An Abridged Liturgy for a Church Coming of Age in America
The Preface: Wesley’s Case for a Shortened Liturgy
The work opens with Wesley addressing the Methodist societies newly organized in North America, explaining why he has undertaken to revise the liturgy they have used informally as members of the Church of England. He reminds his readers that the American societies now stand in a position unlike that of the British Methodists: separated by the Revolution from any tie to the English crown and hierarchy, they are, in his words and reasoning, “totally disentangled” from the state church and from any civil establishment that the old Book of Common Prayer presupposed. This political and ecclesiastical fact becomes his practical justification for producing something new rather than simply forwarding the English liturgy unaltered.
Wesley is careful, even so, to declare his esteem for the Anglican service he is cutting down. He affirms, in substance, that he regards the Prayer Book liturgy as among the most scripturally sound and spiritually serious forms of worship available in any language, ancient or modern. His revision, he insists, is not a repudiation of that inheritance but a pruning of it — removing what long use and the changed circumstances of the American church make unnecessary, repetitive, or simply inapplicable. He points to prayers for the sovereign, for Parliament, and for the established hierarchy of bishops as material that can no longer stand, since America has neither king nor established church. He also signals his intention to reduce the sheer bulk of the traditional service: the combined length of Morning Prayer, the Litany, and the Communion office as customarily read in sequence in England, he judges, is excessive for ordinary congregational use, and he proposes to compress the devotional substance into a single, more manageable service.
Beyond questions of length, Wesley explains specific excisions of doctrinal and calendrical material. He removes the Athanasian Creed, objecting in particular to its damnatory clauses condemning to perdition those who do not hold the creed’s precise formulations — a feature he judges unfit for a service of edification. He likewise strips down the church calendar, retaining only the most essential festivals of the Christian year — the observances tied directly to the life of Christ and to the great facts of the gospel — while dropping the greater part of the saints’ days that fill the older kalendar. He explains, further, that he has removed duplicated readings, such as the repeated recitation of psalms or the Lord’s Prayer occurring more than once within a single continuous service, judging such repetitions to have arisen from the historical fusion of originally separate offices rather than from devotional necessity.
Within the whole design of the book, this preface functions as the interpretive key for everything that follows: every abridgment, omission, and retention in the subsequent services is to be read as a deliberate application of the principles stated here — fidelity to the substance of the Anglican liturgy joined to a frank willingness to cut what circumstance and use no longer warrant.
The Order for Morning Prayer, or the Sunday Service
Following the preface, Wesley presents his revised order for the principal Sunday office, built on the frame of the Anglican Morning Prayer but compressed considerably. The service opens, as in the parent liturgy, with a selection of introductory Sentences of Scripture, followed by a brief exhortation calling the congregation to confession, and then the General Confession recited by the whole assembly, followed by the minister’s Absolution and the Lord’s Prayer. Wesley retains the versicles and responses that open the body of the service — the exchange beginning with the call to praise — but trims the accompanying material that in the fuller Anglican rite surrounds them.
The reading of Scripture forms the substantial core of the retained order. A portion of the Psalter appointed for the day is read or said, though Wesley reduces the volume of psalmody compared to the English use, and abridges the accompanying canticles. Lessons are appointed from the Old and New Testaments, each followed traditionally by a canticle or hymn of response; Wesley keeps this alternating pattern of lesson and canticle but shortens the canticles themselves and removes some that he judges redundant with others already retained. The Apostles’ Creed is preserved as the confessional center of the service, recited by the whole congregation, standing as the one creedal statement Wesley judges necessary for ordinary worship once the Athanasian Creed has been set aside.
The prayers that close the service are likewise reduced from the fuller English form. Wesley retains a core of collects — including collects for the day, for peace, and for grace — while removing others he considers dispensable duplicates of prayers offered elsewhere in the service. The overall effect of this section is compression rather than innovation: nearly every element a reader familiar with the Anglican Morning Prayer would expect to find is present in some form, but reduced in bulk, so that the service can be completed within a shorter span of time than its English original, an outcome directly answering the practical concern Wesley voices in his preface about the excessive length of the combined offices as customarily performed.
The Litany
The Litany follows as its own distinct unit within the Sunday Service, retaining the traditional responsive form in which the minister utters a series of petitions and the people respond with a fixed refrain, most prominently the plea for deliverance and the repeated response calling on Christ to hear the people’s prayer. Wesley preserves this call-and-response structure intact as the recognizable shape of the litany, since it is this antiphonal pattern, rather than any particular set of petitions, that constitutes the office’s essential character.
Where Wesley intervenes is in the content of specific petitions rather than the form itself. Petitions asking deliverance from sedition, from rebellion, and from other civil disorders tied to the maintenance of a particular political order are removed or altered, since they presuppose a monarchical and established context that no longer applies to the American societies. Petitions for “all Bishops, Priests, and Deacons” in the sense of the English hierarchical structure are likewise adjusted to fit the different ministerial situation of the American Methodist societies, which at the time of publication had neither the settled parochial clergy nor the diocesan bishops the English Litany assumes. Petitions of a more general and universally applicable character — pleas for deliverance from sin, from the assaults of the devil, from plague and famine, from violent death, and for the wellbeing of those in trouble, sickness, or any other adversity — are retained largely as inherited, since these do not depend on any particular civil or ecclesiastical arrangement.
