“Preacher,” said a man on the worship committee of one of my churches a few years ago, “I don’t mean this personally, so no hard feelings, but I think about the most boring thing we do in our worship services is pray. Therefore I propose that we eliminate as many prayers from our services as we can and fill the time with other things.”
A stunned silence settled over the meeting. “Bob,” I finally said, “you may be right. I’m not going to respond without giving what you said some thought. Why don’t we schedule a time when we can all talk about it at length?”
He appeared satisfied. After all, it was his first meeting with the committee, and he probably expected his suggestion to be shot down without dignity. Now, at least, his pastor had responded and promised to put it on the agenda for a later meeting.
I confess I did have an immediate response, even though I chose not to voice it that evening: Man, you don’t understand Christian worship at all! Christian worship is prayer. That’s what our whole service is about. The hymns, responses, readings, offering, time of commitment–they’re all a way of praying, of responding to God for his gracious gift to us.
But I knew nothing would be lost by delaying the discussion. In fact, at least two things eventually were gained. One, I was prepared for a more generous, thoughtful discussion than we might have had that first night. And, two, Bob found time to come up to speed with other committee members. Upon learning more about the theology and history of Christian worship, he sheepishly admitted that, although his boredom in worship had been genuine, his specific suggestion had been out of order.
WORSHIP IS PRAYER
Theologically and historically, worship is prayer. Jewish synagogue worship, on which New Testament liturgy originally was based, consisted primarily of hearing scriptural readings and comments on them, and engaging in prayer and praise to the God of Israel. Early Christians added to this the congregation’s celebration of the Lord’s Meal. But they recognized they were in the presence of the Holy One of Israel and that they came together foremost to pray and to praise God.
Christian worship always has been, therefore, essentially an act of commemoration in which we reconsider God’s benefits to us and make an oblation of ourselves to the God of our faith.
Most of the hymns we sing are prayers. Almost all our favorite hymns either are addressed directly to God or summarize God’s greatness and mercy. Consider “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” “How Great Thou Art,” “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,” and “I Am Thine, O Lord,” whose very titles indicate direct address to the Deity, and “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” which are all prayerful exclamations of our faith in God and delight in his redemption.
That we sing the hymns instead of saying them alters not the fact that they are prayers. The hymnal actually is a congregation’s prayerbook and contains many of the finest prayers in our language.
Most services begin with an introit or an invocation–either one, a prayer. Then they unfold through various stages of communication with God, from the approach through the time of recognition or confession, through the restatement of the Word (God’s communication with us) and the offering (our response to his Word), through Communion (if it is observed, which is further remembrance of God’s communication) and the departure to serve, when the guidance and protection of the Holy Spirit are invoked for a final time. From beginning to end, the act of worship is an act of prayer, a convening of God’s people to remember his mercy and to respond in prayer and self-giving.
Worship aims to unite the believer with the Deity. Worship is not a mere celebration, not a horizontal rite in which people relate to one another for sociological reasons; it is a vertical rite in which the individual can get caught up in the very presence–feared, beloved, dreaded, or eagerly awaited–of God.
Thus worship is and must be prayer, for nothing short of the act of communicating with the One being worshiped will suffice to accomplish this purpose.
PRAYER: THE TEST OF LITURGY
Herein lies the perfect test to see whether the various parts of the liturgy measure up as genuine components of Christian worship. We have only to ask of a hymn, a reading, a chancel drama, “Is it prayerful? Does it conduct worshipers into the presence of the Most High? Is it appropriate as part of the content of a service directed to God?”
I test even the sermon by such a rubric. We aren’t accustomed to thinking of sermons in this way, for sermons, especially in their development in America, have had, more or less, a life of their own, apart from ritual and ceremony.
But if worship is indeed the act of coming before God, and if it is enacted as Soren Kierkegaard suggested, with God as the audience, then a sermon is out of place in worship when it does not breathe an air of prayer and sensitivity to the Deity’s presence.
Suppose I prepare a sermon on a prophetic text such as Amos 4:1 (“Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria … “) and in the course of writing vent some personal anger against certain members of the congregation. Is such a sermon really appropriate in the setting of Christian worship?
The one sure litmus test is to ask, “Can this sermon, prepared as I have prepared it, be given with a sense of prayer and devotion?” If it can, well and good. If it cannot, then I should alter or abandon it.
The fact that worship is prayer means we are obligated to be serious about what we say and do. We cannot merely play at worship, for that would involve us in the hypocrisy of which God accused the Israelites in the day of Isaiah: “The multitude of your sacrifices–what are they to me?” says the Lord. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to meet with me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations–I cannot bear your evil assemblies” (Isa. 1:11).
Robert McAfee Brown has suggested in “Spirituality and Liberation” that prayer–truly genuine prayer–leads to revolutionary transformations in ourselves and the world around us. We cannot consistently pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven, or for God’s will to be done in our own lives, without eventually being shaken by the results.
I have long regarded the prayers of the liturgy–the formal, stated prayers–as my greatest opportunity for eventually subverting the selfish human will of the congregation and turning it to the purpose of God. While I preached only occasionally in my parishes on such great prophetic issues as our duty to the poor and homeless, our concern for victims of prejudice, our care for persons with AIDS, and our love for the enemies of our country and its ideology, I rarely missed an opportunity to pray about them.
Here, for example, is a pastoral prayer from my last year in a Los Angeles pastorate:
O God, whose grace envelopes us now like an invisible mist, penetrating our bodies and permeating our minds, help us to relax and submit to the total therapy of your presence. Forgive the mistakes we have made, the wrong choices, the weakness of will, the lack of love, the rebellion of spirit. Let the Spirit who was in Christ Jesus be now in us, drawing us back into the way of obedience and love and sacrifice. Teach us how to find ourselves by denying ourselves and how to serve you by serving others. Bless the wandering souls who have come our way today in search of truth or fellowship or inspiration. Make yourself known, both here and in other places, to those who are open to your coming, to those who sorrow, to those who are dying, to those who feel alone, to those whose burdens in life are extremely heavy. Grant your peace to AIDS and cancer patients, and hope to their families. Let your loving protection surround our young people, saving them from the cynicism and immorality of our age. Inspire your servants in the media industry with a vision of your kingdom, that they may mold the public consciousness toward those things that edify and redeem a people. Imbue our president and his cabinet and the Congress of our nation with a continuing spirit of love and unselfishness, that they may work for a world in which no child goes to bed hungry and no elderly person sleeps in the cold. Hold this church before the cross of Jesus, that it may see the true dimensions of its calling and center not upon its edifice or its distinguished history but upon salvation through faith alone and loving service to the lowliest of the low. For you are the God of all humanity and the gracious Lord of all peoples. Amen.
I reasoned that, while people might well complain about a sermon dealing with their failure to follow the summons of Christ to love our neighbors, all of our neighbors, they hardly would be unhappy at my speaking to God about it. Apparently I was right. I’ve never been reproached by church members for speaking of even the most sensitive issues in a pastoral prayer.
And occasionally I’ve breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving upon hearing some church officer, who had once appeared hermetically sealed against the idea I was praying for, come out with a similar prayer on some public occasion. Then I knew that the fullness of the gospel was getting through!
DISTINCTIVE PRAYER
But I haven’t forgotten my friend Bob and his complaint that prayer is the boringest part of worship. Even though Bob came to a new view in the course of our committee meetings, his initial reaction reminds me of the response of many church members to the stated prayers of the liturgy.
So I do everything in my power to make these prayers as lively and interesting as possible. Otherwise many people simply will tune out during prayers.
Here are some guidelines for infusing freshness and immediacy to our public prayers:
* Prepare your prayers in a spirit of prayer. The Apostle reminded us that the Spirit of God prays for us at levels we cannot attain on our own (Rom. 8:26). I ignore this spiritual reality only to the detriment of my praying. Once I’ve felt the flow of the Spirit’s power in my life, I can follow the flow as I prepare specific prayers. This makes it easier to follow the next suggestion.
* Fill prayers with important matters. This is not to say I should never pray about small matters. It often is helpful to mention the little grace notes in life, such as the beauty of flowers, the singing of the birds, and the sounds of children’s playing. But I make these the accents to my prayers, while I concentrate on the great issues of redemption, renewal, love, justice, hope, and service.
I sometimes review my prayers of the past six months to see which subjects they dealt with. The resulting list ought to include such grand themes as the gift of Christ’s death and resurrection, the empowerment of his Spirit, our care for the poor and displaced, the achievement of justice in our courts and among the nations of the world, and a sense of love, forgiveness, and compassion in our relationships.
* Be specific. Prayers become real when they deal in the day-to-day applications of the above abstractions. Instead of praying for the poor in general, I try to pray for the homeless who pass my church each day. Instead of asking God to bless the earth, I ask for conscientious use of herbicides on lawns or fluorocarbons in hair sprays. The same message gets across, only more potently.
When I attended Lenten services at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama, I was startled and impressed to hear the cathedral’s dean, Laurence Gipson, make intercession for the Alabama Power and Light Company and its employees. He did this for an entire week. Another week he prayed for the city government and its employees. The effect was galvanizing; I found myself mentioning them in my own prayers.
* Employ biblical words and phrases. This is one of the secrets of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, of its endurance as a great devotional guide and its immense popularity across denominational lines. Thomas Cranmer, the spiritual genius most responsible for the “Book of Common Prayer,” echoed the Authorized Version of the Bible in almost every phrase and sentence of his masterpiece.
Today we’re wise to use contemporary translations of Scripture in order not to sound archaic and funny to modern parishioners, but it’s still a good practice to use words and phrases from the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Epistles. They ring authentic and serve to keep us on track with the great biblical ideas.
* Use strong, short words and employ as few adverbs and adjectives as possible. Sometimes, I fear, we pray as if we felt that in addressing the Deity, we should sound learned and impressive. Unfortunately, using multisyllabic words we wouldn’t use in everyday speech only makes us sound pompous and silly.
How simple are the words and phrasings in the Bible: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” I try to select strong and active verbs, always preferring those that convey a sense of power to those that are merely florid and high-sounding.
* Vary the pace and rhythm by creating sentences of different lengths. Nothing dulls people’s senses faster than a sing-song manner of speaking that results from too many short sentences, unless it is the monotony of long, involved sentences with piled-up subordinate clauses. I break the lengthy sections of my prayers with short, staccato-like statements. Note the variety in this brief Communion prayer:
At this table, Lord, we shed our pretensions about ourselves. We know we are sinners. We know we often fail in life–at work, at school, in our relationships, in our values, in our faith. But as you reached out to your disciple Peter and clutched him from the waves, reach out now to us and rescue us. Teach us how to see your presence here. Give us thankful hearts for the mystery of this food and what it means to our faith. Send your Holy Spirit upon us to illumine the way we should think and believe when we have eaten and drunk. And bind us all together in the fellowship of your love, from this moment forth and forever more. Amen.
* Watch the tone. I find it best to create a mood of holiness in prayers through what I say, not through “holy” language or the tone of my voice. A stained-glass voice is a poor substitute for a genuine sense of the presence of God honestly felt and simply addressed.
A mood of holiness often begins with the initial way God is addressed in the phrase of the prayer called the “ascription.” Consider the following ascriptions:
O Lord God invisible, who dwells in the light and yet is not seen by mortal eye …
God of all mercy, whose wisdom has appointed us to our particular places in this life …
O God, who broods over us at night like a mother bird over her nest and rises upon us in the morning like the sun that warms the earth …
O God, who has been our refuge in the hours of the world’s suffering …
Each ascription immediately reminds us of some special quality of God, and this calls us to an attitude of reverence.
* Aim to express “sacred intimacy.” If worship is to awaken and cement the bond between the individual and God, then prayers should be phrased to facilitate the exchange. The opening prayers of the liturgy especially should set this mood, reminding worshipers of the loving nature of God and initiating the process of conducting them into life-changing personal encounters.
Here are some examples of intimate prayers from various parts of the service:
INVOCATION: O God of sights and sounds and truth and feelings, we praise you for the softness of children’s flesh, the feel of the grass under bare feet, the sweet smell of summer rain on hot pavement, the abundance of flowers in the earth, the sense of worship in a place like this. Receive us now, rich in things but poor in soul. Set us on your knee like little children. Hear the humble prayers we make and the songs we sing. And renew us for life in your beautiful world. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
CONFESSION: I admit to you, O God, that I am often distressed by the daily news: by the failure of nations to agree, by the insistent problems of hunger and war and economy; by crime and negligence and immorality. I wish my sense of the presence of Christ were stronger and I had more confidence in his eternal victory over the world. Then I would not be shaken by the winds of adversity, but would stand like a tree planted by the living waters. Forgive my weakness, O God, and deepen my faith in your Word. Through Jesus Christ. Amen.
OFFERTORY: The cattle on a thousand hills are yours, O God, and the diamonds in a thousand mines and the oil in a thousand wells. So are the homes we live in and the land we live on and the income with which we buy our food. We thank you for what we have by sharing it now with others in the world, through the work and ministry of this church and your kingdom. Amen.
* Prime your pump with selections from volumes of published prayers. Sometimes I have a hard time getting started on the preparation of prayers, even after waiting before God in a mood of meditation. That’s when others’ works can help.
I resist the temptation to borrow the prayers outright, for this short-circuits my creative powers, impedes my growth, and lessens the chances that the prayer will be suited for my congregation. But a phrase or an idea from someone else’s prayers may well become the spark that ignites my generative ability and starts me on the way to a prayer of my own.
A Texas minister I know keeps a well-worn copy of John Baillie’s “A Diary of Private Prayer” on his desk for this purpose.
In the pastorate, I kept several other excellent collections at my elbow: William Barclay, “Prayers for the Christian Year” (SCM, 1964); Horton Davies and Morris Slifer, “Prayers and Other Resources for Public Worship” (Abingdon, 1976); Arnold Kenseth and Richard P. Unsworth, “Prayers for Worship Leaders” (Fortress, 1978); Samuel H. Miller, “Prayers for Daily Use” (Harper and Brothers, 1957); and Leo S. Thorne, ed., “Prayers from Riverside” (Pilgrim, 1983).
* Surround prayers with a context conducive to prayer and praise. I’ve visited churches in which the liturgist related a number of announcements and then said, somewhat abruptly, “Let us pray.” Since prayer is usually a mood before it becomes an actuality, such treatment may preclude anyone’s experiencing the mood.
I derive much more from a prayer if it is introduced by a moment of silence or soft music, or even if it is preceded by the reading of Scripture. Carlo Caretto tells about his practice of going into the desert for an hour or more before entering the sanctuary to pray. Even a brute, he says, should compose himself before going to God in prayer. That is a good rule for public worship as well as for private devotions.
* Leave pauses and silences for private prayer within the public liturgy. “Be still,” says the ancient text, “and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). Our Quaker friends long have understood the benefit of creative silence in the midst of worship, a time to cultivate a sense of the Spirit within the hearts of worshipers. Because many of our people are unskilled in the use of silence, they tend to become bored or anxious when left to their own devices. But the gradual introduction of such moments can help us remember the God we adore is the Mysterium tremendum as well as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
WHISPERING INTO GOD’S EAR
Are prayers boring in worship? Not if worship leaders aren’t bored with their relationship to God and the prospects of worshiping him. Our prayers ought, on the contrary, to be the most exciting moments in the agenda of worship, for they are the moments when it is easiest to break through the veil to eternity and whisper into the ear of God.
When we instruct our congregations in the true meaning of worship, they will see the liturgy from beginning to end as a spiritual service. Then, when we pour our best efforts into the heart-felt and thoughtful prayers, God, who hears from heaven, will answer in ways that will astound us.
(Prayers appeared originally in “Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise: Prayers and Affirmations for Christian Worship,” Angel Books, 1986.)
********************
John Killinger is distinguished professor of religion and culture at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.
Copyright (c) 1994 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
