Tag: Orthodox

How Can We Lead Prayer Better?

What are the problems involved in evangelical and charismatic approaches to public prayer? And how can it be done better?

In my (charismatic free) wing of the Church our services don’t feature much written or traditional prayers or liturgies. We prefer to change the exact words we speak to reflect the type of community we are waking in or what we think the Holy Spirit wants us to do at any particular moment.

There are big advantages to this approach. 

It allows us to be flexible, fresh and to respond to the needs and characteristics of the people in Church. It also allows us to be alert to what the Holy Spirit might want to do at the time we are ministering. Finally it allows us to model for the people we are pastoring that they can pray in any language and in a way that is real for their personality and background.

With that said, emphasising contemporaneous prayer also has drawbacks. 

Andrew Wilson has written about the need,  in the midst of spontaneity,  to maintain the essential elements of Christian worship (like praying, reading Scripture, taking communion etc). Otherwise our worship becomes progressively less and less full of the riches of worship the spirit has given to his Church in Scripture and Tradition. We want to be “Eucharismatic” in our worship.

My concern here is a slightly different one. When the charismatic or evangelical worship leader, venue pastor or preacher leads the Church in spontaneous or unplanned prayer, he (or she) is writing liturgy and language that needs to sum up, express and model the concerns of the Church, the needs of the world and the right way to address God. All at the same time as teaching the people how to do that for themselves. 

This is a much harder task to do well than one might imagine. It involves formulating Scripturally sound, theologically rich, pastorally sensitive and reverent words, expressing them contemporaneously and clearly, and then fitting them into the rhythm and setting of an informal worship service. 

If we are not careful the spontaneous prayer we bring becomes all the things we want to avoid as people of the Spirit and Scripture. 

I think there are three particular areas we need to be careful about (drawn from my own failings leading prayer and worship over many years):

  1. Not including much, if any prayer, in public services.
    Here we end up having extended singing followed by a sermon (and maybe communion). There might be a short prayer between songs or at the end. But, if we’re honest, it’s not a particular feature of the service, certainly compared to, for example, sung worship or a talk. 
  2. Having my own personal prayer time in front of the congregation rather than leading them in prayer.
    Here I end up praying in a slight mumble with my eyes closed and talking quickly and informally, as if I am having an internal monologue. The problem is I am not leading the congregation at this point; instead, they are just watching me pray.
  3. Praying prayers that, instead of expressing the immediate, urgent, prophetic intercession of the Spirit praying through me, become predictable, banal, cliched, and dominated by non-words that litter speech such as “just…”, “yeah…” and so on.
    The ‘just’, and ‘yeah’ prayers are actually the least problematic form of this. It gets much worse when public prayer becomes dominated by the concerns or vocabulary of the leader’s own politics or concerns, narrate their own thoughts about life, politics, social issues or Jesus (often with the phrase ‘God, you know that… followed by explaining it to him anyway). At times they can become offensively bad. The most egregious one I’ve heard used the phrase ‘blaze, Spirit, blaze’ from Shine Jesus Shine (an excellent song people are wrongly snobbish about) to segue into intercession about a major fire in which people had lost their lives. It was, to say the least, not optimal.

What can we do to remedy these difficulties if they begin to arise in our context or ministry?
One approach would be to begin using formal, written liturgies. That approach might be one we should consider (I’ll leave that to Andrew to argue for). I think, however, that there is another approach that would allow us to keep the good that we find in spontaneous prayer while also remedying its difficulties.

Resolving these issues requires us to think a bit more about what is happening when we pray publicly, particularly if we do so spontaneously.

Filling Our Stores: The Christian Tradition of Prayer

When we speak publicly, whether in prayer, preaching or some other way, we are essentially bringing words, ideas and idioms out of our minds and memories. No speech is, in that sense, truly spontaneous. We are a bit like jazz musicians Who seem to be producing spontaneous, improvised music but are doing so using scales, techniques and phrases they have internalised over time practising. Or footballers,  who produce moments and movements of inspiration in the immediate context of a match but draw on hours of drills and practised skilIs. 

If we want to lead prayer well,  therefore, we need to practise. 

