Anglican worship has a variegated history, having fluctuated between worship forms similar to those of Catholicism and worship influenced by the Puritans. This accounts in part for the variations in worship within the Anglican communion of today. Nevertheless, The Book of Common Prayer is basic to all Anglican churches.
The Anglican tradition is ambiguous: what started off as a fairly moderate reformation, and remained so for three centuries, reversed itself in the nineteenth century and moved to reappropriate a great deal of the medieval cultus. To modern observers, Anglican worship seems more conservative than Lutheran; but the theological origins are far more liberal. Anglican liturgy began with Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s (1489–1556) two editions of The Book of Common Prayer, that of 1549 and the much more radical 1552 book. Using the latest technology, Cranmer sought to put all the services in the hands of everyone by translating, condensing, and revising them before publishing them in popular versions under a price ceiling.
Cranmer succeeded in recovering daily services of public prayer, which became a staple of Anglican worship. Many of the ceremonies associated with the sacraments and other rites disappeared from the 1552 edition and the theology became much more unambiguously Zwinglian. Martin Bucer (1491–1551) provided much of the structure for the ordination rite, but Cranmer was not prepared to accept as high a view of the Eucharist as Bucer and Calvin. A great ornament of the book was Cranmer’s linguistic ability to cast traditional Latin prayers in the language of his contemporaries.
After the brief regression of the Marian years, Anglican worship tended to stabilize during the long reign of Elizabeth I. As a political settlement, episcopal forms of church government were retained, as well as something of the appearance of public worship, although there had been much iconoclasm even before the rise of Puritanism. Weekly communion proved to be too radical a step for most people, and canon law eventually settled for a minimum of three celebrations a year. The normal Sunday service came to be morning prayer, litany, ante-communion, and sermon. Popular hymnody was lacking, but magnificent choral daily services characterized worship in the cathedrals. The poet-priest George Herbert (1593–1633) offered an example of Anglican parish ministry at its best.
The Puritan takeover of the Church of England from 1644 to 1660 moved things leftward in a radical direction, but only temporarily. The restoration period afterward attempted to return to the status quo of 1604, as the prayer book of 1662 showed. Despite the survival of high church traditions (without much ceremonial), most Anglicans were comfortable in a tradition that avoided the excesses of either Catholicism or Puritanism. In the eighteenth century, this meant worship that was edifying and moralistic but with little concern for the sacraments or anything overtly supernatural.
In the nineteenth century, reactions came in the form of a recovery of patristic theology (the Oxford Movement, Tractarianism, Puseyism) and to a full-scale recovery of late medieval ceremonial (the Cambridge Movement, Ritualism). These brought back weekly celebrations of the Eucharist at just the same time this was occurring among Disciples of Christ, Mormons, Plymouth Brethren, and the Catholic Apostolic Church. A new emphasis was placed on baptism, penance, and the revival of medieval architecture, liturgical arts, and choral music. Congregational hymnody also made its advent.
The twentieth century has seen an indigenous liturgical movement in the Church of England, manifesting itself as the parish communion movement in the 1930s. Recent years have seen a wholesale revision of Anglican prayer books around the world, usually either following the patters of Cranmer or trading in such later medieval forms for the third-century model of Hippolytus.