Where do the words come from?

Sit through a service at the Minster and a natural question surfaces: who decided all this? Who chose the readings, wrote the prayers, picked out the psalm? The surprising — and rather lovely — answer is that almost none of it was written this week, and very little of it was chosen by Beverley at all. Most of what you hear is the inherited, shared prayer of the whole Church, handed on and polished over centuries. The simplest way to see how it fits together is to follow one service from the beginning. Let us take a Sunday’s Choral Evensong, and watch it come into being.

It begins with the day itself

Everything starts with the date. The Church keeps a calendar of seasons — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and the long green stretch of Ordinary Time through the summer, counted simply as Sundays after Trinity. The season sets the mood, the colour of the hangings, and — most importantly — which passages of the Bible are read. You can read more in The Christian year. Choose the day, and a great deal follows on its own.

The readings are appointed, not chosen

For most of its services, the Minster does not sit down each week and pick Bible readings to suit a theme. They are appointed in advance, by a shared table of readings called the lectionary, used right across the Church of England and much of the wider Church. Evensong has two lessons — one from the Old Testament, one from the New — together with an appointed psalm. It is one of the quiet glories of Anglican worship: a church in Beverley and a church on the other side of the world may be reading the very same words on the very same day.

Reading ahead: which readings, for which service

Many people like to read the lessons before a service, and it is a good habit. The one thing that makes it confusing is that each service draws on a different part of the lectionary, so the readings at 11.00 are not the readings at Evensong. The 11.00 readings are printed on the weekly notice sheet; for the other services, this is how to work them out.

Whose translation of the Bible?

When the scripture is read aloud at the Minster, it comes from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) — the translation used across much of the Church of England, valued for being both scholarly and clear. It is what you will hear from the lectern. Some in the congregation prefer others for their own reading — Eugene Peterson’s vivid paraphrase The Message, or the King James Version for its older music; there is more on choosing a translation in Nourishing your faith.

The psalm — the oldest words you will hear

The appointed psalm is not read but sung, to Anglican chant, from the Coverdale Psalter — Miles Coverdale’s sixteenth-century translation, carried down to us in the Book of Common Prayer of 1662. These are among the oldest words spoken anywhere in the building on a given day, worn smooth by four hundred years of singing.

The Collect — the prayer of the day

Each Sunday has its own short, ancient prayer, called the collect — so named because it gathers, or “collects”, the day’s theme into a sentence or two. At Evensong it is followed by two unchanging evening prayers: one for peace, and one — rather beautifully — for aid against all the perils of the coming night.

The canticles — the Church’s own songs

Between and after the lessons come two great songs: the Magnificat, Mary’s song of joy from Luke’s Gospel, and the Nunc Dimittis, old Simeon’s song of farewell. The words are fixed and ancient; the music is not. The choir sings a named composer’s setting of them — one week Stanford, another Howells — which is why Evensong can feel, at the same moment, utterly familiar and entirely new. There is more on all of this in Music in worship.

The frame that holds it together

All of this hangs on a fixed order of service. Choral Evensong follows the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 almost word for word — the Confession, the Preces and Responses (the sung call-and-answer that opens the service), the Creed, the Suffrages, the Blessing. (The morning’s Choral Holy Communion follows the modern Common Worship instead.) So the greater part of what is said is not composed afresh each week. It is the common inheritance of the Church — and much of it is known by heart by the people in the pews.

And the music?

Everything that is sung — the responses, the canticle and anthem settings, the hymns, and the organ voluntary that sends you out — is chosen afresh each month by the Director of Music and published as the Minster’s music list. The hymns are drawn from Hymns Old & New, the Minster’s edition, which is why every hymn has both a number on the board and a first line you may already half-know.

And then it is assembled

Finally the strands are gathered into the single order of service you hold in your hands: the inherited liturgy, the appointed readings and psalm, the day’s collect, and the month’s music. When two sources ever seem to disagree, the rule is simple — the clergy’s particular choices for a day come first, then the appointed lectionary, then the standard texts beneath. What looks, in your hands, like one seamless booklet is really a quiet collaboration between this Sunday and a thousand years of them.

With thanks — and the credits

None of this belongs to Beverley alone, and we are glad to say so. With gratitude, the words you meet are drawn from:

• Liturgy — the Book of Common Prayer (1662, Crown copyright) and Common Worship (© The Archbishops’ Council, 2000), reproduced under the Minster’s CCLI Church and Streaming licences.
• Scripture — the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), used under the Minster’s licence; and the psalms from the Coverdale Psalter, public domain.
• Readings — the Common Worship Sunday and Additional Weekday Lectionaries (© The Archbishops’ Council).
• Hymns — Hymns Old & New (Kevin Mayhew Publishers).

In recent years a small website has begun gathering all of this together automatically for any given date — the season, the readings, the psalm, the collect of the day. But it only ever assembles these long-established sources in one place; none of the words are new. They never were.

Section 11 of 26 in the Companion