My contribution to this morning’s 10:30am service at St Clement’s was to fly the sound desk rather than to play bass or guitar. Unencumbered by an instrument, I decided to set off early and find out what a 1662 Prayer Book service is like.

There was a small congregation, rather scattered across the pews. I am used to a service taking a fair amount of preparatory work but the prayer book service is very scripted so perhaps it would be unfair to look on it as wasting too much time to get ready compared to the number of people who benefit from that effort. However, it does seem a lot less interactive than the services I am used. Perhaps it is partly that the service is unfamiliar to me but it did leave me feeling fairly uninvolved with the rest of the congregation with the priest doing most of the work and everyone else largely cast in the role of passive spectator.

Interesting but, from my perspective, mainly to remind me of how much worship patterns have developed over the course of my lifetime compared to the 300+ preceding years when the 1662 Prayer Book was the way Anglican churchgoing was routinely expressed.