The Lord's Prayer, on the Day of Pentecost

Our Father in heaven,

Hallowed be your name in my own heart,
and in the hearts of all your people,
by the presence of your own Holy Spirit.

Your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven;
with the same prompt obedience and holy joy as angels and archangels before your throne,
may I and all your creatures do your will.

Give us today our daily bread,
and by your Spirit sustain us in our life;
for when you withdraw your Spirit we perish,
and when you send your Spirit the earth is renewed.

Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us,
and cleanse our consciences from all sense of guilt
as your Comforting Spirit ministers to us
the forgiveness secured by the cross and resurrection of Christ our Lord.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,
sending your Spirit ahead of us to prepare our way,
and walking with us by your Spirit in every step we take.
Equip us, gracious God, by the gifting of your Spirit,
to live in holiness, by whatever path you lead us.

For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God,
now and forever.

Amen.

Books about corporate worship

These are the books I've found most helpful on the subject of corporate worship - with the caveat that this is not at all meant to be a list of the best books on the subject, just the ones I've meandered through in my idiosyncratic reading and found helpful.

Peter Leithart's Theopolitan Liturgy is the most recent addition to the list - the only book from my Christmas haul that I've finished reading so far.  It's helpfully slender, and makes a strong biblical case for the importance of corporate, liturgical worship.  Creation and culture exist for worship; in the liturgy, far from using created things and cultural forms in a strange way, we restore them to what they always existed to do.  Reality is liturgical all the way down (you could also consult James Smith on this one), and human life is inevitably shaped by sinful, idolatrous liturgies or by Christian worship.

Alexander Schmemann's book For the Life of the World comes from a very different theological and ecclesiastical context than my own - he was an Orthodox Priest - and consequently there are some things in this book which I find off putting.  But the flipside is that it opens up a very different perspective.  Schmemann more than anyone has taught me to value the sacraments.  I could have learnt that from Calvin, if I'd been paying attention, but perhaps it took someone speaking from slightly further away to get through to me.  The liturgy matters at least in part because sacraments matter.

On the practical side, Hughes Oliphant Old's Leading in Prayer has been invaluable for shaping prayer as a substantial part of corporate worship.  The idea of a service of prayer - of corporate worship as substantially a conversation between the congregation and the Lord - is largely absent in contemporary evangelicalism, as far as I can tell, which adds to the general impression on approaching this book that it belongs to an earlier era.  (The cover design and language trend in the same direction, to be honest).  This book springs from years of pastoral experience, and gives a large number of written prayers which the author has used in worship - not with the idea that they would necessarily be used as printed, but as worked examples.  The whole assumes a more formal structure to worship than I could get away with regularly in my context, but it's nevertheless helpful for thinking about the shape of worship and the nature of public, led prayer.

Karl Barth's Homiletics can stand here for more extensive engagement with Barth's theology of preaching - probably I'd have to include large chunks of Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2 to get the full effect, as well as some of the essays from The Word of God and Theology.  If Oliphant Old helps with the human side of the dialogue that is corporate worship, Barth has really helped me to see preaching as the other side.  Of course, in preaching a human being stands up and speaks, but what Barth sees so clearly is that the church counts on the fact that the Lord himself is speaking as his word is preached.  Preaching is encounter.  I dare say I could have learnt this from many places, but I actually learnt it from Barth.

I'm sure there are others that I've missed here, but there's a few that I've found useful.

Praying for God

Preaching from Ephesians 3 on Sunday, I was particularly struck by the things that the apostle Paul prays for:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

He asks that God would give his Holy Spirit, so that the believers might be strengthened in their spiritual innards; he asks that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith.  He asks that they might know the love of Christ in all its unknowable immensity; he asks that they may be filled up with God in all his overflowing fullness.

Big asks!

But also asking for things which to an extent they already have.  They're Christians, which means they have the Spirit, they know Christ by faith, they have some experience of God's love, God already dwells in them and amongst them.  They have all this; but Paul prays it for them anyway.  Because God is inexhaustibly rich, because the love of Christ is a vast ocean that can never be fully charted, because the Holy Spirit is a never-ceasing fountain of grace - therefore, Paul prays for them, that they might have and enjoy what they already have and enjoy, more and more, through and through.

And notice that what he wants for them is God.  This is God's will: to give himself to his people.  The God who lacks nothing, and is rather the source of all goodness, wants to give his presence, his power, his own self, to his people.  It is only because the gift is God himself that Paul can pray knowing that there is always more for them to receive, no matter how much they have already.  God in his infinite bounty desires to spend eternity demonstrating just how bottomless is his grace.

