Say your prayers

There are many ways in which the Evangelical church is not doing so hot these days (and a few ways in which it’s doing fine, even thriving). But one of the ways in which the church is least healthy these days is in prayer in our church services. If you are a member at a church that spends more than 120 seconds praying on a Sunday morning, you’re already in a church that is unusual. If that two-or-more minutes is carefully planned and thought ought beforehand (as opposed to primarily made up of “just”, “Father God”, and “Lord we pray” interspersed with lengthy pauses), you’re at one of only a handful of Evangelical churches in the nation. (Aside from churches with established liturgies–we’re talking almost entirely about the low church world here.) This is not a good thing, and is one of the signs that there is some trouble ahead for Christ’s church.

The good news is, steps are being taken to help serve the church here. One of these steps is Pat Quinn’s new book Praying in Public: A Guidebook for Prayer in Corporate Worship. In this short book, Quinn seeks to help the church in its prayer “accomplish the following:

1. Center on adoration, confession, and supplication
2. Freely use biblical language and allusions
3. Invoke the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
4. Be thoughtful and reverent
5. Focus on the gospel
6. Have a strong theological foundation
7. Be well-prepared” (24)

In seven chapters Quinn walks through each of these points and offers both brief theological guidance and practical advise at to how these goals may be accomplished in the public prayer of the church. The remaining chapters of the book provide examples of prayers of adoration, confession, supplication, and ‘composite’ prayers which combine the three.

This is an important and useful book both for those responsible for leading Sunday morning services (seriously, have the majority of your public prayers prepared and ready to go before Sunday morning rolls around–ideally, coordinate them with the sermon text for that morning), but it will also be useful for those of us in the pews who want to think about how to pray for our church’s prayers. Which of course is something we should all be doing anyway.

Highly recommended.

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO