Let’s get back mardling and Katherine’s request for me to get back to Pam’s original question: “Why don’t we pray that much in our Sunday services?”
Here’s my honest and most straightforward answer to Pam and Katherine’s question.
Firstly, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that over the last few years we’ve not made congregational praying as much of a priority as we should have. I’m sorry that we’ve not taken Jesus’ congregational imperative to pray (“Our Father”) as seriously as we should have. I’m sorry that we’ve dragged our feet when we should have been more active in including congregational praying in the way we gather. Sorry.
Secondly, I guess we as elders have been working on this! You see it would be easy for us to land an external shape on top of what we do, that includes lots of congregational praying, and at a heart level, none of those tensions that I listed earlier get resolved. All we’ve done is put an external shape squeezing things into a format and probably building up levels of frustration. As a result, we’ve been trying to help shape our imagination for congregational worship! You can see this happening here, here and here . We’ve also been spending time talking with friends from other churches (e.g. Joel Cady from Redeemer Church, New York). We’ve also been praying and talking (lots) because I think this really does get to the core of what it means for us to gather as a congregation.
So I hope you can see that we’re committed to helping foster a congregational way of worshipping that is shaped by and infused with Scripture. What I mean by this is: by reading the Bible, preaching the Bible, praying the Bible (or biblically saturated prayers), declaring biblical truths through creeds, singing songs that are saturated with … you guessed it, the Bible and lastly, seeing the Bible (or gospel message) enacted in the breaking of bread and drinking of wine in communion. I know this sounds pretty simple and if I’m honest, a bread-and-butter vision of congregational worship but we long for it, love it and pray that together we will find an honest and authentic way of expressing this here at Kingsgate! We’re going to make some mistakes as we take steps in this direction but we want to be a church that collectively (or congregationally) gathers as one body and are united by one Spirit to worship our one great Saviour as we recount, week-in-week-out the one gospel story that has changed everything! And yes, this will involve increasing amounts of collective praying!
For the final part of Pam, Katherine and my mardle about prayer, check out next week’s email
Got a mardle question? Drop me a note at mardle@wearekingsgate.org