Crafting Prayers for Public Worship

The Art of Intercession

Wells

• Verlag: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848254916
• Thema: Teología y religión
• Thema: Oración

An inspirational and practical guide for all who help to lead the intercessions in regular worship or offer prayers on specific occasions. It aims to empower and equip lay people and clergy alike to offer heartfelt, informed, thoughtful and appropriate prayers on behalf of the people of God for God's world.

Crafting Prayers for
Public Worship

The Art of Intercession

Samuel Wells

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1 Speaking to God for the People

2 A Time-Honoured Shape

3 Social and Liturgical Context

4 Fine Tuning

5 Examples: Seasons

6 Examples: Ordinary Time

7 Examples: Occasions

For
David Trelawny-Ross
and
David Warbrick

Preface

I’m grateful to many people whose prayers lie behind this book. I think of the people of St Mary’s, Saltford, the congregation in which I grew up, came to faith, and was first invited to lead intercessions. I know I broke all the guidelines enunciated in the pages that follow; but those were patient people and they cherished me – and because of that I was found by a vocation that accompanies me still. I hope that every congregation I have served could aspire to nurture its children and young adults in sunshine and rain the way that congregation raised me.

I can’t forget those who knelt by my bedside each night and inscribed on my heart the habits of intercessory prayer: Ruth and Stephen Wells. And I name with gratitude those with whom I pray daily: Jo, Laurence and Stephanie.

I think of the ministry colleagues with whom I have shared the daily office during the years since my ordination, and the way we have each learned to shape intercession around one another’s rhythms and cadences. Among many, including many lay people, I especially recall John Inge, Chris Boulton, Marguerite Roberts, Craig Kocher, Meghan Feldmeyer, Nancy Ferree-Clark, Abby Kocher, Keith Daniel, Adam Hollowell, Christy Lohr Sapp, Bruce Puckett, Richard Carter, Katherine Hedderly, and Clare Herbert.

And I’m indebted to those who’ve kept on my case and insisted I write this book until I finally gave in and did so: including Emily Wilson-Hauger, Sally Robinson, Stanley Hauerwas, Norman Wirzba, Rebekah Eklund, Charles Michael Smith, Jackie Strange and Adrienne Koch.

The book is dedicated to two very different people who bear the same name. With one I have shared discovery, and adventure, and sadness; and have been in awe of patience, and gentleness, and courage. With the other I have pondered depths, and joys, and fragilities; and have admired a soul in which details are a form of devotion, regardless of whether anyone sees them. Of such are prayers made.

Introduction

‘It is our duty and our joy.’ These words, usually associated with the prayer of thanksgiving in the service of Holy Communion, are equally fitting for the practice of intercession. Interceding in public worship is a duty; this book is intended to make it a joy.

It is a joy when it is an opportunity to engage in passionate and wholehearted dialogue with the maker, redeemer and sustainer of all things: when one is invited to commune in the heart of God and share one’s deepest fears, hopes, and realities. It is a joy when one can meet the intersection between the profoundest longings of one’s soul, the most direct import of the scripture, and the most desperate needs of the world. It is a joy when one can share this most intimate of encounters with a congregation one has joined for a season, for a morning, or for life. It is a joy when all one’s disparate intimations of immortality, half-remembered wisdom, enchanting turn of phrase, abiding sense of outrage, restless pangs of despair, and reassuring rhythms of comfort can be brought together into one brief, tender, but comprehensive address to God.

But of course it’s not always a joy. It’s sometimes a tedious trudge through a lifeless hallway of half-hearted and tired phrases, delivered without passion by a leader going through the liturgical motions. Or occasionally it’s an exercise in pastoral patience as an intercessor inflicts a social and political manifesto on a defenceless congregation in the presence of God. Some communities settle for the former because they are wary of the latter. It’s possible to aspire beyond either.

This book came to be written because of the seven years I spent leading a large ecumenical community that gathered around an extraordinary place of worship: Duke University Chapel in Durham, North Carolina. The chapel serves the university, but also has a ministry to a much wider community through its renowned music, preaching, and ordered worship, and increasingly also through its social outreach and interfaith programmes across the main Protestant churches – United Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and their various subdivisions.

Two things happened as I regularly led worship in this setting. One was that around once a month I led the intercessions – or prayers of the people, as they are known in most American mainline traditions. This was strange to me, as intercessions in the Church of England are almost always led by a lay person, so it had been many years since I had regularly led them in a main act of worship myself. For the first time I started to write intercessions down, rather than simply improvise them as Church of England clergy habitually do at midweek celebrations and other such occasions. And then a second thing began to happen. People started to comment on the intercessions – often more fully and more appreciatively than they did on sermons. This rather bewildered me, both because preaching was what I was primarily there to do, and because I was only praying the way I had come to take for granted, and couldn’t see why this way of praying was ‘any big deal’.

As time went by I realized that this way of praying was unusual in the mainline churches in America. Some such churches tended towards a rather strict and unimaginative form of words, generally said by a member of the clergy, usually the same form each week; more duty than joy. Others experienced florid and somewhat moralistic expositions on pastoral needs and current events that seemed to be aimed more at the congregation than at God; more for the joy of the intercessor than anyone else, as far as I could tell. I started to be called upon to teach colleagues and others, who had tired of these rather well established alternatives, how to pray the way I prayed; and thus I came to identify the principles and practices set out in this book. As I started to publish books of sermons, people started to tell me that that was all very well, but what they really wanted was a book of prayers. So eventually I gave in and put one together. Here it is.

