For generations, Episcopalians and other Anglicans have responded to the Holy Spirit’s invitation to both communal worship and individual prayer with the assistance of the Book of Common Prayer.
In creating the first Books of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer sought—among other things— to simplify and rationalize the existing liturgies of the Church of England, in large part to ease their use. As he wrote in the Preface to the first BCP, “the number and hardness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the service, was the cause, that to turn the Book only, was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times, there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.”
It’s a problem that sounds shockingly familiar. Over the course of the centuries, but especially in the aftermath of the Liturgical Movement of the twentieth century, the liturgies’ complexity has continued to grow. Any Episcopalian who’s regularly prayed the Daily Office with physical books could tell you that the process typically includes at least two books (the BCP and a Bible) and six to eight bookmarks (to keep track of the calendar, collects, psalms, lectionary, and Office liturgy itself, as well as to mark one’s place within three or four different books of the Bible.) The same is true of Eucharistic worship; while the proliferation of Eucharistic prayers and seasonal variations has indeed enriched our worship, it’s also led to either significant complexity for the worshiper or to the wasteful production and printing of bulletins that can span dozens of pages per worshiper per Sunday.
The Episcopal Church has not, as yet, begun to explore the possibilities that the widespread availability of powerful, portables computers (i.e., smartphones and tablets) has created. Our official liturgical resources are available solely as PDFs, which—being intended to allow for the perfect reproduction of print layouts—are uniquely ill-suited either to be used on mobile devices or to be used as a resource for creating print bulletins. Meanwhile, attempts to express the complex calendrical and liturgical rubrics of the Church algorithmically have been left to hobbyists and amateurs, with the result that various online sources provide conflicting and—importantly—unofficial and unauthorized interpretations of the Church’s liturgies.
I intend this website to do three things:
- Provide the authorized liturgies of the Church in a simple, accessible style that can be read as easily on a smartphone or a tablet as on a laptop or from a book, and can be copied and pasted into word-processing or desktop publishing software to ease bulletin creation.
- Leverage computers’ strengths to simplify the process of things like calendar calculations and lectionary lookups, in a way that is not possible in a print book without greatly increasing its page count.
- Clear away as many barriers to prayer as possible for as many people as possible.
There are several excellent Daily Office apps available (of which Venite.app is my own creation). This site is intended to be a more general resource. While it will always lack some of the more advanced and creative settings and possibilities of the Venite app, it is intended to include a wider breadth of our liturgies and to be structured in a way that’s closer to a digital Book of Common Prayer than to a Daily Office app.
I hope you find it helpful in your life of prayer!