The Litany concludes, as in its English original, with a sequence of closing petitions and prayers, including an appeal for mercy repeated in a set formula, before passing into concluding collects. Positioned as it is within the Sunday Service rather than as a wholly separate office to be read only on stated days, Wesley’s arrangement makes the Litany a regular, recurring element of ordinary Sunday worship for the American societies rather than an occasional addition, reflecting his general strategy of consolidating what had been several distinct English offices into a single continuous Sunday service.
The Order for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper
The Communion Service constitutes the third major component of the Sunday order and receives from Wesley the least alteration of doctrinal substance, even as its surrounding material is trimmed. The service opens with the Collect for Purity, asking that the hearts of the worshippers be cleansed by the Holy Spirit, followed by the recitation of the Ten Commandments, each read out by the minister with the congregation responding after each with a plea for mercy and a request for grace to keep that particular law. This retained call-and-response reading of the Decalogue functions as a preparatory examination of conscience before the rest of the service proceeds.
Following the Commandments comes a collect for the day, together with the appointed Epistle and Gospel readings, and then the Nicene Creed, recited by the congregation as the doctrinal confession proper to the Eucharistic rite — distinct from, and fuller than, the Apostles’ Creed used earlier in Morning Prayer. Wesley retains this creed without the alterations he applies elsewhere to Trinitarian formulas, preserving its confession of the divinity of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit intact. After the creed and any sermon, the service proceeds through the offertory, a prayer for the whole state of Christ’s Church, and the customary exhortations inviting the congregation to due self-examination before communicating — though Wesley shortens these exhortations considerably compared to their full English length, retaining their substance while removing extended passages he judges more suited to occasional than weekly use.
The service then moves through its climactic sequence largely as inherited: the invitation to confession, the General Confession, the Absolution, the Comfortable Words of Scripture assuring forgiveness, the Sursum Corda exchange lifting the hearts of the people, the Sanctus, the Prayer of Humble Access acknowledging unworthiness before approaching the table, and the Prayer of Consecration containing the words of institution over the bread and wine. Communion is then administered, followed by the Lord’s Prayer, a post-communion prayer of thanksgiving, the Gloria in Excelsis, and a closing blessing. In preserving this sequence almost entire, Wesley signals that whatever he is willing to cut elsewhere for reasons of length or changed political circumstance, the sacramental core of Eucharistic worship is not, in his judgment, subject to the same kind of abridgment.
in the surrounding rite. This placement made unmistakably clear that whatever losses the reduction elsewhere in the book might represent, the table itself was to remain furnished exactly as inherited.
The Ministration of Baptism
Moving from the altar to the font, the service turns next to the rites by which a person is admitted into the visible church, and here again Wesley’s method is retention with pruning rather than invention. The Publick Baptism of Infants keeps the essential shape found in the Church of England’s Prayer Book — an address to the congregation on the necessity and meaning of the sacrament, questions put to the godparents renouncing sin and professing faith on the child’s behalf, the act of baptism itself with water in the name of the Trinity, and a concluding thanksgiving — while cutting the longer exhortations and some of the accompanying rubrical detail that Wesley judged unnecessary for the pace of American congregational life. A shorter form, The Ministration of Private Baptism of Children in Houses, is retained for cases of sickness or urgency, again abbreviated but preserving the substance of the public rite so that it can be supplied afterward in the congregation if the child survives.
Because the Sunday Service was designed for a mission field in which adult converts as well as infants required baptism, provision is also made for the baptism of those of riper years, adapting the questions of renunciation and profession to persons old enough to answer for themselves rather than through sponsors. This is one of the points at which the American situation visibly presses on the inherited English text: a Prayer Book written for a settled, universally infant-baptized population is being reshaped for a growing, evangelistic church still gathering converts from outside any Christian upbringing. The theological substance — baptism as the sign of regeneration and admission into the covenant community — is unchanged, but the pastoral occasion for using each form is broadened.
The Catechism
Following the baptismal offices, Wesley reprints a shortened Catechism, cast in the traditional question-and-answer form by which children and new believers are to be instructed in the elements of the faith before being brought to confirmation — though confirmation itself, being tied to episcopal authority that the American societies did not yet possess, receives no separate liturgical form in this book. The catechism covers the baptismal vow, the Apostles’ Creed article by article, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer, with the child instructed to state what these require in duty toward God and toward neighbor. As in the rest of the volume, the wording is trimmed from the fuller English original, but the catechetical structure — creed, commandments, prayer, sacraments — is left intact as the basic curriculum of instructed piety.