Can you have more of God?  If not, I don't know what Paul is about here in this prayer.  Yes, there is more.  Always more.

And might we not ask for that?  For God?  Remember that the good Father always gives the Holy Spirit to his children who ask him.  Here is a thing he has promised to give in response to prayer, and moreover it is the best thing - himself! - and a thing we will never have finished praying for because there is always more.  And yet our prayer meetings, and I would guess our personal prayer times, are full of prayers for other things, uncertain goods, finite ends.

Might we not pray for God?

Reformation Liturgies and corporate prayer

I've just finished working through Reformation Liturgies, edited by Jonathan Gibson and Mark Earngey.  This (massive) book compiles a number of different liturgies and forms of worship from the Reformation period (i.e., the 16th century), including liturgies from Lutheran, Anglican, and Reformed churches.  I'll be honest, it's probably not everyone's idea of a gripping read, but I found it fascinating, and as a resource for contemporary worship absolutely invaluable.  Those guys, driven by gospel need, thought hard about what Christian worship ought to be like, and strove to put it into practice.  The care that went into those liturgies, to make sure that what was said and done was God-honouring, is really striking.  What is equally striking - and helpfully illustrated in an appendix which compares the 'running order' of all the different liturgies (including, usefully, an outline of the mediaeval Mass) - is that there was a broad consensus amongst the early Protestants, despite differences in detail and approach, on the content and shape of a Christian act of worship.

I don't want to go into detail on that content and shape here - see the book - but I do want to ask a couple of questions.

The first is this: given the consensus in the early Reformation period, how have we got to a point now where anything that smacks of being 'liturgical' feels, to folks in my congregation, as if it is 'Anglican'?

The answer is actually hinted at in the book - the liturgies of some of the English exiles during the Marian period are already tending towards simpler forms, less prescriptive.  The particular history of non-conformity in the late 16th and 17th centuries must surely have a bearing.  Theologically, arguments like that of John Owen in his Discourse Concerning Liturgies (1662) are relevant.  Owen's main points are: that Christ has provided men to lead in worship, equipped by the Holy Spirit, thus obviating the need for set prayers; that Christ having made such provision, any seeking out of other means is contrary to his will; and, that nobody other than Christ has the necessary authority to impose a particular liturgy.  I don't find these hugely persuasive, and I think Owen ignores evidence that set liturgical forms were in use much earlier than he is prepared to admit (and I think further evidence has come to light since Owen's day).  Owen thinks he is arguing for the liberty of the churches, but to me he seems to be arguing only for the liberty of the clergy, to lead as they see fit; and set in that light, the arguments do not appear so noble.  However, Owen's arguments are better than the main arguments expressed in our contemporary setting, which seem to be that set forms are necessarily 'inauthentic', and that only prayer from the heart counts; add to that our culture's strong preference for informality, and hey presto.

My second, and more important, question has to do with the effect of the abandonment of liturgical forms on our churches.  It is commonly observed that our worship is often rather thin gruel; that our services lack 'shape' and depth.  I think that's right.  The work of teaching, formation, and discipleship has come to be focused exclusively on the sermon, with the surrounding informal liturgy being seen as primarily a time for self-expression.  That is problematic, to say the least.

I wonder whether there hasn't been a broader impact on corporate prayer.  I don't want to over-state this, but I do think it is significant that when Jesus taught his disciples to pray he gave them, not a technique, but a form of words.  (I've commented on this here and here).  We learn to pray by praying along.  There is no doubt in my mind that this is easier with 'set prayers' which are repeated over time than it is with extemporaneous prayer.  Moreover, the sense of 'praying along' is surely conveyed better in a liturgical form with space for responses and prayers recited together than a more informal form which reserves only the 'amen' for the 'laity' (so-called).

Why I am a Christian

There are lots of ways you could tell this story, of course, with the emphasis falling in different places.  There are plenty of circumstantial factors that would have to be borne in mind - pre-eminent among them the fact that I was born into and raised within a family where the Christian faith was sincerely believed and seriously practised - and I'm sure many people would want to reduce the whole answer to the sum of circumstances like that.  For myself, I could also give an 'upper storey' account of why I am a Christian, pointing to the agency of the Holy Spirit enabling my agency in belief - an account which would, of course, only be plausible for those who were also operating with a commitment to Christian faith.

But this is the account of the middle storey, the account of what reasons I could give for being a Christian.  If somebody were to ask me why I believed, and of course people do ask just that, this is the answer I would give.

Incidentally, for me faith is not a thing that comes easily.  I know that for some people it does, and over time my attitude toward that has changed.  For a long time I tended to think that those who seemed to have an implicit trust in God were just being naive.  I was a bit patronising about it, to be honest: they don't seem to have wrestled with the hard questions at all, how can that be genuine faith?  (The implication being that my own belief was somehow more valid for being more complicated).  Well, I repent.  Simple, straightforward faith is a great and glorious gift of God, and not to be despised.  Perhaps rather to be envied.  But that's not where I am or have ever been.  I walk somewhere on the border of Christianity and atheism, and I'm thankful that I've typically kept to the faith-full side of the border.  But why?

There are three reasons, basically.  The first and most foundational is that I am convinced that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.  At first this simply meant that I found the testimony to this event convincing: I read the accounts and I thought the witnesses seemed sincere, in a position to know the truth (or otherwise) of what they were saying, and ready to venture a great deal on this testimony (their lives, in fact).  I was struck by the lack of art or manufacture about the various strands of testimony to the resurrection.  Even the inconsistencies struck me as evidence of truthfulness; nobody inventing a story would do it that way.  When I have doubts about aspects of Christian faith, I circle back around to the resurrection: I don't see how it can be explained away, and everything else rests on it.

Of huge help to me in thinking about the resurrection more thoroughly was Tom Wright's book The Resurrection of the Son of God.  Wright sets the testimony to the resurrection within its context, showing that this wasn't something anyone - Jewish or pagan - was expecting, and yet that it did in the end  fit within the Jewish story, as the fulfillment of the ancient hopes and promises.  It's a really big book, but if you're serious about thinking through whether this really happened - and what it would mean if it did - this is the place to go.

The second reason is basically this from C.S. Lewis:  “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.” In other words, putting the resurrection of Jesus in its place at the centre of my view of the world causes everything else to make sense. In particular, I know of no other worldview, religion, or philosophy which enables and encourages me to be a human person, and to take my humanity and personhood seriously, in its glory and its limitations. The world is a confusing and often dark place, and human thinking about the world is a muddle. Contemporary culture seems to be elevating that muddle to a position of unassailable orthodoxy. But I keep wondering - can you live as if this were true? Can you really live as if you were a meaningless blip in a meaningless universe? With Jesus, I find that the world, and my life, and indeed the very darkness and muddle, receive a powerful explanation. It's like the sun rose, or someone turned the lights on.

The third reason is that this morning, like almost every morning, I spent some time speaking with God and listening to him speak to me. Which is to say, I am a Christian because I know (relationally) the God who made the universe.

I'd be interested to hear why you are, or are not, a Christian. Let me know.

Thoughts on the Lord's Prayer

Doing a little bit on the Lord's Prayer for last Sunday, I had a couple of thoughts.  Nothing remotely original, but just things that have struck me again.

1.  Prayer can be learned - otherwise what are Jesus' disciples doing asking him to teach them?  And what is Jesus doing in his response to their request?  I commented on this before in relation to Bonhoeffer's book on the Psalms.  Against the assumption that prayer must be spontaneous or the overflow of the heart, the very existence of the Lord's Prayer testifies to the fact that prayer can be learned.

2.  It is significant that Jesus doesn't teach a technique or a frame of mind but a form of words.  Prayer is not a vague openness to God, or a period of meditation (however helpful that may be).  Prayer is an address, an act of speech.  So what is interesting to me is this: we all know how to talk, and what Jesus thinks his disciples need to know is what to talk about when they are addressing God.  In other words, it's an agenda, not a method.

3.  A lot could be made of the fact that the prayer is cast in the first person plural - our Father.  Again, our assumption often is that the purest form of prayer is that done by the individual in isolation.  There is some reason for this - consider Matthew 6:5-6.  Certainly the lack of individual private prayer is an indication that something is seriously wrong, even if there is plenty of public prayer in your life.  Nevertheless, according to the form of the Lord's Prayer, even our individual prayer is done in company - we always address our Father alongside brothers and sisters, and ultimately alongside the Lord Jesus.  So there is a sense in which corporate prayer is primary, and individual prayer joins it.

