Early Influences On F W Boreham

What Shaped Boreham's Life of Prayer?

St John’s Anglican Church in Royal Tunbridge Wells. Credit: Wikipedia

From his earliest days, F W Boreham went with his parents and brothers and sisters to the local St John’s Anglican Church in Royal Tunbridge Wells. He confessed that his mind often used to wander while listening to lengthy sermons so, to alleviate his boredom, he would read the Anglican Prayer Book. This book did much more than ease his childhood boredom for F W Boreham came to love the written prayers for their beautiful words and the way they taught him about prayer through the various times and seasons. 

Writing late in his retirement, F W Boreham recounted a vivid memory when saying, “As a small boy, following in the Prayer Book the liturgy of the church, I was always impressed by one phrase in the General Thanksgiving-‘We bless Thee for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of life.’” He added, “I loved that opening expression of gratitude and this particular clause gave me the opportunity of saying so. It is certainly good to be alive today.”¹

In his description of the Sunday evening story times on hassocks before the fire, when their mother read and told moving stories to her children, Frank tells of the way his mother first read the collects and the lessons that were being used in church.²

The Boreham family in Tunbridge Wells with mother in the centre and father at the back-right. Taken sometime in the 1880s. Frank is standing at the back left, alongside his father. He was the eldest of 10.

The Collect is a short prayer in the Prayer Book that has five main parts: An invocation or address to God, an acknowledgement of an attribute of God that relates to the request, a petition, an aspiration that indicates what might happen when the petition is granted and the pleading (‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’) including an ‘Amen’ of response by the people.³

These Collects from the liturgy seemed to have influenced F W Boreham’s prayers that were usually brief, succinct, focused and rich. From his Prayer Notebook, it is evident that F W Boreham had memorized many of these Collects and he used them often in his leadership of worship.

Here are some of the Collects he used in the section of his Prayer Notebook that he calls ‘Opening’ [Prayers]: