If you’ve been following this blog from the very beginning (nearly five years now!) then you might have read one of my first posts about the potential virtues of cynicism. I’m a lot less cynical than I used to be in my twenties, but every now and then I do like to indulge myself.
Having been involved in organising church events for over twenty years now, I’ve been reflecting on the role that prayer plays in our non-conformist services. Here are three ways that I have seen public prayer used, and have used prayer myself, over the years:
The first is what you might call Stealth Notices. Sometimes, prayer is used as a way of communicating information to the congregation without them noticing that they are being informed. I think that this is a mostly harmless addition to communal prayer, and that it can be very helpful for the congregation to know exactly why they are praying for certain individuals. God might not need the information, but we do.
However, the second is less harmless, and can damage our understanding of communal prayer. I call it Bread Prayer. This is when prayer is used to sandwich the ‘more important’ parts of a service. We know that people need a bit of variety to help their concentration, so we use prayer as the spiritual equivalent of getting everyone to stand up and have a stretch. The truly harmful thing is that – in our church services – communal prayer is rarely the main event. No-one who prepares a service ever says, “Right, here I’ll put in five minutes of prayer and break it up with a sermon on one side and some worship on the other.” No, prayer becomes the bread that we use because we know that people feel uncomfortable when we eat peanut butter straight from the jar. And don’t get me started on what’s going on when we use prayer as a way of getting people to close their eyes so that the worship group can get ready for the next song.
While we’re on the food analogies, the third can be called After-Dinner Mint. In this situation, prayer is used as a full-stop to whatever event we’re running – not because we believe that prayer is the most suitable ending, but because anyone who’s been in a church long enough comes to expect it. It’s as though nothing spiritual ever really happens without someone saying, “Let’s close in prayer…” at the end of it. Sometimes you can see the joy in people’s faces when you announce the prayer, not because they’re excited to pray, but rather because it’s the church equivalent of the school bell at the end of the day.
So there you go. I have seen prayer used well in a communal context many times, but I’ve also seen it used less well. I don’t repent of my cynicism, but I repent of using prayer as a service-leading tool rather than what God intended it to be.
Interesting thoughts, thank you. Im not really a fan of Church of England liturgy just out of personal preference but I do sometimes wonder if there is real benefit in having a set time of prayer every service to pray through world, church and personal stuff….even though as a kid I used it as a nice time for a snooze
Yes, I think that there are some benefits to the structure that a liturgy gives – it can prevent prayer from becoming a ‘tool’ that is used the way that I describe in the post. The down side is, of course, that familiarity breeds contempt. However, I wonder if we just have the worst of both worlds in the non-conformist traditions.