Weekly News | 9.18.25

This Sunday is our Annual Parish Meeting, beginning at 10:15AM! We invite everyone to attend to hear about the life and finances of our community, as well as for members to vote on new parish council members. If you have young(er) ones in tow, see Briana’s graphic below.

I never imagined I’d own eight different prayer books, let alone one, but nineteen years ago, as my husband and I settled into Sunday Eucharistic liturgy at Holy Trinity, we became hungry for more. Fast-forward to a year into our Anglican journey, and there we were, up at 6am, bleary-eyed and sometimes belligerent to start, praying the morning office with our housemates. When stuck in besetting sin, we poured over the confessions; when at a loss for words in grief or confusion, we found ourselves flipping to the back of the nearly undecipherably arranged prayer book to the collects. It took awhile, but as our fingers flipped back and forth from canticle to antiphon to psalter, the words formed grooves in our minds, familiar pathways down which to travel.

Today, the prayer book is no longer a curiosity but a steady companion as we navigate middle age and parenting teens, cultural/political unrest and emotional upheaval, as God reveals how much we need his grace to survive each day. As James K. A. Smith posits, we are creatures of habit and ritual–we are what we love–and our practices form us. Practices informed by the prayer book keep us in spiritual good health and give us a framework for life lived with and for Christ.

Our prayer book has a complicated history. Its compiler was a confounding yet God-fearing man who drew extensively from Scripture, ancient Christianity, Judaism, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and newly Reformed traditions to write the first edition. The text has spread and shifted, been banned and expanded, from colonizers to colonized and back again. Our own ACNA 2019 prayer book trickled down to us over the centuries by way of Scotland in the wake of the American Revolution. We pray the energetic Kenyan Rite during Eastertide and beyond. Some prefer the “thee”s and “thou”s of the good ol’ 1979 American version. Despite all of these complications and preferences, the prayer book is meant to be embodied, enacted, by people living out their faith in a specific context and community.

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of the BCP, how it’s used at COTC, and how to make it part of your daily practice, please join Blake and me after the 11am service on September 27th in the large conference room for a Lunch & Learn on the prayer book.

Peace to you and yours,

Krista Vossler, Deacon

PS. If you didn’t receive a physical copy of the COTC cookbook at the 1oth anniversary dinner and would like to see the recipes, check out the digital version!