Collect for Feast for the Dedication of a Church (1928 BCP)

Collect for Feast for the Dedication of a Church (1928 BCP) is the prayer appointed in the American 1928 Book of Common Prayer for the annual observance of a church's dedication. It gives thanks to God for a particular place of worship, asks him to hear the people who assemble there, and links the building to the Church's vocation as a spiritual house in Christ.

Text of the Collect

O GOD, whom year by year we praise for the dedication of this church; Hear, we beseech thee, the prayers of thy people, and grant that whosoever shall worship before thee in this place, may obtain thy merciful aid and protection; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The complete text was compared word for word with the Society of Archbishop Justus transcription. The prayer is particular without treating the building as a rival to God: it praises God, asks that worship be offered before him, and seeks his merciful aid rather than a power belonging to the site itself. Its three movements are thanksgiving for the dedication, intercession for the people, and a Christological conclusion.

The appointed readings

The Epistle makes explicit what kind of “church” the worshippers are to become:

To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.

The collect therefore does not make the annual celebration simply an anniversary of masonry. Those who worship in the place are being built, in their coming to Christ, into a spiritual house and holy priesthood. “Merciful aid and protection” serves the end named by the Epistle: sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.

The Gospel places the petition for worship within Christ's judgment upon the use of a holy place:

It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them.

Together these verses explain both “worship before thee” and “merciful aid.” The collect asks that the church be a house of prayer under Christ's rule, and the Gospel remembers that Christ's temple ministry joined praise, welcome, and healing. Its use of “whosoever” keeps the intercession open to all who come to worship, rather than restricting it to a building's founders or a single generation.

Anglican account of a collect and a dedication

Francis Procter and Walter Howard Frere describe the older corporate logic of the collect:

A Collect is a form of prayer with special characteristics of its own; these stand out the more clearly by contrast with two other types of prayer, viz., Litany, which is prayer in dialogue, and Eucharistic prayer, which comprises the developed formulas of worship.

Their historical account also records a specifically American inheritance behind church-consecration rites:

A form of Consecration of a Church, based on that drawn up by Bishop Andrewes in 1620, ... [was] added to the Prayer Book in 1799.

These observations illuminate the 1928 prayer's plural “prayers of thy people.” A dedication collect is not a private blessing of property; it is the Church's concise common petition in a place set apart for the public worship of God. The Prayer Book's annual observance keeps that original consecratory purpose before a later congregation.

Anthony Sparrow gives a complementary Anglican explanation of why a collect can speak for a gathered people:

The Priest doth herein Collect the Devotions of the people, and offer them up to God ... they all joyning their assent and saying Amen to it.

Sparrow's interpretation accounts for the collect's direct request that God hear the people's prayers and for its Amen. The prayer gives the congregation words to make its own: praise for God's past mercies, intercession for those now assembled, and confidence that help is received through Christ.

The building and the Church

The distinction between a visible house of prayer and the people who become God's temple remains clear in later official Anglican liturgy. The Church of England's dedication preface says:

for your blessing on this house of prayer, where through your grace we offer you the sacrifice of praise and are built by your Spirit into a temple made without hands, even the body of your Son Jesus Christ.

This is not the source of the 1928 wording, but it states the same scriptural balance found in 1 Peter: the church building visibly gathers the worshipping community, while the true temple is the Spirit-built body of Christ. The 1928 collect's request for aid and protection may thus be read neither as superstition about a sacred structure nor as indifference to place. It is a prayer that worship offered in this local house may form a holy people in Christ.

See also

• Book of Common Prayer (1928)
• Collects Epistles and Gospels (1928 BCP)
• Consecration of a Church
• Holy Communion (1928 BCP)

External links

• 1928 Standard Book: Collects, Epistles, and Gospels
• Church of England, “Dedication Festival”
• Anthony Sparrow, A Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer (1672)