Colin Nicolle (photo: The Parish of St. Mary & St.John) and Matthew Perreault (photo: Dave Brookwell).

The New BCP App

Colin Nicolle, left, and Matthew Perreault talk with Sue Careless about the new digital app they have created as a free tool to make the daily services of the Book of Common Prayer more accessible both to those who know and love them and to those who are discovering them for the first time. 

TAP: Are you both parish priests?   

MP: I am a curate serving at the parish of All Saints, Cochrane in the Diocese of Calgary.

CN: I’ve been the Rector of the Parish of St. Mary & St. John in Summerside & St. Eleanor’s, PEI in the Diocese of NS & PEI for the past four years.

TAP: Are you cradle Anglicans? Did you grow up with the BCP? 

MP: Although my mother’s side of the family were Anglican, I was raised in a Pentecostal tradition. When I was at university, I loved attending my grandmother’s Anglican Church with her. The parish was using the BAS, though she kept referring to the beauty of something called the BCP and suggested we try attending a BCP service some time. We never did, but I did accidentally arrive quite early one Sunday and caught the end of the BCP Eucharist. My mother, who has Alzheimer’s, was able to join in with the Prayers after Communion because she still recognized them from her childhood. I decided that we should give it a shot, and I soon fell in love with it.

CN: I was raised Roman Catholic though during my teenage years stopped being involved with church of any kind. After starting my undergraduate studies at the University of King’s College in Halifax I eventually found my way into the chapel, which uses the Book of Common Prayer, and found in the chapel’s expression of Anglicanism and in the BCP something I felt as though I had been longing for all my life but was never able to find or articulate.

TAP: What attracts you to the BCP? 

MP: The BCP uses a beautiful language to convey deep theological truths in a way that I don’t see in many modern liturgical offerings. It has a timeless and transcendent quality that is sometimes lacking in modern revisions. There is also something stunningly authentic about it. When I pray with the BCP I am not joining my prayers to revisions from the 1980s, but to a tradition of prayer that extends back to 1600 and earlier, and which has been prayed around the world.

CN: Many things, but chief among them the beauty of its language which never fails – no matter how badly I might on my own – to express thanks, penitence, humility, and adoration in concise yet meaningful and deeply moving ways. As well, the life and rhythm of prayer that is laid out for us in the BCP is something that has attracted me to the BCP since first encountering it; the BCP is not, for me, a service book but a book for every time and season of my life. These are things which no contemporary book or liturgy has ever come close to doing for me. It is always there for us and through it we never have to rely on ourselves to give a prayerful and beautiful structure to our spiritual lives.

TAP: Will the app be a bonus during this pandemic? 

MP: One of the most significant pastoral challenges of Covidtide has been social isolation. For someone cut off from their community, praying the Offices is a means of linking oneself in a very real way with the Body of Christ at Prayer, the Communion of Saints throughout time and space. By all accounts, our current situation will remain for some months, and while we no doubt all continue to pray for God to deliver us from this plague, having this app will be a lifeline of prayer. Both now and in the future, the ability of the app to teach someone to pray the Offices will be a huge pastoral boon for clergy who want to encourage the prayer life of their parishioners.

TAP: What does it mean to “pray the Daily Offices?”

CN: Spiritually, praying the daily offices means attempting to pattern one’s life according to a rhythm of structured daily prayer that has been forming the hearts and prayer lives of Christians since the earliest centuries of the Church, and which we as Anglicans have inherited principally in the form of Morning and Evening Prayer, though we also have Noonday Prayer and Compline in our BCP. Practically, praying the daily offices means setting time aside each day to enter into that ongoing rhythm and pray along with the rest of the church. The daily ‘offices’ (services) of prayer are comprised of confessional prayers, psalms, canticles of praise from scripture, scripture readings, and various intercessory prayers that give a kind of frame to our day so that we can begin and end each day with prayer and thanksgiving to God. The offices change only a little day-by-day, which to a first-time pray-er may make them seem repetitious, but in this I think we see precisely the purpose of the daily offices: a structure and language of prayer that through our coming to lean on it daily not only forms our habit of praying every day but embeds itself into our hearts and becomes the language of our own prayer and relationship with God.

TAP: The PBSC already offers the whole Canadian Book of Common Prayer online. Why did you feel an app for Morning and Evening Prayer was needed as well?

MP: Covidtide brought with it, at least initially, a great many people moving away from weekly, or more frequent, celebration of the Holy Eucharist towards praying the Offices. This created a great deal of exposure to the Offices, but also showed that there were many people who lacked familiarity with them. Navigating the lectionary, selecting collects, and addressing other “exceptions” that arise over the course of the year can be difficult, and so the app was conceived as a means of helping to instruct Anglicans in how to pray the office, making it far more accessible for those who do not have someone to teach them.

