Prayer Book Society Contest

The Society for the Preservation of the Book of Common Prayer is sponsoring a "godly competition to encourage the revival of the production and provision of contemporary prayers and hymns in the traditional religious language found in The Book of Common Prayer". The idea is to get people to write new prayers that are not in the "hey, dude" vernacular of "contemporary worship" services.

There will be six categories -- collects, prayers, litanies, hymns, liturgies and homilies. And there will be two age-groups -- those who have not yet reached their eighteenth birthday and those over eighteen years. All entries must be in English and may be submitted from any part of the world with British or American spelling. Each entrant shall make a statement to the effect that the submission is his own work.

I will be submitting the following collect, which I wrote in 1991 for St. Luke's. Every year we dedicate the Feast of Holy Innocents (Dec 28) to a prayer service for the unborn:

Lord God, who hast taught us to call thee "Father"; who hast created man from the dust of the earth and raised him, in Christ, to the very throne of Heaven; let us never cease praising thee for the unspeakable blessing of life and for the lives of our fellow men which are precious in our sight; Grant that we may more and more perceive thine image in our brothers, even those yet unborn, and that we may love them more and more; Make all nations and all peoples to know thy gospel and obey thy laws, that man may no more be a curse unto man; For his sake who, despising not the Virgin's womb, became a man for our salvation, thy Son, Jesus Christ.

Since the competition requires a minimum of three for the Collects category, I will have to come up with two more. Of course, this one is a bit longer than usual so I might be able to break it up into two separate collects.

Anyway, I think this is a wonderful idea and encourage anyone who reads this blog to give the competition some thought.

(Via: my friend and "Best Woman", Cindy who doesn't have a blog yet.)