During Sunday morning worship there are usually three or four opportunities for public prayer. Before praying the person leading will sometimes make the statement, “Will you pray with me.” Recently I heard this not as a statement, but as a question, “Will you pray with me?” I had a real sense of the whole congregation being invited to join in the prayer, rather than just being a bystander to the prayer.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----My first experience with joint worship was in a Pentecostal church. There I found a shared mindset about “the empty rituals of the dead churches”. Although I studied that thinking, I could not use it. It just smacked of something wrong. When I returned to Montrose the Summer after my Senior year in High School and began worshipping at a Christian Church with my Dad, it felt so empty. The hymns seemed dull and drab. The worship service seemed canned and controlled. The congregation seemed more an audience than a participant. But I needed only a few Sundays before I realized the highly scripted proceedings in these “cold” worship services had deep meanings to many who had been participating in them for years. So I began to search for the meaning they felt. I began to sing the hymns while giving thought to the lyrics. I listened to the communion and offertory meditations with the understanding these were being presented from the sincerity of other hearts. And I joined my thoughts with the prayers spoken by one single voice in a crowd of silence, understanding that it was merely different from joining a prayer spoken in a sea of vocalized babbling. From adjusting to what was supposed to be this “dead church” I learned that ritual is simply the physical actions made by the inner meaning of many hearts.
-----Now I attend a Presbyterian church. It is even more ritualized than were the Christian Churches. And I am comfortable with those rituals, because I quickly found the meaning inside them. And the prayers at all the churches I’ve attended have been expressions of the needs, concerns, and interests of the people there. Sometimes they get long and full of the many words Jesus said were not required for their hearing, but even at that I am able to pick my way through them and join with what of them I sense to be genuine. Even if the one offering the prayer or performing the ritual is proceeding from plain ritual in his own heart, the symbols of what’s real are yet there like little gateways through which many in the congregation enter into sincerity. Each one enters by the participation from within his own heart.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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