Guiding Worship
For those who plan and lead worship events.
Teaching people to pray in worship
By Marlene Kropf
When Uncle Dan lifted his face toward heaven and led the congregation in prayer, I always paid attention. Even as a child, I recognized that he knew God. Something about the fervor and intimacy of his prayers reminded me of Enoch, about whom scripture says, “He walked with God” (Genesis 5:24).
Congregational prayers are not always considered the highlight of worship. Many worshippers tune out when public prayers are offered, perhaps because we don’t know what to do when someone else is praying, or perhaps because public prayers aren’t all that engaging. Whatever the reason for our lack of involvement, worship is considerably diminished when prayer isn’t a significant or meaningful element.
How can we reclaim the importance of prayer in public worship?
Praying in the congregation
We must first expand how we think of prayer. Though spoken words are important, they are not the only mode of prayer. We can pray as we sing; many of our most beloved hymns are prayers. We can pray without words, either in silence or with symbolic actions. The leaders of a weekend conference I recently attended created a welcoming space for prayer. While music was played, worshippers came forward, lit candles, and offered their prayers—spoken or silent—as they placed the floating candles in bowls of water. While the candlelight flickered and danced on the water, we were all drawn into the circle of prayer.
We can create a spacious place for honest and significant encounters with God in worship
We can also pray more. When prayer is offered only at one point in worship—in the pastoral prayer, for example—the congregation begins to think of prayer in very limited ways. Prayer is much more than petition or intercession. In prayer, we can praise and adore God, offer thanks, confess our struggles and sins, lament our woes, and offer blessings. A sermon series on prayer can focus on this entire range of biblical expressions. Congregations can also use the children’s time as an opportunity for teaching and modeling various types of prayer.
Much of what happens in prayer is internal, but not everyone is comfortable with inner reality or knows how to be contemplative. For such people, movement of the body can be a helpful companion to inner communion with God. We can open or raise our hands or join hands with others to unite the internal and external worlds of prayer.
Leading public prayer
Though we can’t all pray like my Uncle Dan, we can become more effective leaders of public prayer. Because our personal spirituality shapes the tone and focus of our prayers, as leaders we are responsible for cultivating our own relationship with God so we can lead others into communion with God.
Effective leadership of public prayer requires thoughtful, creative choices of words. We need to use words that are appropriate for our context, avoiding language that creates barriers or seems exclusive. The way we name and address God in prayer can either unite people’s hearts or leave them feeling separate and unconnected with the Spirit’s movement. We should also use fresh images of God. Above all, our language needs to be real, honest, and authentic. Scripture provides powerful examples of such prayer—see, for example, the prayer of longing in Psalm 63 and Daniel’s prayer of penitence on behalf of his people in Daniel 9.
Walter Brueggemann explains that taking care with language is not a peripheral matter but essential to the ministry of public prayer. He writes that our prayers must be artistically “well-said”—“not to call attention to the artistry itself but to mobilize and sustain the attention of the praying community.” Good examples of vivid and inviting contemporary language for prayer can be found in the hymnal supplements Sing the Journey and Sing the Story.
Public prayers don’t need to be written in advance to be effective. What is required is preparation: leaders should know how a particular prayer fits with the overall focus of worship and with other parts of the service and should shape it accordingly. In addition, we need to develop our capacity to respond in the moment to the movement of God’s Spirit, incorporating and bringing to speech whatever is happening and offering it to God.
Learning to pray in worship is a commitment involving both the congregation and its leaders of prayer. If we give attention to how we pray as leaders and also offer a rich array of prayer opportunities for worshippers, we will create a spacious place for honest and significant encounters with God in worship.
Marlene Kropf is minister of worship for Mennonite Church USA and associate professor of spiritual formation and worship at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. She is coauthor of Singing: A Mennonite Voice and Preparing Sunday Dinner: A Collaborative Approach to Worship and Preaching, both from Herald Press