The book comes in two parts: theory and practice. In Chapters 1–4 I lay out some ground rules for what I regard as the best way to offer intercessions in a congregational setting. Of course there are other ways. But this is a book designed to answer the call, ‘Teach us to pray.’ It’s useless to say, ‘Here are 15 different ways of doing things.’ Much better to say, ‘Here is one way, and this is why I have pursued it, and this is how to go about it, and here are some examples of how it has been carried out.’ Readers will take from it what they find helpful and make their own arrangements. I am seeking to offer grace and joy, not a new law – still less a new rote.

Chapter 1 begins with an exploration of what intercessory prayer is – intended to be free of theological jargon and scriptural citations, just a simple explanation of what we actually think we are doing. I then explain what intercessory prayer is and what it isn’t, and use this distinction to show how intercessions can go wrong both theologically and pastorally. I also offer a straightforward distinction that tries to make clear what one is trying to do in the mood and content of intercessions, and how that in great part explains what kind of prayers lead the congregation to feel that something important and true has been said and done.

In Chapter 2 I propose a shape for composing intercessions – a shape that is lodged in Anglican traditions, easy to remember, straightforward to replicate, comprehensive in its scope, and satisfying in its rhythm. In the rest of the chapter I suggest how to inhabit that shape and make it one’s own, while being able to improvise as necessary.

Chapters 3 and 4 are about quality control. Here I suggest ways to enhance the material one has put together, by dovetailing with the rest of the service and by engaging a range of resources, notably hymns and songs, which are already lodged in the congregation’s memory and ripe for prayerful use. I end with a discussion of silence and extempore prayer, because my hope is that improving the practice of intercession will have the fruits of enabling individuals and congregations to rest in silence; and because I believe learning the rhythms of intercession will enable practitioners to pray extempore in ways that stimulate and inspire congregations rather than bore and intimidate them.

The second part of the book consists of three chapters of examples. All of the examples come from the seven years I spent leading prayers in ecumenical (and sometimes multi-faith) settings in North Carolina. Chapters 5 and 6 include intercessions in a liturgical setting – the first during the seasons of Advent, Epiphany, Lent and Easter, the second during Ordinary Time. Chapter 7 offers prayers spoken in more informal or occasional settings; these settings are unlikely to be exactly repeated in a British context, but the point is not to imitate the prayers themselves, rather to see the work the prayers do and then do one’s own work when faced with comparable challenges. All the examples in these three chapters are accompanied by brief commentaries that highlight ways the principles elucidated earlier in the book have been employed in this instance.

I am not a mystic. For many years I felt in awe of those who apparently effortlessly enter the cloud of unknowing and seem to abide there in communion with the saints and angels for indefinite periods. That is not me. But I found extraordinary renewal in prayer when I came to realize that there was a profound gift to offer God’s people when giving them words and a shape for their silent yearnings and compassionate searchings; and in practising that ministry I have found freedom and joy. I hope that the readers of this book make similar discoveries and find renewed ministries.

1

Speaking to God for the People

To be in the presence of God is humanity’s purpose and destiny. The whole Bible is concerned with humanity’s creation for, shrinking from, restoration to, and preparation for being in the presence of God. The whole of the Christian life is training for, anticipating, longing for, practising, and enjoying the presence of God. The name we give to consciousness of being in the presence of God is prayer. The sense of being so united with God that we are almost in God while at the same time being so aware of God that we are deeply with God is what we call communion. While this can be experienced alone or with intimate and like-minded companions, the principal place in which Christians expect to find it is in public worship, among those they have not specifically chosen, with others from whom they may personally have significant differences, in the rehearsing again for today the story of their redemption in Christ.

Consciousness of being in the presence of God evokes many kinds of dialogue. We may be overcome by awe, holiness, wonder, amazement, joy, words that we call praise or in silence that we call adoration. We may become acutely conscious of our fragility, our failure, our foolishness, and our folly, and eager to embark on a verbal process of repentance and confession and seeking forgiveness, or an active process of gestures of penance and a quest for reconciliation. We may be flooded with thanksgiving for the gift of creation and its myriad complexity; for the grace of God in Christ, in God’s utter faithfulness and wondrous love in spite of our hardheartedness and perverse estrangement, and in the resurrection promises of forgiveness and eternal life; or for all the blessings of our own lives.

But we may also find ourselves urgently aware of our own neediness, the plight of those we love and care about, and the trouble and sorrow of others whom we know only by hearsay, by news item, by stray conversation and a sense there was something deeper we could only imagine. Neediness can be bonding: a burden shared is a burden halved. There are few things more transforming than feeling your grief and sorrow has been heard, received, understood, appreciated, and delivered back to you with compassion, grace and wisdom – even blessing. But neediness can just as easily be isolating. We’ve all edged away from a grieving, begging, or angry person because we feared saying something patronizing or clumsy that made things worse or because we feared letting them get close might drain our emotional energy.

This book is about how human nee...