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I come to bury Common Prayer
- Joel West
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
Many laity (and hopefully most clergy) maintain a form of ascetical discipline through the Daily Office. In his classic text Christian Proficiency, Martin Thornton proposed a three-fold Rule that balances weekly Eucharist, Daily Office and extemporaneous personal prayer.
Tracking the liturgical year and picking the daily lessons and collects requires a certain amount of skill and dedication. A good Ordo calendar can at least resolve the question of when fixed feasts do (or do not) pre-empt other aspects of the liturgical year.
Of course, computers (when properly programmed) can automate key decisions and simplify things for worshippers to speed up the process and reduce mistakes.
Enter … and Exit CommonPrayer.org
Until recently, a popular online resource for Daily Office has been CommonPrayer.org. Its website once pronounced that it was launched in August 1999 and garnered 2000 visitors in its first 14 months (or about 5 a day).
However, CommonPrayer.org had two technical weaknesses. First, it used ColdFusion, a 1995 web tool that was cutting edge when the website was launched — but over time became harder to find support. Second, it had an inherent design flaw that required the site operator to verify certain aspects of the liturgical calendar every year at the beginning of the year (rather than, say, pre-verifying 20 or 50 years in one batch beforehand).
So while the site worked through December 2024, in January 2025 that annual checkup was not done, and the website stopped working. So despite all the praise that Common Prayer deserves for its first 25 years, it may not come back to life. So, to quote Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
Below are three alternatives to CommonPrayer.org that predate its demise.
Alternative #1: AnglicanHours.org
There are Daily Office websites for the various prayer books, including 1662, 1979, 2019 and England’s Common Worship. However, for worshippers using the American 1928 Book of Common Prayer, there is really only one replacement: AnglicanHours.org
Starting in 2018, Anglican Hours offered what CP did, with some key additional features:
Beyond the KJV, it also offers NKJV, ESV and RSV translations
In addition to BCP and Bible version of the psalm, it also offers the 1977 (Cambridge) Liturgical Psalter, a gently modernized psalter (rather than the aggressively modernized psalter from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer)
It supports all the prayer book holy days, handling short and long Epiphany and Trinity, feast days that are and are not pre-empted, and also the complexities of the liturgical year (which have been debugged over the past eight years)
Other fixed prayers: noontime, compline, litanies, family prayer
More recently, it has added
An easy way to look up lessons for future or past dates
Text-to-speech (spoken) prayers for an or all of the service. I sometimes let the website do the lessons and then do the prayers on my own (as though I had a lay reader).
It now generates an Ordo calendar for the offices for any month.
An REC software engineer who used the site for the first time this week described it as “stellar.” It is developed by a veteran software engineer who worships at St. Matthew’s Church of Newport Beach, the largest Continuing parish on the West Coast.
Alternative #2: CradleOfPrayer.org
Almost as well known as Common Prayer is Cradle of Prayer. It has much to recommend it:
An audible version of the morning and evening offices, suitable for walking, driving or other approaches to listening.
A rotation of sung canticles, and an opening hymn suitable for the occasion.
Excellent speaking and singing voices.
Available in podcast form, an entire week in advance.
An attractive, up-to-date website.
The option on the website (not podcast) to read along with the text of the liturgy as it is said/sung.
It has one major disadvantage: It does not support fixed holy days, except those between Christmas and Epiphany. So no Annunciation, St Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, etc. In Trinity Season or Christmas it’s usually fine, but sometimes it’s jarring when you know there’s a major feast day and it’s not mentioned.
Alternative #3: Live Daily Office
Since March 2020, St. Matthew’s has hosted a live videoconferenced worship service, twice a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It was initially using BlueJeans, but is now on Zoom. Of those 14 weekly services, all but one or two includes a live homily after the creed and three (sometimes four) fixed prayers.
The services require a staff of some 20 volunteers from St. Matt’s and other parishes in the Diocese of the Holy Trinity, to lead worship, respond to the prayers and psalm, and read the two Scripture lessons. It observes all the liturgical year, including fixed holy days, octaves of key holy days, and even (most difficult of all) Fall Ember Days.
There are two related disadvantages:
It happens at 7:30 am and 4:30 pm PT, which works for Pacific and Mountain time but may not work for Central and Eastern time zones
The live service is posted to the podcast an hour or two after it was live. So it works for someone who wants to do the service at 10am, 7pm or the next day, but not (say) 30 minutes after it ran
The St. Matt‘s offices also use an extended lectionary, adding more verses to OT readings outside high season (but rarely on Sundays). These extended lectionary readings are now available as the alternate reading on Anglican Hours.
Alternative #4
Update Oct 16: Attending this week’s ACC/ACA synod, a reader pointed out another alternative that presents both the fixed and variable text for each day’s Morning and Evening Prayer: CommonPrayerOnline.com.
This website is officially maintained by the Anglican Province of America, and presents each office using the 1928 BCP psalter and the KJV scripture readings. Having visited the site, it seems to be a direct replacement for CommonPrayer.org (except that it still works).