Dear friends in Christ,
Years ago, when I served as a parish priest, I spoke with quite a few folks who found their way to the Episcopal Church. Our church was growing, and new members came from other church backgrounds and from no church background. I loved listening to what God was doing in their lives.
A common thread in those stories was gratitude for Episcopal liturgy, especially for the prayer book. People said they loved the sense of connection to the church in all times and places, liturgies that were hundreds of years old yet still compelling in today’s world. They spoke highly of the poetic and theologically rich language.
If you’ve read Walk in Love: Episcopal Beliefs & Practices, you’ll know how much I love our liturgy. The Anglican liturgical tradition certainly not the only way to rightly and beautifully worship God! But the prayer book is certainly a treasure to enjoy.
Forward Movement publishes a beautiful edition of the Book of Common Prayer (1979). We want you to have a book that is as beautiful as the liturgy. The edition we publish has a leather cover, gilt-edge pages, and a ribbon. Perhaps most exciting to me personally, the book also offers red rubrics. The word “rubric” literally means red, after all. So the red-letter days are actually red! It looks lovely.
So if you need a prayer book, or if you’re looking for a gift for someone on a spiritual journey, check it out. (There are bulk discounts if you’re buying several at once.)
But that’s not all. Today I also want to share a new PDF of the prayer book. As we prepared this edition, we realized that some of the PDFs floating around have quite a few errors. And they don’t show rubrics in red. As a gift to the church, Forward Movement is glad to share a PDF of the whole prayer book. By canon, the Book of Common Prayer (1979) is not copyrighted, and neither is our PDF. You are welcome to share it or post it on your church website, or whatever you like.
Whatever book or digital resource you use, I commend the richness of the prayer book to you.
Yours faithfully,
Scott Gunn
Executive Director
P.S. We also offer the complete BCP in Braille.
More from our ministry:
Listen to this year’s Lent devotional on Audible or Apple Books
Explore the spirituality of the BCP: Inwardly Digest
Another beautiful, portable prayer book: Hour by Hour
Pray from the Book of Common Prayer each day: prayer.forwardmovement.org