4.  The prominence given to forgiveness of sins is striking.  Bread and forgiveness are our two great daily needs.  I wonder what is lost when that sense of needing, and being given, daily forgiveness is eclipsed.  It is also striking that this daily experience of forgiveness is conditional, which goes against the grain for many of us; probably because what is ingrained in us is cheap grace and not gospel.

He must maintain and defend it

We tell our Lord God plainly, that if he will have his church, he must maintain and defend it; for we can neither uphold nor protect it...

Thus Luther, Tabletalk, 368.

It is a common theme of my musings on Sunday nights and Monday mornings that if God wants to have a church, he is going to have to step in and work.  Whether the Sunday service has gone well or poorly - and I am often a bad judge of that - there is still the realisation that nothing we have done is sufficient.  Nothing we have done can bring it about that spiritually dead people will come to life; nothing we have done will lead by necessary consequence to the strengthening of faith; nothing we have done is adequate to defend those who know the Lord from the attacks of world, flesh, and devil.

Indeed, the church is a very fragile thing.

One of the most helpful applications which I take from the Advent season is simply this: not only does the world need Christ to come to redeem his creation on the last day, but the church needs Christ to come to save his people every single day.  Because God wanted to save his world, he sent forth from the heavens his eternal Word, to become a baby, frail and human.  If God wants to keep his church, he must send forth from the heavens his eternal Word, again and again and again, by his Spirit.  If God wants to grow his church, he must open up the heavens and show forth Christ.

It is a humble but impertinent prayer:

Lord God, you have shown us that we can do nothing without you, either to maintain your honour, display your glory, preserve your church, or advance your kingdom.  In truth, we are nothing unless you send your Word in the power of your Spirit.  And so, we turn to you.  If you desire to have a church, if you desire to draw a people to yourself, if you desire to be glorified in all the earth - you must do it.  Will you do it, please?  Amen.

Learning to Pray

The introduction to Bonhoeffer's short book on the Psalms - The Prayerbook of the Bible - is worth every penny you might pay for the book, even assuming you didn't read and benefit from the rest of it, which you ought to.  In noting that Jesus' disciples ask him to teach them to pray, Bonhoeffer probes and pops on of the great prayer myths that circulates in the church.

"To learn to pray" sounds contradictory to us.  Either the heart is so overflowing that it begins to pray by itself, we say, or it will never learn to pray.  But this is a dangerous error, which is certainly very widespread among Christians today, to imagine that it is natural for the heart to pray.

We imagine that prayer comes spontaneously or not at all.  Not so, says Bonhoeffer, for if it were so how could Jesus teach the disciples to pray?  There is plenty of stuff the heart can do by itself - "wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing" - but these are not yet prayer, and ought not to be confused with prayer.

Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one's heart.  It means, rather, finding the way to and speaking with God, whether the heart is full or empty.

This has implications.  How should we learn to pray?  Why, the same way we learn to talk in general: by imitating our parent's speech.  In this case, taking on the speech of God.  "Repeating God's own words, we begin to pray to God."  We encounter this language of God in Holy Scripture.

This allows Bonhoeffer to develop a particular, and a particularly Christological, view of the prayers of the Bible, and particularly the book of Psalms.  Here in the Psalms we have the Word of God - but they are also prayers to God, which is to say they are particularly human words.  (What is prayer but a human word?)  How can they be both?

We grasp it only when we consider that we can learn true prayer only from Jesus Christ, and that it is, therefore, the word of the Son of God, who lives with us human beings, to God the Father who lives in eternity...  In Jesus' mouth the human word becomes God's Word.  When we pray along with the prayer of Christ, God's Word becomes again a human word.

Jesus prays, and we can pray along with him, because he includes us in his prayers.

If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible, and especially the Psalms, we must not, therefore, first ask what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ.

Recognising that we must learn to pray, and that we can only do so as we pray along with Christ Jesus, we learn to pray beyond our own immediate interests and feelings, to pray more than what it is in our hearts at the moment - sometimes, indeed, "it is precisely the case that we must pray against our own heart in order to pray properly."

Not the poverty of our heart, but the richness of God's Word, ought to determine our prayer.

All quotations from The Prayerbook of the Bible, in volume 5 of Bonhoeffer's Works, pages 155ff.

Vote and pray

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

Thus the apostle.

In directing the believers to pray for those in authority, Paul makes clear that the sphere of political leadership is not one of divine disinterest.  The fact that Jesus' kingdom is not of this world does not mean that the kingdoms of this world are beneath his notice.  Admittedly, Paul's expectations and goals when it comes to praying for kings and all in high positions seem to be very limited, but there is engagement.

