What would you think of sitting next to a young girl wearing a hijab (and so presumably a Muslim)? Living in multicultural Birmingham as we do, most of us would think nothing of it. Now suppose you were both sitting in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge waiting for choral evensong to begin! That’s what happened to Carl Trueman when he took his son there in the summer (colourfully retold on his website ‘reformation21’). They sat through the Book of Common Prayer service side by side. Then, afterwards, he and his son mused over what the girl might have made of what she’d witnessed.
He says, “In this liberal Anglican chapel, the hijabi experienced an hour long service in which most of the time was spent occupied with words drawn directly from scripture. She heard more of the Bible read, said, sung and prayed than in any Protestant evangelical church of which I am aware – than any church, in other words, which actually claims to take the word of God seriously and place it at the centre of its life.”
There are good reasons for not using the Book of Common Prayer. But what has taken its place? How ironic if, in the legitimate interests of being intelligible and relevant, we have replaced the eternal words of the living God with… well, with something else. “Dearly beloved … the Scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness…”