Where It Falls in the Service

Where it survives in use, the Prayer of Humble Access is said or sung immediately before the reception of communion, typically by the whole congregation together rather than by the presiding minister alone, marking a final shift in posture from the preceding prayers of consecration to the moment of personal reception. Its placement so close to the sacrament itself is part of what has made its wording theologically sensitive: prayers earlier in the service can address doctrine in more general terms, while this one is spoken at the precise threshold of the act it describes. Musical settings of the prayer, some dating from the sixteenth century and others composed much later, have kept it in use even in congregations that have otherwise revised or modernized their liturgical language considerably.

Modern Anglican prayer books in some provinces offer it as an optional rather than a required text, reflecting an accommodation between those who value its historic wording and those who find its self-abasing language out of step with contemporary liturgical sensibility, and its continued presence as an option, rather than uniform inclusion or removal, is itself evidence of the unresolved debate Cranmer's original wording provoked.