That means filling our minds and memories with great prayer, Scripture and discipline so that we have something to draw from when we pray in public. In some ways, this is more important for those of us in traditions that don’t use a formal liturgy in our public services than it is for those who do. It is precisely because we want to be able to lead the congregation in spontaneous prayer in response to the Spirit’s leading in the moment of worship that we particularly need to fill our minds and mouths with the language, cadence and concerns of great prayers. We might repeat these exact prayers as we lead people to pray. More likely, though, is that we will begin to pray with a greater fluency and depth when we create our own prayers. We will also find the content of our prayers becomes more timeless and aligned with the eternal and historic concerns of the Church and the saints she contains and less dominated by the phrases and personal preoccupations we unconsciously find ourselves repeating.

Similarly, disciplining ourselves to include in our daily devotional life a set time in the Psalms or the Divine Office imprints on our minds and hearts the central importance of prayer as a discipline for both public and private worship. We will find, then, that the impulse to overlook intentional times of public prayer on the basis that there is no time in the service or that it interrupts the “flow” or mood of sung worship is easier to overcome. 

Moreover, the discipline of reading (out loud) the prayers of the historic Church and of Israel is an antidote to the habit of mumbling to oneself when leading in prayer. These are prayers written and published with the intent of being read publicly. They have that feel about them.  As we begin to make them a part of the unconscious reservoir from which we draw our public prayers, we will begin to find that we construct and project our prayers with a similar tone.

What Does This Mean in Practice?

So what does this mean for those Who regularly lead prayer in charismatic or evangelical  services? 

There are, I think, three specific things that will transform the way we pray, and particularly how we pray in public.

  1. When praying, remember we are leading the congregation and not just praying on our own in front of them.
    That means:
    1. Begin your prayer with clarity. Don’t just let the prayer ’emerge’ from under your breath.
    2. Go at a pace where the congregation can follow what you are saying and agree with it. God can understand you at your fastest speed but we can’t.
    3. Think about what you want to say and then say it. Don’t feel the need to keep on speaking when you don’t have anything to say at that moment.
  2. Plan to pray as part of your service leading.
    If you are not able to say when you are going to lead the congregation in prayer during a service, there is a problem. Choose a time in the service and allocate who is leading prayer and what you want for it. A good test is to think how you would treat the preparation of sung worship in terms of planning etc and then make sure prayer in the service is at least as good and focussed as that.
  3. Twice a day, as part of your daily devotional times, include praying the Psalms and/ or a traditional Daily Office.
    There are lots of modern versions of a liturgy of the hours or something similar. However, to be honest, I think you are better off with one of the older ones from a historic denomination. For me, the best you can do is get the free “Daily Office” app. It is a Catholic app, devoted to systematically praying through the Psalms and uses many of the ancient prayers of the Church. If you don’t want to use a prayer book then read three Psalms (give or take, depending on the Psalm length)twice a day as part of morning and evening prayer.

Throughout this article I have focused on the pragmatic reasons for immersing yourself in the Church’s historic prayers. There is, however, another even more powerful reason to do so. These prayers have been collected, edited, arranged and prayed over millennia. Praying them each day as part of a disciplined prayer life won’t just make you better at praying; it will bring you joy. Ultimately every worship leader themselves needs to draw close to Christ. Disciplined prayer with the church will help you to do that.

Further Reading and Resources

If you want to explore these ideas further or get into praying with the Church, here are some resources to get you started.

Books about this type of prayer for evangelicals:

Prayer Books or Apps

Free-will, Grace and Election: A Pastoral Guide

One of the theological questions that has the potential to cause the most concern for some Christians is the relationship between God’s sovereignty and our freedom.
It is a topic that I have wrestled with a good deal myself as well as being asked about it by concerned members of my church. I want to explain my conclusions in case they are helpful to anyone else who is wrestling with this issue.

One of the theological questions that has the potential to cause the most concern for some Christians is the relationship between God’s sovereignty and our freedom.

