Christianity Today November 2, 2026 9 min signal 2026-11-02

The Book of Common Prayer is having a moment

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

November 2, 2026

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Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

Musician Andrew Osenga and his family were volunteering at a Christian camp when a pipe burst and flooded their house—really, truly flooded, with the floors collapsing and water dribbling underneath the front door.

“We had to move out for six months,” he remembered in a recent interview. “We lost everything we owned.”

Osenga and his wife had an infant and two other young children at the time, about 15 years ago. They were exhausted as they worked to piece their lives back together. He remembers this as a dark season, possibly the most painful he’s walked through.

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In those months, wrangling repairs and diapers, Osenga found himself attending a Bible study at an Anglican church just down the road from his house. Soon he was stopping by services in the mornings after dropping his older kids off at school, even though he was part of a different, decidedly not-Anglican church. As he allowed the liturgy to wash over him, he felt a profound sense of relief at the centuries-old form of worship. The service offered him an outline that he could follow, even when he was barely functioning.

“I didn’t understand what was happening,” he recalled. “I was so depleted. … The liturgy works whether you have the energy for it or not. You can just enter into it as you need. … It was such a gift to me.”

I’m particularly fond of the evening rites, which include prayers like, “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior Jesus Christ.” Paired with Scripture readings selected for nighttime, the prayers help me combat my own twilight derangement.

Whenever the sun starts to set, for whatever reason, I start thinking about death. In his thorough history of the Book of Common Prayer, scholar Alan Jacobs writes that medieval people felt much the same about the end of the day, with its low visibility and wild beasts. These prayers for deliverance spoke to their fears and reminded them of God’s faithfulness.

My copy of the Book of Common Prayer is lovely, pocket-sized, with evergreen covers—but it can be challenging to navigate, with its many services for different occasions and plenty of choose-your-own-adventure liturgies. In the dark, unable to sleep, I usually pull out my phone and read the prayers on the Daily Office website instead.

Osenga told me that even after 15 years attending an Anglican church, he likewise struggles to flip through his physical copy of the Book of Common Prayer for personal devotions: “When I wake up in the morning and I’m groggy, and then I’m reading Old English and the calendar—and I never know what day it is anyway—and then trying to figure out what day it is in relation to the church calendar, I just kept feeling like, ‘Do I suck at this?’”

Now, Osenga is publishing his own set of prayer books, The Quiet Hours, out this November. Largely inspired by the Book of Common Prayer, he hopes these three volumes will make its historic rituals more accessible to Christians longing for rootedness.

Osenga’s devotions include morning and evening prayers, as well as Scripture from the Old and New Testaments. They pull from the church’s spiritual resources over millennia—writings from Catholic monks, Anglicans, Lutherans, and others, an ecumenical touch that brings a spirit of generosity to the endeavor. Osenga said his time in Christian music, playing at “every conceivable type of church,” influenced him to see the value in various traditions.

“I don’t know how copyright works,” he added, “so every prayer is really old.”

Osenga’s project comes amid a seeming boom in Christian publishing offering liturgy to unfamiliar evangelicals. Douglas McKelvey’s series of Every Moment Holy books, putting forward prayers for a wide range of specific life circumstances like dropping kids off at school, changing diapers, being overwhelmed by too much information, and suffering losses from storms, has sold more than 300,000 copies, according to his publisher. Anglican priest Claude Atcho’s Rhythms of Faith, published last year, introduces the church calendar with its periods of Christmastide and Eastertide and Pentecost. Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary recommends spiritual practices for everyday life, including responding to emails and making sandwiches.

And Ashley Tumlin Wallace, an author and children’s minister of an Anglican church in the Florida panhandle, has found an eager audience as she writes about feast days, saints, and practical ways to observe the liturgical seasons. (Her essay about Michaelmas inspired me to bake a blackberry pie last year for the first time.)

Wallace estimates that half of her readers are a lot like me: “nonliturgical, really hungering for liturgy and more of the historical traditions in their life.”

In an interview, Wallace said she fell in love with the Book of Common Prayer as a young mom. “I needed more meaning in my day,” she told me. “The Book of Common Prayer gave me a structure to my day and a way to teach my children how to pray when they wake up or before they go to bed.”

Liturgy also challenges modern Protestants in healthy ways. Wallace remembered a Baptist pastor visiting her church as a guest preacher one Sunday and being so struck by the confession that he added a version of it to his own services. My church, affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of America, also sometimes reads prayers and confessions from the Book of Common Prayer aloud.

### Douglas McKelvey’s ‘Every Moment Holy’

### Time Is Scarce. It Should Be Sacred.

Claude Atcho

Andrew Hagen, my church’s worship leader in Washington, DC, said he believes renewed interest in liturgy is part of a “greater movement amongst Western Christians, particularly those who grew up in evangelical backgrounds,” to “look for things that are established and written outside of ourselves.”

Older texts, he said, “have more of an opportunity to work on us and to exist outside of our modern Western bias.”

So far as newer iterations of liturgy succeed, they do so by focusing on Scripture. Traditionalists may cling to thees and thous and be suspicious of editing time-tested texts to meet modern needs like Osenga has. But the spirit of the Book of Common Prayer, written at a time when most regular people weren’t very familiar with the Bible, was to get the words into their minds and hearts. One of the chief reasons that Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, wrote the Book of Common Prayer (published in 1549), according to Jacobs’s history, was “to provide a venue in which the Bible could be more widely and more thoroughly known.”

It still has that effect, however unexpectedly. South Carolina–based artist Stephen Crotts told me he first encountered the Book of Common Prayer roughly 20 years ago, watching the nautical film Master and Commander.

“I remember being struck by the lines surrounding the burial at sea,” he said in an interview, referring to a scene where actor Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey reads a prayer about committing corpses to the deep and awaiting the resurrection of the dead. The prayer points to Revelation 20:13, a verse about the sea giving up its dead.

“As a young artist, my mind was just swimming with that imagery,” Crotts said, “not least because it mentioned the resurrection of the body, which I thought was something that only happened to Jesus. I had never encountered the idea that Christians would be raised in their body from the dead. I had only heard about the soul escaping to heaven.”

Crotts was so affected that he tracked down a tattered copy of the Book of Common Prayer at a library sale and photocopied the pages to collage them into an art piece. Crotts and his family attend an Anglican church now. He told me that in addition to the prayers, he appreciates the tradition’s commitment to observing the liturgical calendar.

“Our default position in modernity has been to experience time as a flat timeline,” he said. “But the church calendar gives us a way into kairos, presence, an upward cycle of feasting and fasting that brings us ever closer to Christ along with the saints who have gone before us.”

Osenga wants to connect readers with the same kind of grounded tradition.

“I think this is a gateway drug, maybe,” he said of his series of prayer books. “The thing that has given me the most hope and joy has not been finding old prayers that are beautiful, though that has been life-changing and wonderful. It’s been the look on people’s faces, when I see how delighted they are to think that they could discover it.”

Haley Byrd Wilt is a writer based in the Washington, DC, area. She reported on the US Congress for nine years, with her work appearing in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and CNN.

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