Lord we just pray that you’ll just undertake to move the hearts, Lord, of those who just open their mouths to pray Lord, without taking time just to think Lord, of what it sounds like, Lord. Lord it’s just so hard to be part of a congregation being led in prayer by someone Lord, who just doesn’t understand how difficult it is to really worship you when the one supposed to be leading our prayers just doesn’t know where the prayer is going, Lord. Lord we pray that you’ll just…………zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Caricatures are seldom fair. But they are seldom completely untrue. I was reminded of some of the more forgettable prayers offered up front in worship when reading a wee bit of Karl Barth on public prayer as the prayer of the Church. Talking of the extemporary prayers of ‘officiating ministers’ Barth barely hides his scorn for the unprepared verbiage that passed in his day (and now in ours) for ‘leading in prayer’:
‘In many of the Free churches the extemporary prayer of the officiating minister is substituted for the prescribed form. But there is not much advantage in this if it is understood as a personal expectoration of the thought of the moment. For, exceptions apart, it is hard to see how even a serious minister can claim the right and competence to expect the congregation to accept his momentary(!) prayer-thoughts as though they rested on divine inspiration…..
Perhaps the solution is for the minister to make ‘extemporary’ prayer no less an object of serious and careful preparation than the proclamation of the Word of God, and both with the same regard to the congregation, to its historical connexion with the earlier Church and to its need for a certain stability of form. The minister’s task – a real task which must on no account be left to momentary inspiration, would then consist in leading the congregation afresh each Sunday in relation to each sermon and situation, in the one age-long prayer.
There is need that the question…should be discovered and taken up by congregations no less than ministers as a burning question which it is not merely a matter of taste and judgement but of life and death. In prayer even less than in other things…[the Church] should not be asleep but awake.’
Church Dogmatics, III.4, 114-5.
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