It is an issue that I have wrestled with a good deal myself as well as being asked about it by concerned members of my church. I remember being at University studying law (but interested in theology) and worshipping at a moderately Calvinistic Baptist Church. The prevailing view in that congregation was that Calvinist understandings of predestination were correct. The most popular articulation of that how was the high evangelical Calvinism of John Piper and the movement around him in the US. This caused me a tailspin- what if I was not really ever choosing anything? Was I really free? Did I even exist as a mind or soul in any meaningful way? I was profoundly unhappy for and while before resolving some of these questions in prayer and reading. 

Years later I flirted with the Open Theism of Greg Boyd and others but soon found a similar level of anxiety and dissatisfaction with the exegesis I was being urged to accept. I ended up realising that I did not fully accept the exegesis or synthesis of either the rigorous Calvinists or the Open Theists. I went away and did some more reading (and praying) particularly in the Church Fathers, Reformers and Eastern Orthodox writers. In the rest of this article I want to explain my conclusions in case they are helpful to anyone else who is wrestling with this issue. In keeping with the ether of this blog, I have tried to be as un polemical and consensual as I can while also saying what I think is true.

The first part of this article outlines a classical Christian understanding of the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freedom, ultimately arguing that John Wesley’s synthesis of these ideas is the most helpful,  but not necessarily the only correct,  way of seeing this question at least within the limits of actual lived human experience.  The second part  will focus on how we can read the Bible well when these issues come up.

Thinking About Free-will and Predestination

The question of free-will and predestination is a massive one and I’m not sure I will be able to answer it satisfactorily. In some ways, that is part of the key to coming to peace with it. We have minds designed to operate within time and to perceive it as acting in a linear way. Then when we try to work out how God (who exists above and beyond time) acts in relation to us we become confused. That confusion is inevitable – it flows from the natural limitations of our present existence; we can’t expect to understand it because it is a question that is by its nature not one that can be grasped by us. I don’t think that this is a cop-out but rather recognises that there is a fundamental difference between ourselves and God that prevents us from even imagining the answers to certain questions (another, related, example is what was there before the beginning / big bang etc? We can’t even properly conceive of an answer because in our experience everything has a prior cause and everything exists within creation – beyond that we can’t speak).

With that said, there are certain propositions that orthodox Christians have generally held to be true whatever background they come from (ie Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant etc). 

  1. God is free to do whatever he wants. 
  2. God knows the future. 
  3. As we perceive it, we are free to act in the present. 
  4. Without God’s prior grace that freedom does not extend to choosing him (ie he has to act first).
  5. There is (at least as we perceive it) the possibility of anyone coming to Christ. 
  6. Our grace-enabled freedom (as we perceive it) continues after we come to Christ into the choices we make to become like him. 
  7. While we have faith in Jesus God will keep us to the end.

Different groups have explained how we can hold all of these ideas together in different ways. On a fundamental level, as long as one is able to affirm all of them the explanatory net underneath doesn’t matter as much as we sometimes imply.

My own preference is for Wesley’s framework which fuses (in my view) the best of Eastern and Western Christianity. In this model, all humanity is fallen and therefore tends by nature to do wrong, all are experiencing the grace of God in some way and this grace is intended to enable them to respond to Christ in a way that is appropriate for them (commonly called prevenient grace), we come to Christ when God’s Spirit opens our hearts to enable us to respond (providing us freedom) and we then choose to respond. At that point God freely and totally forgives us in a way we could never contribute to or merit (justifying grace). Thereafter we have freedom to become like Christ insofar as we remain in relationship with God’s Spirit (sanctifying grace) and God then leads us to glory (glorifying grace).

Throughout all of this I want to affirm that God is sovereignly in control of the future but makes space within his plans for us to have true, grace empowered freedom. In the past I have used the (limited) analogy of a sat-nav in which the destination is programmed but the driver has freedom to keep turning off the route, although I wouldn’t want to push this too far.

Reading the Bible

Having thought about the overall framework Christians might use when discussing these questions, we can now address how we can read Scripture when the topic or language of predestination or election comes up. 

We have to be aware when we read Scripture that we often unconsciously read it with a particular set of prior ideas in mind. In my experience this is nowhere better illustrated than in relation to predestination. 

‘Predestination’

Throughout the Scriptures the writers are trying to balance these truths: 

  1. God is free; 
  2. God knows all things; 
  3. God loves humanity; and 
  4. human beings are (as we perceive it) free; 

In any given chapter one or other of these themes may be more prominent than the others but this will nearly always be balanced out somewhere else. This is why it is important to (as you very commendably have) get familiar with the whole of Scripture.