Our situation is rather different from Paul's.  Unlike him, we are periodically asked to help decide who exactly will be "in high positions", through the mechanism of electing our representatives.  We approach that as believers who know the King, but nevertheless are called to take an interest in who will exercise temporal authority over us.  Unlike Paul, we are called not only to pray but to act, to take a degree of responsibility (albeit a small and limited one) for the powers that be.  The emperor did not ask for Paul's input in how he ran his empire, but we are asked for input, and it is important that our input be decisively shaped by the recognition that Jesus has died and risen, and is now ascended and enthroned.  We vote, just as we live, as witnesses to that decisive fact.  Our priorities ought to be different as a result.  Can I suggest a few particular areas to think through?

In 2015, 191,014 human beings were legally killed in England and Wales.  They were, of course, killed in the womb, but killed they nonetheless were.  If you're a taxpayer, you helped to pay for it.  We are called to bear witness to the fact that in Christ no human life is superfluous, hopeless, or without value.  If one of the candidates for your parliamentary seat is consistently pro-life, and shows some willingness to act on their convictions, can I suggest that this might trump a whole load of other considerations?  I know that lots of Christians in the UK have been dismayed at the 'single-issue' voting across the pond, and I'm not saying that you should ignore everything else.  But if you did have to pick a single issue, saving the lives of unborn children wouldn't be a bad one.

In a similar, but less extreme, vein, there are numerous people in the UK who, through ill health or disability, are unable to support themselves.  On this issue, we look for representatives who first of all have compassion - who actually show some signs of caring - and then secondly who have a plan.  I don't think we need to be or ought to be particularly attached to any one plan, but we want representatives who will prioritise taking action in this area.  We live as those who believe in the God of compassion when we vote with compassion - and note that the God of compassion did not sit in heaven feeling sorry for us in our brokenness, but acted to help!

A third area would be around freedom of expression, and especially freedom of religion.  This has two aspects to it: domestic and international.  Internationally, we want representatives who will support the spread of religious liberty around the world.  Domestically, we want representatives who will protect the right of people of all faiths and none to act according to conscience and to speak according to their conviction.  We should stand for religious liberty for all, not just ourselves or those like us.  This is, I will confess, partly out of a self-interested application of what might be termed the Niemöller principle - if we don't speak out when they come for the Muslims, who will speak out when they come for us?  But there is also something more principled about it.  We believe in the Christ who rules by his sovereign word, and wherever that word is given liberty he will extend his reign - we are not, or ought not to be, afraid of other ideas or beliefs.

And then there is a whole load of other stuff.  It's legitimate to think about economics, although we ought to resist the appeals to our own economic self-interest as much as we are able.  We can take a step back and ask what sort of system seems likely to work best, whether that's in economics or governance.  It's reasonable to think about security and international relations.  On most of these things. Christians will be able to reasonably and faithfully disagree, because they're inevitably based on uncertain assessments of the world and our place in it.  But that doesn't mean they don't matter, or that our choices ought not to be shaped by the reality of the gospel.

When we're done thinking all this through, I think we'll wind up back with Paul.  How huge these issues are!  How complex is the world in which we live!  What confusion there is around even the apparently simplest things!  How entrenched are some of the atrocities of our society!  How desperate is the situation of the voiceless!  And how pathetically small is our influence, our ability to shape things.

And so, pray for kings and all who are in high positions.  One way we can witness is to keep calm and know that Christ is on the throne.  It is, despite appearances, in his hands - all of it.  So vote and pray.  And pray and pray and pray.

The difficulty of common prayer

To expand on something I wrote fairly recently, here are some of the reasons I think we really struggle with congregational prayer:

1.  We don't really view ourselves as being really one with other Christians.  Rather than seeing ourselves as a body, when we gather we see ourselves as individuals in a room who happen to share an individual relationship with Christ.  We are all on our own journey, rather than being those who are defined decisively by the journey of Christ (from heaven to death and back!) because we are united to him.  That makes the idea of a common prayer life very difficult.

2.  We value spontaneity and self-expression more than discipline and mutual submission.  A common prayer life requires that often we join in prayers which do not flow directly from the way we're feeling.  We pray common prayers of thankfulness, including for things we have not personally enjoyed.  We pray laments, suffering together even when we have not personally suffered.  Because we are culturally inclined to value authenticity above all things (and that is not an entirely bad thing by any means), we tend to feel that common prayer involves some sort of hypocrisy.

