Anglican worship emphasizes the incarnational and sacramental motifs of the Christian faith. God was embodied in Jesus Christ. Thus, in worship, the church incarnates in a visible and tangible form the embodiment of God in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world.
The Episcopal Church, like the other national and regional churches which comprise the Anglican Communion, does not have an official theology of worship. It does have an official practice set forth in The Book of Common Prayer in its various editions from 1549 until the present. Anglican theology of worship is derived from its official liturgical practice.
In The Book of Common Prayer of 1979 the American Episcopal Church says, “The Holy Eucharist, the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts, and Daily Morning and Evening Prayer … are the regular services of public worship in this Church.” (Book of Common Prayer, 13). The pattern of worship there set forth is daily prayer, preferably in common, and the weekly celebration of a service of Word and Sacrament.
Anglican theology has often been described as incarnational or sacramental and this is especially true of its theology of worship which uses the words and actions of an “outward and visible” rite as the symbol and the means of entering into an “inward and spiritual” relationship with God in Christ (Book of Common Prayer, 857). Worship is therefore embodied. It is something that we do, not only with our minds but with our entire being. We stand, we sit, we kneel, we bow, we lift our hands and our voices. We look, we listen, we sing, we speak, we remain silent. We smell and we taste. What often appears to be an undue concern with the external aspects of worship by Anglicans, however badly it may be expressed in particular cases, derives from this central theological conviction that it is by entering into the symbolic activity of the liturgy that we are drawn by the action of the Holy Spirit into the very center of the divine mystery, there to lay all that we have and are and hope to be before the throne of grace as members one of another in Jesus Christ.
It is in the coming together of the people of God to hear the Word and celebrate the sacraments that we become the body of Christ, that Christ our Head becomes present in our midst, and that we participate in his Paschal victory over death. Christ’s promise to be present in the midst of the assembly “where two or three are gathered in my name,” (Matt. 18:20, RSV) stands as the primary foundation of worship, which is a corporate activity of the Christian people in which we encounter the living God. Its principal parts include the reading and proclamation of the Word, prayer in Jesus’ name, and the celebration of the sacraments, of which baptism and Holy Communion are the chiefs.
In worship, we as a gathered community remember the mighty acts of God in Christ by which we are saved, in all their power, virtue, and effect, and offer our lives—“our selves, our souls and bodies” (Book of Common Prayer, 336) to God in praise and thanksgiving. This very act contains elements of penitence for sin, acknowledgment of our own unworthiness, and fervent petition and intercession for the needs of all humanity, including ourselves and those we love, for it is only as we are spiritually united to Christ in the power of his risen life and through the activity of the Holy Spirit that we are emboldened to make this response to the divine initiative.
In baptism we are reborn by water and the Spirit to a new life as the children of God, passing over with Christ through death to life, and in holy Eucharist, the anamnesis (commemorative celebration) of the sacrifice of Christ makes us partakers of the benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection. As our bodies are fed by the bread and wine over which we have given thanks in obedience to Christ’s command, “Do this in remembrance of me,” (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor. 11:24), so our souls are nourished by the body and blood of Christ and we are united with Him and with one another in his mystical body.
From this theological center, worship moves out to the celebration of this saving mystery in the daily praise of Morning and Evening Prayer and its application to the critical moments in the lives of individual Christians in pastoral offices such as marriage, ministry to the sick, rites of reconciliation, and burial services, drawing every aspect of life into unity with God in Christ through the church, so that all may be offered in union with the perfect self-offering of Christ. It is from this center that we receive, in turn, the power of Christ’s victory, so that we may become what St. Paul declares us to be (1 Cor. 12:27)—the body of Christ in the world.