The Rev'd Professor Stephen Burns of Trinity College Melbourne will deliver a free public lecture at St Francis College titled, A Prayer Book for Australia: That Was Then, This is Now

In 1995, A Prayer Book for Australia (APBA) was the first revision of an Anglican Prayer Book in the twentieth century (revising An Australian Prayer Book of 1978). Now, the Anglican Church of Australia is the last of all the churches in global western Anglicanism to revise its liturgical resources. The pioneer has become stuck. Persons involved in the processes have been candid about the difficulties of both APBA's production and its initial reception--and those difficulties had longstanding precedents in historic polarisations in Australian Anglicanism. But these have intensified since 1995 such that, for a variety of reasons, common prayer no longer exists. At the same time, understanding and practice of common prayer has developed in new ways around the Anglican Communion--not least with a new missional consciousness--leaving Australia missing marks that now characterise wider Anglican worship. Given that, as the Liturgy Committee of the national church acknowledged at the last General Synod, maybe less than half of Australian Anglican churches use APBA, this lecture enquires about the future of sacramental common prayer in Australia, exploring consensus and clues in international Anglicanism that might dodge the diocesanism and factionalism of the Australian situation.