A Second Whack at Prayer

I've been thinking more about prayer since I wrote about it last ("Where two are gathered in My Name", 2011/Dec/22), largely because our church has really been zeroing in on prayer as a church.

My approach to prayer is not lax, really, but it's hard to identify. I see living life with God in mind as a sort of prayer on its own; explicit prayer is not something I really do all that often.

At least, not normally; I find that I, like so many others, pray explicitly when I, well, in the words of one of my pastors, want to "get stuff."

Power

One of many distressing things about the church and its internals is the use and abuse of power.

It's be easy to look at priests' abuse of children, and see those as mere aberrations - or things isolated from "our church," which is surely an excellent place with no such abuses.

But this view, an example of an external locus of control, is not always accurate.

What does it mean to be focused on Christ?

One of the things that I like about the church that I currently attend is that it maintains a very tight focus on Jesus – but what does that mean?

Well, the church has two primary focuses, two goals.

One is to make the body larger, to bring people to Christ. The other is to strengthen the body, to make it stronger, to make the body more knowledgeable or more spiritual - to educate.

The Role of Forward Momentum

This morning, I caught myself thinking that if you traced the motion of a leaf on the wind, you'd end up with something approximating the face of God.

More rationally, you'd end up with a bunch of squiggly lines, but then again, who are we to say that's not a valid representation of the Most High?

It's not a traditional representation, after all, of anything that relates to God. We think of God in the abstract. Most Jews don't think of God as a concrete image at all, because of the injunction against graven images, so even the squiggly line might be out of bounds, if it's considered an image of the Holy One.

But tradition is a huge thing in today's Christianity, more than it should be.

There's a huge movement in the church today to "revert," to do what the original Christian church did; meeting in houses, fellowshipping in small groups. Less formal services, more direct communication among believers; it's a model that you follow when your church has no money and no space.

Now that churches do have money and space, it's not as necessary; we also have a professional leadership (seminaries train pastors, and we see "lay pastors" as different than, well, "actual pastors.") Pastors no longer always know everyone in their congregation; the congregations are too large for "successful churches." Productions are elaborate; services are more like performances.

This is our forward momentum now, this is our tradition.

I'm thankful for my church

My family and I attended church services on Christmas Eve, at 5:00 p.m., the first of three services our church put together. The next service was at 9:00 p.m., and the last service was Sunday morning, on Christmas day.

The services were fairly normal services for the church, although they did have some special features - a family played some instrumental Christmas music, and we had interpretive dance (rhythmic gymnastics, with ribbons, which is one of my favorite gymnastics sports for some reason. I really don't know why. I like watching the ribbons hang in midair while the gymnast is off doing something different.)

The thing that struck me about the services, beyond the unusual aspect of the special features, was how normal it was. It was Christmas-themed, of course, and centered on Luke 2, but it was a normal service, with an invitation (a very unobtrusive one, like always), the standard format of the service, everything.

If you'd visited on Christmas Eve, and then showed up again in February, you'd see the same services. (Well, content would differ, of course...)

My church - at which I'm blessed to be - is very focused on the Christian mission, to be witnesses for Christ to all, without an overbearing approach.

Everything we do is Jesus-focused.