Children and the <i>Book of Common Prayer</i>

Abstract This chapter discusses significant issues regarding children’s worship around the Anglican Communion today, arguing that the church should include children alongside adults while also honoring children’s distinctive needs and gifts. It surveys the treatment of children in recent Prayer Book revisions and other authorized Anglican liturgies, including how liturgical revision has responded to modern changes in childhood. It argues that baptized children are full members of the Body of Christ and that future liturgical revisions should make the communion of all the baptized normative. It offers critical evaluation of new eucharistic prayers for use with children and of the past century’s trend toward age-separated worship, proposing a spectrum model for considering children’s participation in liturgy with adults and suggesting that liturgical revisers may do well to think not only in terms of designing rites for children but more broadly in terms of designing rites accessible to all.