When it began to be clear that COVID-19 was a global phenomenon, clerics were scrambling for liturgical ways to address the crisis. But it turned out that most twentieth-century Anglican Prayers Books have few, if any, prayers for times of plague or great sickness. This was not always the case. In light of the current pandemic and the pastoral challenges it has introduced, this article explores the theology of sickness and plague in the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer in light of the devastating history of plagues and sicknesses in England, both before and after the sixteenth-century reformations. This exploration makes use of the lens of ‘divine visitation’ as an ordering principle, one of the distinctive phrases that the Prayer Book uses repeatedly to speak of bodily illness.

This essay examines the Anglican claim for the early church as the normative standard for liturgy, as reiterated throughout our history from the time of Thomas Cranmer through the liturgical revisions of the late twentieth century. A secondary claim of general uniformity through similarity in texts of common prayer is then discussed as a point of historic resonance for Anglican identity. Some very general examples of early church evidence follow, as a means of debunking the notion of a unified and simple structure for primitive liturgy. I will then discuss the notion of ‘early church’, and what we mean by terms like it, and follow this with a consideration of liturgical diversity. The gospel call to privilege Christian unity, I will assert, remains the primary stumbling block to the full embracing of the God-given diversity of the one holy, catholic and apostolic church.