3.  We don't tend to pray in a way which reflects gospel blessings.  We are far more likely to give thanks for particular blessings in God's providential direction of our daily lives than for his eternal blessings in Christ.  That means that our prayers tend not to be about the things we have in common with one another, which makes joining in common prayer difficult.

4.  Practically, common prayer usually requires a degree of formality, and we live in an informal age when formality often comes across as pomposity.  We tend to think the person leading in prayer is grand-standing, even when they're not.  And for people preparing to lead in prayer, the awareness that we could come across this way inhibits our praying.

5.  We don't appreciate the mediation of Christ enough.  We imagine we can just pick up the telephone to God at any point, and he will always be glad to hear us.  We forget that we can only pray because Christ prays for us, and in so doing we also lose the corporate aspect: Christ intercedes for the church, and for us insofar as we belong to her.  So as critical as individual prayer undoubtedly is, common prayer comes first - if we could only remember it.

A catalogue of congregational prayer

Invocation

A prayer that God would come and do something here and now, in the gathered church.  For example, at the beginning of the service, we ask God to come and be with us as we draw near to him; at the preaching of the word, we ask him to speak; at the beginning of Holy Communion, we ask him to feed us on Christ.  The invocation is solemn and humble (God is not at our beck and call!), but bold (because it responds to and claims God's own promise).

Praise and Adoration

Technically distinguishable, in worship the one must flow into the other.  Praise is the acknowledgement before God of his glorious nature and character; adoration is the lifting of our hearts to bask in the same.  Here we take our eyes completely off our own needs and situations and focus on God in prayer.

Confession

As sinners in the presence of a holy God, and as beneficiaries of gospel forgiveness, we confess to God that we have sinned against him.  The Christian confession of sin is not a grovelling, but a humble acknowledgement in God's presence that we have failed and need both his forgiveness and his help to change.  The prayer of confession is traditionally sandwiched between biddings, which explain God's delight in forgiving confessed sin and invite us to come, and words of assurance, which remind us that confessed sin truly is taken away through the gospel.

Thanksgiving

Focusing on particular things that we have received from God, we give him thanks.  This could be for particular answers to prayer, or for gospel blessings received through Christ.  In a sense, this a prayer of praise and adoration that particularly views God's character and nature as it has affected us.

Intercession

This means both the church as a whole interceding with God for its own members who are in particular need - for example, the sick - and also the church interceding for those outside its particular membership.  The church prays together for the church worldwide, and for the world outside the church.  This is a key part of what it means to be a kingdom of priests.

Doxology

A short prayer of praise which might be appended at various parts of the service - for example, the Gloria Patri.

Benediction

Only implicitly a prayer.  The speaker pronounces a blessing over God's people, and in that way stands in the place of God; but of course, they can't really stand in the place of God (they cannot of themselves make the blessing anything more than a pious wish), and so the implicit prayer is that God would make the blessing effective.  If we are pronouncing gospel blessings, though, we do know that they are in accordance with God's will for his people, and so they can be pronounced with authority.

Two questions:
1.  Have I missed any?
2.  How do we ensure that the richness of Christian prayer is reflected in our worship services?

Common prayer

I am currently reading Bonhoeffer's Sanctorum Communio, and finding it both quite hard going (it is, after all, a proper academic thesis, and a German one to boot - though I am reading in English!) and also very stimulating.  It is a study of the church, and whilst there is a lot in it that I disagree with - including some of the more fundamental ideas, I think - there is also much that has made me think.  Here is an example of something that has got me thinking (from p 188f):

"For the church it is... critically important to assign corporate prayer the central place it deserves.  Leading a single life, the church must also have and practice one common prayer."

Common prayer is critically important because prayer in the church is "individuals organizing themselves to realize the divine will for others, to serve the realization of God's rule in the church community".  Corporate prayer is "a God given means for realizing God's purpose".  As such - and here Bonhoeffer quotes Luther - "the Christian church on earth has no greater power or work against everything that may oppose it than such common prayer.  Prayer is 'unconquerable'".

I confess that the main reason this struck me is because I am very aware that common prayer is not so regarded in the churches with which I am most familiar.  Of course, in Anglican circles this idea and practice of the church praying together - having a common prayer life - is very strong, being represented by the shared liturgy.  It was strong, too, in a different way, in the churches in which I grew up, where it took the form of the mid-week prayer meeting, and of the long extempore pastoral prayer in the Sunday service.  Neither model is free from danger - of formalism, or performance, or whatever - but that life of common prayer was there.

