On Morning Prayer

Most Sundays we use the Holy Communion service, but this Sunday we will be using the Morning Prayer service.  Holy Communion and Morning Prayer are two totally distinct liturgies with different words and structures from one another.

Morning Prayer is part of the "Daily Office" ("office" in this sense comes from officium, which is just Latin for "service").  Thus, Morning Prayer is the daily morning service of the Church.  Unlike the weekly Holy Communion, Morning and Evening Prayer are meant to be prayed every day by all priests and deacons, whether privately or publicly in churches, and laypeople are always invited to join at home or in person when public services are offered.  While most Anglican churches now celebrate Holy Communion as the main service on Sunday mornings, some alternate between Holy Communion and Morning Prayer, or offer Morning Prayer once a month.

The structure of Morning Prayer is derived from the ancient hours of prayer offered by clergy and monastics, which grew out of Jewish and early Christian morning and evening prayers.  By the Middle Ages, these hours of prayer had grown into eight services a day, and they had become extremely complicated.  At the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, for the purpose of making these services accessible and available to regular people, the Anglican Church translated these services from Latin into English and combined and condensed them down to just two each day: Mattins (or Morning Prayer), and Evensong (or Evening Prayer). These are the services we continue to use to this day!  Though simplified, they retain the spirit and structure of the ancient and medieval services.

While the primary focus of Holy Communion is the receiving Christ in the Sacrament, the Prayer Book indicates that the purpose of Morning Prayer is to "acknowledge and confess our sins... to come together in his presence to give thanks for the great benefits we have received at his hands, to declare his most worthy praise, to hear his holy Word, and to ask, for ourselves and on behalf of others, those things which are necessary for our life and our salvation."

Morning prayer will be a great gift for our church during our family services, as it will continue to instruct and lead us in the ways of the historic church, while being a slightly shorter service for the little ones (and big ones) that get restless.

-Grady Buhler