The primary service for Anglicans each week is that of Holy Communion. Of course this was not always the case in the English church. There was a time in the 18th and 19th centuries where the primary weekly service was morning prayer. During this period of time communion was administered only monthly or on the biblical feast days. That all changed with what was known as the Oxford movement beginning in England on July 14 of 1833. The tractarians, as the Oxford Dons soon become known, were attempting, with various levels of failure and success, to return the church of England to it liturgical roots. Of course there is much room for criticism of this movement and the men who moved it, but there are also ways in which that movement had enriched the liturgical life of the tradition. Weekly communion being one of those contributions.
As for the liturgy itself, the prayer book (and here I am speaking of the 1662 prayer book) has its basis in an earlier liturgical rite known as the "use of Sarum" or the "use of Salisbury." This was the rite in use in England before the reformation when the church was still under the supremacy of the pope. It is a Latin rite, which means that it would have been recited in Latin, but is and was distinctively an English rite as it was designed by and for the English church by the English church. It did become prominent thought throughout parts of northern and western Europe and influenced a number of liturgies across the known world.
This then would have been the rite that Archbishop Cranmer would have been familiar with as he was reforming the church. It is also the rite in which the prayer book that we now have (the 1662) is based upon. The big difference, though, between the 1662 rite and the rite of Sarum, however, would be the emphasis that Archbishop Cranmer put upon the doctrine of justification by faith alone in the liturgy of the prayer book. It has been said that the 1662 prayer book is the doctrine of justification by faith alone put into liturgical form and that's why the form of the liturgy is so important. Its why we don't deviate from it or revise it on our own.
Of course there have been revisions. Our own 1928 prayer book is one such revision. But the revision of the 1928 prayer book has not departed from the work of Thomas Cranmer. Though there are some differences between the rites of the 1662 and the 1928, which you will observe if you look at your new RE prayer books since both rites are included, but the 1928 is still a Cranmarian prayer book due to the fact that many of the revisions from the 1662 to the 1928 were based upon an earlier prayer book, which was written by Cranmer's hand, known as the 1549 prayer book. So even though there was some revision (approved by the bishops in council) to the 1928 prayer book it did not deviate from the liturgy that Cranmer left us.
But then we come to the 1979 prayer book of the Protestant Episcopal Church USA (TEC). The 1979 was another revision of the prayer book by the Episcopal church in the late 70s following the revisions of the Roman Catholic rites at the second Vatican council in 1962. You might think that it is strange that Rome's revision would have any bearing on the Episcopal Church, but it did and the 1979 prayer book is a result of that.
This prayer book is the version that most modern day Episcopalians and former Episcopalians are familiar with. It has been in existence now for over 40 years and at least 2 generations of Episcopalians have known nothing else. There have even been situations where people have visited classic prayer book parishes and what they witness there is completely foreign because they were so used to the 79 prayer book that they never knew anything else.
But the 79 is full of problems. It has significantly departed from the Cranmarian theology which underpins the form of the liturgy. It has attempted to soften the blow of sin. It has reframed our common human problem and attempted to appeal to emotions rather than objective theological fact. For this reason I do not count the prayer book of 1979 to be a valid Book of Common prayer as it is not rooted in the Cranmerian tradition of the classical prayer books. The bottom line, though, is that what we now have in our prayer books of 1662 and 1928 is faithful to the reformed theology of the Church of England after the reformation and the Elizabethian Establishment. This is why I commend them to you, not just for worship on Sunday mornings, but also for private and family devotions as well.
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