In the sorts of church with which I am most familiar, the main locus for prayer has moved away from Sunday services and whole-church meetings, and into small pastoral groups and special interest groups.  There is some virtue in prayer in these settings - honesty and intimacy is encouraged, for example - but I think something is also lost.  My observation is that when the small group prays, it tends to bring the prayer requests of individuals, but not of the church.  The prayer life of the church, in this model, is in danger of becoming just the aggregated prayer lives of its members; that is to say, there is no real common prayer.  Might this be why we see little evidence of the church "leading a single life"?

A couple of thoughts on how to move forward:

1.  We need to get over the idea that I can only be included in something if I am doing it.  I think one of the things I struggled with in the model of extempore prayer practised in my childhood churches was that I didn't identify with the person praying.  It didn't feel, to me, like corporate prayer, but like listening in to someone else's individual prayer.  I tend now to think that this was largely my problem. Being an individualist at heart, and essentially valuing what I did for myself over what others did for me, it was always going to be hard to get on board with this.  We need to teach about corporate prayer, and then make sure we're modelling it.

2.  We need to learn how to lead in prayer.  It's not the same as praying privately.  Those of us who lead church services need to make sure that they are services of prayer as well as worship and preaching.  We need to bathe in the Psalms more, and we need to appreciate the historic liturgies of the church more.  We need to be willing to pray big prayers - the prayers of the church, not just our individual prayers.  I wonder how much of that is about confidence?  In which case, we need to reflect more on the intercession of Christ.

Obscenity

The thing I struggle with - the thing that today is hard to take - is that life just goes on.  Last night I mowed the lawn, and watched the Bake Off, and children died crossing the sea.  Today I will sit in the office, and sort out my spreadsheets, and children will die.  Isn't it obscene that we all just carry on?  Isn't it appalling that we get on with our lives?

I mean, what is that about?

Of course it has to be that way.  Of course it does.  The show must go on.  But maybe, just maybe, every now and again, the show can just stop.  Stop and acknowledge that everything is really, seriously messed up.

There are practical things we can do - and goodness knows I need to do more.  I genuinely worry that one day I will hear a voice say 'son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while this little boy washed up dead on the beach'.  Yes, there is stuff I need to do.

But what I really want to do is just make everyone stop.  Because the juxtaposition of ordinary life and horrific suffering is more than I can bear.  Please, can't we just stop?  Can't we all see the obscenity of it all?

So here is one thing I will do.  On this coming Monday, I will fast and mourn and pray - because we should, shouldn't we?  Of course, life will go on, but I will do something to mark what is happening, and I will repent of my part in it, and pray for change.  I will fast, because enjoying good things right now seems obscene to me.  Ordinarily that's something I would do in private, but maybe - perhaps - you feel the need to stop as well, and you'd like to join me.

Now, as a final thought, imagine this post liberally scattered with expletives.  That's how I wrote it, and how I read it back to myself now in my head.  But I deleted them all so as not to offend sensitive readers.  And isn't that just obscene as well?

A prayer

The Lord reveal himself more and more to us in the face of his Son Jesus Christ and magnify the power of his grace in cherishing those beginnings of grace in the midst of our corruptions, and sanctify the consideration of our own infirmities to humble us, and of his tender mercy to encourage us.

And may he persuade us that, since he has taken us into the covenant of grace, he will not cast us off for those corruptions which, as they grieve his Spirit, so they make us vile in our own eyes.

And because Satan labours to obscure the glory of his mercy and hinder our comfort by discouragements, the Lord add this to the rest of his mercies, that, since he is so gracious to those that yield to his government, we may make the right use of this grace, and not lose any portion of comfort that is laid up for us in Christ.

And may he grant that the prevailing power of his Spirit in us should be an evidence of the truth of grace begun, and a pledge of final victory, at that time when he will be all in all, in all his, for all eternity. Amen.

Richard Sibbes

What, then, shall we do?

Yesterday I was pondering the miserable state of the church in the west, and concluding that we are also at a low point in western culture generally, and I was thinking: what would our ecclesiastical forebears have done in this situation?  How would our forefathers have responded to the lack of evangelistic fruit which we have become used to?  What would they have done about the prevalence of sin in our lives and churches?  How would they have coped with the rapid move of general culture away from Christianity?