TAP: What advantages will the app have over the online BCP and the book itself? 

MP: Normally to pray the Office, one would need to know what the most recent Sunday was, then consult the calendar to check for feast days, then consult the table of lessons, in addition to finding the readings in your Bible, bookmarking the psalms in the psalter, and taking into account issues such as seasonal sentences, antiphons, etc. While this quickly becomes second nature once a rhythm of praying the office has been established, it might seem like something of a daunting task when beginning. The app automates the process, by resolving all of these variables without user input. Essentially, if you want to pray Morning Prayer when you wake up, open the app and hit pray, and it will automatically determine the appropriate collects and readings, and print the entire Office out for you.

The virtue of the digital medium is also useful for reasons of accessibility: the font size can be enlarged and other options can be used to assist in making the Office easier to read.

TAP: Who did you design this app for?  

MP: The Society was aware that a number of Canadian clergy are fond of using the Church of England’s Daily Prayer app. In that sense, this offers a Canadian version that follows the Canadian calendar and lectionary. At the same time, the pandemic has renewed lay interest in praying the Office, and the app has particularly been designed for those who do not know how to pray the Office, but desire to learn. In addition to providing a simple way to pray the Office, our intention is to package guides with the app that will help people learn how they can pray the Office using their physical Prayer Book and Bible.

TAP: For those who might struggle with the meaning of certain words, would you consider offering links to simple definitions? 

MP: Understanding liturgical and theological language is always a challenge. One of the benefits of the Prayer Book is that its use of more archaic verbal forms and grammar can force the reader to consider the meaning of a word, whereas in more contemporary English they may actually misunderstand a word through its common (non-theological) meaning.

The UK’s Prayer Book Society has produced some resources – a glossary of terms for the Prayer Book and so on – and we want to explore how something like that might help.

TAP: Do you have plans to make any other services also accessible by app?

MP: Compline, Prayers at Mid-Day, the Litany, and Family Prayers are already included in the app. The idea is to make this a resource for personal devotion first and foremost.

TAP: The General Rubrics in the BCP state: “All priests and deacons, unless prevented by sickness or other urgent cause, are to say daily the Morning and Evening Prayer either privately, or openly in the Church” (lvi). Do you think the app will make this demanding requirement easier? 

MP: Praying the Office is an important spiritual grounding for clergy which is why it was made a requirement. While the BAS doesn’t re-iterate that requirement, it remains a requirement for all clergy none the less. An app that automates part of the process, and which can be accessed on any device means you have the Office at your fingertips wherever you might be regardless of whether or not you’ve brought all necessary materials with you, and it can facilitate learning the Office for clergy whose academic training did not sufficiently focus on praying the Office.

TAP: Will more young people be likely to take advantage of it? 

MP: We definitely think of young people as being more tech-savvy. And while this will be an accessible way for young people to pray, the app’s main demographic is “Christians” and is not determined by any age bracket. If you are a Christian who desires to join in the prayers of the Saints and you have access to a computer, smart phone or tablet device, this app is meant for you!

TAP: During the pandemic older folk have become more familiar with Zoom and smart phones, encouraged by the younger members in their families so everyone could keep in touch online. Do you think even older folk will take advantage of this app when nine months ago they may not have even owned a smart phone? 

MP: Absolutely. There are plenty of Anglicans in Canada who grew up loving the traditional Offices from the BCP. Many of our design decisions have been based around creating a very simple user interface that allows anyone to easily pray without having to deal with technical challenges. There are also options to enlarge the text or provide a dark background and light text for ease of reading.

TAP: Will there be any visuals or artwork used? 

MP: Not at this time. The basic principle of our design process was to make the app appear as similar as possible to the pages of the BCP. The goal is not to replace the BCP with a digital app, but rather create an app that can be a tool for helping faithful Christians learn how to use the BCP themselves. 

TAP: How are costs covered for creating and running this free app? 

MP: The Prayer Book Society of Canada is a charitable organization, and so all of the costs incurred so far, and the costs associated with upkeep of the app, are paid for by the Society through donations. The PBSC website has information on how to make a charitable donation.

TAP: Why were you keen to have this app up and running by Advent?  

MP: Advent is an excellent time for someone to take up a new discipline of prayer. Even for those who already pray the Office, perhaps they have been using an American or other Prayer Book source, and the beginning of the liturgical year is an excellent opportunity to change over to a new system.  TAP