authorized services

Common Worship

The principal forms of service in Common Worship were authorized for use from Advent Sunday 2000. As well as being published in book form, all the contents of Common Worship have been made freely available at the Common Worship web site.

The following services and other material are available:

These files are also available as PDF and RTF files.

Common Worship Daily Prayer is also now available on the Common Worship web site. oremus has worked with Church House Publishing to implement the on-line version of Common Worship and BCP Morning, Evening and Night Prayer.

One of the last parts of Common Worship to be authorized is the Ordinal, the forms for the ordination of deacons, priests and bishops. This was finally authorized by the General Synod in Summer 2005. The printed Ordinal is now published, and contains the 1662 BCP ordinal, the CW ordinal, and a study guide with historical introduction and practical points for those planning ordination services. These extra features are not currently available on the web.

Common Worship: Festivals has not yet been published. However, the draft texts are available in two parts Feasts of our Lord and Feasts of the Saints.

The Common Worship calendar and lectionary is available as an annual ‘almanac’ for use with a desktop calendar (such as Outlook, or Apple’s iCal) or a smartphone or tablet (such as an iPhone or Android, Blackberry etc).

For some years before the authorization of Common Worship the Church of England was busy revising the Eucharist and other services. The final forms are now available, as noted above at the Common Worship web site.

For historical interest we retain here various draft forms, particularly of the Eucharist. These forms show the development of Common Worship. Also available is the text of Exciting Holiness, the companion to the festivals and commemorations of the Calendar.

Part of the process of revision was the publication in 1992 of Celebrating Common Prayer. This was the work of a group of experts drawn from the Society of Saint Francis and members of the Liturgical Commission and others. It is a full version of the fourfold daily office offered for the use of Anglicans and others and is no doubt a major contribution to revision of the Church of England's official provision for daily prayer. I am grateful to the Society and their publisher, Mowbrays, for making this text available and allowing it to be published on the Internet.