The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony
The marriage service preserves the recognizable sequence of the traditional rite: the minister’s opening charge on the causes for which matrimony was ordained, the mutual questions and vows of the man and woman, the giving of the ring, the joining of hands, and a concluding prayer invoking blessing on the couple. Wesley’s abridgment shortens the exhortations that frame these central acts without touching the vows themselves, which stand essentially as inherited. The rite assumes, as its English original had, a settled and public exchange of consent before witnesses and minister, folding the new Methodist societies into an existing legal and religious institution rather than devising anything distinctive to their own discipline.
The Order for the Visitation of the Sick
For pastoral use at the bedside, the book supplies a Visitation of the Sick, consisting of prayers for the recovery or, failing that, the preparation of the sufferer, an examination of the sick person’s faith modeled on catechetical questioning, and prayers of absolution and comfort. Wesley’s version compresses the longer exhortations of the English form, again retaining the pastoral logic — examine, absolve or comfort, commend to God — while reducing the amount of set material a minister traveling a demanding circuit would be expected to read at length beside a dying parishioner. The retained material assumes ministers moving quickly among scattered societies, for whom a shorter form was not a theological statement but a practical necessity matching the itinerant character of early American Methodism.
The Order for the Burial of the Dead
The Burial of the Dead likewise follows its English original in outline — sentences of Scripture said or sung as the body is brought to the place of burial, a psalm or reading affirming the resurrection, committal of the body to the ground, and a closing prayer of thanksgiving for the departed and petition for those who remain — while shedding some of the longer prose passages of the source text. The doctrinal center, confidence in bodily resurrection grounded in the Pauline language of the “first fruits” and the promise that “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,” is carried over essentially unaltered, since it is precisely this consolatory and doctrinal core, rather than any incidental ceremonial elaboration, that Wesley wished the shortened service to preserve for congregations often without settled clergy nearby to conduct funerals.
The Psalter
Rather than reprinting the complete cycle of one hundred fifty psalms for continuous monthly recitation as the Church of England’s Prayer Book directs, Wesley supplies a reduced selection of Psalms, distributed for use across the services of the book rather than arranged for the older system of daily course reading. Psalms whose imprecatory or cursing language he judged unsuitable for Christian worship — verses calling down destruction upon enemies — are omitted or altered, consistent with the same principle of pastoral fitness that governs his other cuts. The psalms that remain continue to supply the sung or spoken praise, lament, and confession that punctuate Morning Prayer and the Communion service, but the volume of psalmody a congregation is expected to work through is deliberately reduced from the inherited monthly cycle to something more compatible with a single Sunday service of manageable length.
The Collects, Epistles, and Gospels
The book retains a cycle of Collects, together with appointed Epistle and Gospel readings, for the Sundays and principal feasts of the Christian year, though Wesley trims the calendar sharply, removing most of the saints’ days and lesser holy days that crowd the traditional English kalendar. What remains concentrates attention on the great structural feasts of the year — those marking the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and the sending of the Spirit — while eliminating the accumulated commemorations Wesley regarded as neither scriptural nor necessary to Methodist practice. This pruning of the calendar parallels his pruning of the psalter and the daily offices: in each case the inherited material is not rejected outright but reduced to what he judged its essential, scripturally warranted core.
The Ordinal: Forms for Ordaining Superintendents, Elders, and Deacons
Toward the close of the volume Wesley includes forms for ordination — for Deacons, for Elders, and for Superintendents — a section without which the Sunday Service could not have answered its immediate practical purpose, since the American societies, cut off from the Church of England’s bishops by the Revolution, had no means of obtaining sacraments without ministers empowered to administer them. The ordinal follows the structure of examination, prayer, the laying on of hands, and the delivery of Scripture or the elements of ministry appropriate to each order, adapted from the Church of England’s own ordination services but administered, in Wesley’s design, without dependence on episcopal succession as that church understood it. Wesley himself, only a presbyter of the Church of England, took the position that presbyters possessed the same essential right to ordain as bishops, and it was on this basis that he personally ordained ministers for America and set apart Thomas Coke, already a priest, as superintendent, sending him with this book to organize the ministry of the new Methodist Episcopal Church at the Christmas Conference of 1784. This section of the volume is thus the point at which the Sunday Service ceases to be merely a liturgical abridgment and becomes an instrument of ecclesiastical founding, supplying the very offices by which an independent American Methodist ministry could be constituted.
The Articles of Religion
The volume closes with a doctrinal statement, Twenty-Four Articles of Religion, Wesley’s own abridgment of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, from which he removed articles he considered redundant, overly technical, or tied to specifically English ecclesiastical and political arrangements inapplicable to America — including material touching predestination in its more Calvinist formulations, the Athanasian Creed’s damnatory clauses, and provisions concerning the relationship of church and state under the English crown. What remains affirms the classical Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the sufficiency of Scripture, original sin, justification by faith, and the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, stripped of the polemical and jurisdictional matter that had accumulated around the Elizabethan settlement. When the American preachers gathered at the Christmas Conference adopted this book as the doctrinal and liturgical foundation of the new church, they added one further article addressing the civil authority of the United States, making the American total twenty-five; but the twenty-four articles as Wesley delivered them represent his own final judgment on the irreducible doctrinal minimum a reformed and scripturally grounded church required.