The lectionary directed me to Psalm 60, which is one of those Psalms we do nothing with.  If the heading is to be believed, it is a Psalm of David, written at a time of relative national faithfulness in Israel. Nevertheless, the theme is abandonment by God.  Verse 10 particularly struck me:

Have you not rejected us, O God?
You do not go forth, O God, with our armies.

Faced with national defeat, the people of God do not look to new strategies.  Neither do they settle down and accept the calamity as inevitable.  They look to God.  Specifically, the Psalm addresses the problem of his absence.

The logic of the Psalm works like this:
Major premise: we are losing this war.
(Assumed) minor premise: God does not lose.
Conclusion: God is not with us.

This logic leads to renewed prayer to God for his help and salvation.  This would only make sense as an 'application' if the Psalmist knew full well that God's abandonment of his people was not total, and the rest of the Psalm shows that clearly.  God has set up a banner and a refuge for those who fear him, even in the midst of apparent abandonment of his people.  Because of this, the response to God's rejection is not despair, but a renewed seeking of his face.  Only he can save.

Might we not conclude from our own situation that God is not going forth, as it were, with our armies?  I think our forebears would have concluded that God is not with us.  They would have held solemn days of humiliation and fasting.  They would have examined themselves to see what sin was holding back God's blessing (NB. examined themselves, not the surrounding culture).  They would have earnestly prayed for God's return to them in power.

What about us?

With God we shall do valiantly.  But do we even want to?

Of liturgy and lectionary

This week is the last before advent.  This means that I have a decision to make: will I be buying a copy of the lectionary for the next year, which begins this coming Sunday?

This year has been something of an experiment.  Since the end of last November I have been using Morning Prayer, and most days Evening Prayer, as my main devotional time, praying through the liturgy from Common Worship and following the readings from the lectionary.  Recently I have been reflecting on the good and bad points, the helpful and the less helpful, that have come out of the experiment.  Here are a few of them.

Good points:
1.  Lots of Bible.  I have never read so much in the Psalms as I have done over the last year, and I am sure that has been good for my view of God and my praying in general.  Also, having an OT and an NT reading every day has meant a good balance.  In the past, when I have sometimes read devotionally through a single book of Scripture quite slowly and in some detail, I have noticed the danger of getting a one-sided view of things (and, the summer I read through Jeremiah, sometimes a fairly miserable view), which this helpfully avoids.

2  Puts the Bible in the context of the gospel.  Because the seasons of the liturgical year are based on and shaped by the events of the gospel (although I will qualify this a little below), Scripture reading is placed in the context of the life and work of Christ.  This discourages a moralistic reading, or a quick jump to 'application', and encourages the reading of Scripture as fundamentally witness to him.

3  Good for mornings.  I am not really a morning person, and getting going can be difficult.  Launching straight into prayer is hard.  But when you're weary - and as any parent will tell you, that basically means 'when you're awake' - it is helpful to have some structure that is well thought through and well written to get you started.  By the time I get to the allotted part of the service for personal prayer, I am usually more awake and more 'in the mood' than when I started.

4.  Good for catholicity.  I have enjoyed the fact that evening though I have been using the liturgy solo - which is of course not its design - I have felt connected to something bigger, being aware that there are many people focussing on just these readings and praying just these prayers today.

And some bad things:
1.  Danger of ritualism.  I definitely feel the temptation to rely on the forms to get me into the presence of God.  There is a danger that, rather than being an introduction and warm-up for personal prayer, the set prayers become the be-all and end-all of my praying.

2.  Annoyance of the semi-reformation.  Anglicanism is characterised by nothing more, in my mind, than it's half-reformed nature, and that shows in some of the festivals that one is encouraged to keep.  Since the lectionary readings go with the festivals, it's been hard to dodge all of them (although I have ignored the various saints days).  I have no strong objection to commemorating the apostles, but some of the festivals are just a bit odd - what in the world is Holy Cross Day?  The calendar could do with some reforming.

3.  Holes in the lectionary.  I suppose because it is designed for public reading, the lectionary skips over some of the hard bits of Scripture.  That's a shame, but it has been easy enough for me to just fill in the gaps.  I do wonder - and I'm sure someone must know - whether I would ever get through the whole of Scripture following this arrangement, and if so how long it would take.

All in all, I lean towards continuing, or perhaps adapting slightly more to 'Protestantise' the praying.  Any thoughts?