With that caveat, in the New Testament references to predestination are nearly always to the end state of believers ie what is the final fate of those who are in Christ? The answer is their final salvation and transformation. Thus in Romans 8:29-30, God foreknew those who would respond to Christ and the destination he chose for them was justification and glorification. Predestination refers to where believers are going (ie if we hold to Christ God has chosen a wonderful destination for us, he isn’t leading us nowhere).

‘Election‘

When we’re reading references in Scripture to ‘election’ or something similar, it is important to remember two distinctions that are very easy to forget:

  • There is a difference between corporate and individual election.
    In corporate election a group can be chosen because they all fulfil some other criteria. An example would be choosing to cheer for a particular football team. My (undoubtedly wise) choice to cheer for Spurs means that I will also cheer for each of their players, whoever those players happen to be at the moment.
    In individual election a particular person is chosen without reference to their membership of a group or their relationship to an individual.
    The distinction is complicated in Scripture when one person can be chosen (like Jesus or Abraham), which is individual election, and then others are chosen because of how they relate to that individual (like Israel or the church).
    We always need to ask what type of election is being referred to and in reference to whom.
  • People can be chosen for a particular purpose or task without that referring to their eternal salvation. For this reason we always need to ask what the person or people are chosen for.

In the New Testament, references to election are nearly always corporate. They refer to God’s plans for a particular group (Israel, the church, or those in Jesus Christ). Reading them as referring (at least in the first instance) to individuals is misreading them. The question of who is a part of that group is a separate one which is nearly always answered in respect of the church by pointing to those who have faith in Christ. 

For example, Romans 9 is part of the overall argument from 8-11 about the relationship between Israel and the Gentiles in the church. Paul wants to answer the questions, are the Gentiles part of the elect group? If so, how? What about the Jews? His answers are ‘yes’, ‘by faith’, and ‘also by faith.’ The argument proceeds through chapter 9 by pointing out that God determined the criteria by which the Jews were elect (they were children of the promise given to Abraham). Note this refers to Israel as a group rather than the salvation of any particular Jew. God’s choice was sovereign – it wasn’t because Abraham was good or his descendants were good but because God gets to set the entry criterion: 9:14. They then complain that they haven’t done anything wrong; they kept the law so why should the Gentiles be included by faith? Paul’s answer is that membership of the elect group has always been by faith and now it includes the Gentiles: 9:30-33. 

The overall point of the argument is that God determines the group that he justifies. Individual membership of that group is by faith (implying freedom and response, v.32) and not by works. Far from teaching that God predetermines and elects certain individuals prior to any faith of theirs, the chapter teaches that God determines that all who have faith will be part of the elect group whether they are Jew or Greek. The question is then what about Israelites who don’t believe in Jesus and this is what Paul deals with in chapters 10 and 11, a flow that only makes sense if 9 is about the group rather than the individuals.

I point this out because we get so used to reading chapters out of the stream of the overall  argument of the letter that we assume they are talking about us (as individuals) rather than us, the church, (as a group). God has chosen the church – we (together) are elect. On a deeper level this is because he has chosen Jesus and we are in him (this is the point of Ephesians 1). None of this necessitates that human beings are not (as far as we perceive it) free. In fact it implies exactly the opposite – that by God’s grace we are free to enter the elect group through Christ.

One solution to this is wherever you come across a passage that seems odd in its predestinarian thinking, try reading the chapters either side as one block and see if that changes how it comes across.

Further Reading

I would start by checking out Thomas C. Oden’s The Transforming Power of Grace which manages to be steeped in consensual, ecumenical exegesis of Scripture and yet also readable and enjoyable (and thin!).  

For commentaries on this issue, particularly in the context of Romans, there is a deeper and balanced discussion in Ben Witherington III with Darlene Hyatt, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p.236-259 which I found very helpful. Slightly different perspectives can also be found in Douglas M. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (part of the more Reformed NICNT series) and Scott W. Hahn, Romans (part of the Catholic Commentary of Sacred Scripture).