I've started reading a book called Praying With The Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, and Today by Scot McKnight. It is about praying at set times during the day and using classical prayers that the church has prayed for centuries such as prayers from The Common Book of Prayer. He makes these statements in the first chapter of his book:
"We believed, and I joined in with this conviction for a long time, that there was a spiritually dangerous connection between set prayers and impersonal faith....We were given this diagnosis for an argument: Repetition leads to recitation, and recitation leads to vain repetitions....Before long, we thought, we'd just be mouthing words and not meaning them at all. It is better, we were taught, to say something clumsy but really mean it from the heart than say something profound and poetic and run the risk of not meaning it."
Scot challenges us to think about our spontaneous prayers and prayers of what's on our mind as prayers in the church while at the same time considering praying with the church by using prayers from the Psalms and prayers written down and passed along for centuries. It is a way to connect with the "cloud of witnesses" that have gone before us as well as connecting with current Christians all over the world. I think he has an excellent point and that it would be beneficial for us to pray these "common" prayers together as a group in worship in addition to spontaneous prayers or just "individual" oriented prayers.
The artwork above may not be great, but it reminds me of the "cloud of witnesses" spoken of in The Bible. I've ordered the 1979 Common Book of Prayer along with a couple of other books of ancient prayer. I intend to give these a try.
No comments:
Post a Comment