Bringing intercession back
In every generation, from the first century until now, there have been voices within the church decrying that Christians do not pray enough. Efforts to correct this are often aimed at individual believers, encouraging them to pray more fervently and diligently during their private prayer times. My purpose for this series of articles is a bit different. Getting Christians to pray more as individuals is certainly a worthwhile goal, but I’m aiming here to encourage us to pray more as a church. Specifically, I hope to make the case that the church in America in the early twenty-first century does not pray enough collectively, as part of its gathered worship. I will show that there have been specific pressures to eliminate congregational prayer from worship services, with some challenges extending back hundreds of years. I also hope to demonstrate that by thinking more robustly about the nature of the church as the body of Christ we can see the work of intercession as an integral part of our worship.
Congregational prayer is being pushed out of Protestant worship services in America. The only thing close to a systematic study on this trend, however, is a survey done two decades ago by Constance Cherry, published in “My House Shall Be Called a House of…Announcements.” Cherry measured the amount of time devoted to various activities across several different styles of worship services. She noted that prayer shrank in proportion to other acts in worship services when moving from traditional (13%), to blended (8%), and on to contemporary (5%) styles. Remarkably, of the praying that was done in contemporary services, there was almost no intercessory prayer. (Fewer than 10% of contemporary services included intercessions at all.)
Cherry’s study was conducted over just sixteen months and was not intended to show trends over time. But as contemporary styles have increased, their tendency to devote more time to preaching, singing, and, yes, even announcements, than to prayer has spread across the American religious landscape.
This set of articles is meant to inspire congregations to correct this imbalance of liturgical priorities, especially as it regards intercessory prayer. While I would be delighted to learn that these articles inspired some pastors and worship leaders to increase the number of minutes devoted to intercessions, my aim here is to dig a bit deeper into the reasons why the church prays together in the gathered assembly. I will do so by at a set of “snapshots,”—that is, brief explorations into moments in the church’s history when it wrestled with the role of intercessory prayer in worship. In each of the cases we will discover theological commitments that fueled these decisions, which will then allow us to apply those principles to the present day. Even those congregations that maintain a space for intercessions—calling them the Prayers of the People, or a clergy-led Pastoral Prayer—will benefit from these historical cases and the theological reasons they provide for praying together.
Indeed, my assumption is that there is pressure to exclude this kind of praying from our services, regardless of worship style. This is something I experience as a pastor who leads two services each Sunday morning, one contemporary and the other traditional. Each has unique challenges related to intercessory prayer. The contemporary service format lends itself to extended times of singing, and it eschews interruptions that break the flow of the song sets, even for praying. Hence, our worship team is hesitant to add elements like responsive readings, prayers, or even extended scripture readings.
The traditional service, on the other hand, presents different constraints. On Sundays when Communion is celebrated, for example, there is pressure to limit other components of the service to keep it from going too long. In addition, this service is streamed on YouTube. All prayer requests and announcements are broadcast for the entire world to hear, meaning that we want to be careful not to violate people’s privacy by praying for needs that are too specific.
All this, of course, requires us to define what is meant by congregational intercessory prayer. Prayer itself barely requires a definition; broadly understood, it is a conversation directed to God. What we’re interested in clarifying here are two qualifiers: congregational and intercessory. First, “congregational” means that the prayer is offered in public, in a group gathered for the purposes of worshiping God. This stands in contrast to private prayer—the variety that, according to Jesus, is done in secret and requires a closed door (Matthew 6:6). For the purposes of these articles, I am interpreting this qualifier quite broadly. “Congregational” does not mean that the entire congregation speaks out loud—only that the entire congregation is engaged in praying at the same time, even if only one person is voicing the prayers. This category can therefore include practices such as a monologued Pastoral Prayer, a litany led by a lay liturgist, or Tongsung Kido [BOW 446] in which each person prays their own words out loud at the same time in a kind of holy cacophony.
There are many kinds of congregational prayers in a service: opening calls to worship, prayers for illumination, thanksgivings offered between worship songs, and confessions of sin. But the second qualifier that I use here—intercessory—narrows our scope. Intercessions, for the purposes of these articles, are petitionary prayers offered up for needs in the world and the church itself. They may be general or specific, but they are offered to God while asking God for help.
Throughout these articles I will show that the church has consistently been pressured to limit its intercessions, for a variety of reasons. For centuries, church leaders have faced headwinds that pressured them to prioritize other aspects of their liturgies. Here we will see that congregational intercessions have been curtailed because some considered them to be too long, because they were considered inauthentic, and because they were considered too odd for guests and visitors. We will walk with believers in Rome in the first centuries of the faith, in England in the seventeenth century, and in North America in the twentieth. Each group presents different questions about the role of intercessory prayer, weighing its benefits considering other worship priorities.
But first, beginning in the next article, we will examine what congregational intercessions should be, based on Augustine’s theology of the body of Christ.