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Tuesday, 27 September 2005

Intercessory Prayer Resource

For those who haven't already heard about this, the Faith and Unity Department (under the leadership of its Worship Co-ordinator, Simon Perry) are providing a new resource for intercessory prayer.  Here is the blurb from the BUGB website:

A vital part of worship is a commitment to pray for our world and for those in need. The ministry of intercession is a calling from God, but one that demands much of us. In order to help resource our churches, the Faith and Unity Department is now seeking to provide a page of prayers of intercession for use each month on our website. There will be a mixture of prayers – some designed for use on special designated Sundays of the year, some fitting in with the liturgical calendar, and others picking up on events in the news. You can find these prayers of intercession by going to the Worship Initiatives section of the Faith and Unity page.

September's .pdf file contains a prayer for refugees and a prayer for Harvest.  This has the potential to be a very useful resource so thanks to Simon and his team for all the hard work. 

09:18 Posted in Worship / Preaching Etc | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this

Comments

I think this resource has the potential to encourage the paucity of intercessory prayer in our churches (incidentally, the quality of that prayer is as important as its' frequency, as i am sometimes apalled at what passes for intercession in some of the more liturgically structured churches of all Christian traditions) and wish it well.

What continues to bother me is the fact that what is often produced by groups such as this often bears little relation to what happens in the vast majority of our churches, and is often produced by people who have little sympathy for the evangelical / charismatic tradition, particularly within our Baptist tradition.

My reason for stating this is simple. The cynical disengagement which sometimes marks the attitudes of many towards this significant tradition does little to encourage them to broaden their horizons and dip their toes in some new experiential water. I hope that Dr Perry and his team will at the very least engage with some of the issues that surround charismatic worship so that there is at least some hope of finding streams of living water in all liturgical expressions of worship. After all, it is to be "by all of the people, and truly all for God, to avoid the sacramentum mysterium being removed even further from the faithful." (Bonhoffer)

Posted by: Paul J Lavender | Sunday, 09 October 2005

Thanks Paul - perhaps Simon needs to hear your views once you have looked a few months worth of the material. I am not sure we want to encourage paucity (take another look at what you actually say in your first sentence), and the fact that what is often offered liturgically bears little relation to what happens in most Baptist churches - well this is probably the point. If what happens in most Baptist churches is introspective, shallow, triumphalistic etc. etc. then it needs changing. Whether or not some prayers on the BUGB site wil do it is less certain.

So what else could we do?

Posted by: Sean | Monday, 10 October 2005

Sean. Yep, we need to encourage where there is a paucity of intercession!

I think that what often happens in churches where liturgy is less important is that prayer for others happens in a variety of different ways, not always in a structured slot of Intercessory Prayer. It could also be argued that as well as an absence of intercessory prayer, there is also an absence of lament, confession, or celebration in prayer in many of our churches. And these categories of prayer
are equally well represented in the Psalms.

What else could be done? Well, in addition to the modelling of intercessory prayer, an encouragement to broaden the horizons of our congregations in preaching, teaching and effective modelling of prayer. And perhaps, encouraging members of the congregation to offer the intercessions themselves.

One might also be tempted to ask about the role of some of our theological colleges in all this.

Oh, and perhaps we need to do something about the relegation of prayer in the everyday pastoral encounter to little more than an afterthought. If prayer as a way of life was modelled more by all of us in ministry, then others would catch the point rather than miss it.

And as the Apostle Paul said, I am the chief amongst the sinners!!

Posted by: Paul J Lavender | Monday, 10 October 2005

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