Praying with children can somehow feel like both an incredibly simple and overwhelming experience: What do we pray about? Do I need to use a liturgy? Is it okay if we always just use a liturgy? What if they just spend their time praying for things they want?

As Thomas Cranmer, the principal author of the original BCP, said, “Our Book [of common prayer] … is an instrument of the Bible.” The Bible can be a daunting text to engage with; thankfully, the work of Cranmer and others like him was able to give us a beautiful book to structure our prayer and guide our daily interaction with God’s Word.

By Rev. Christopher Caudle  I bought my first copy of the Prayer Book to impress God with better prayers than I had been praying on my own. The prayers were beautiful and their vocabulary matched the version of the Bible I thought God liked best. There were even charts in the front and back of…