the Gospel,” emphasising that it is God who is giving the new clergy the gift they need to do their ministry through the laying on of the bishop’s hands, acting on behalf of the whole community who give their consent through the words of welcome.

         Similar changes have been made in Prayer Book ordination services around the Anglican Communion over the past 40 years. In the United States back in 1979, in Canada six years later, in Brazil as recently as 2015. To a casual reader, they might look like minor, even superficial changes, but in fact, what they represent is an emerging understanding of what a church might look like as it begins to take seriously what the New Testament tells us: that ministry doesn’t belong to some Christians, but to all Christians. Clergy don’t define the Church; baptism defines the Church. Clergy serve the Church, in the same way the apostles and the bishops, priests and deacons of the first centuries served the Church. It’s what the Church was like once upon a time; it’s what the church can be like today and tomorrow.

The Revd Professor John Kater is currently teaching Anglican Foundations (THL315) for Ming Hua’s Bachelor of Theology program.