All posts tagged prayer

  • Beyond Elementary School Christianity

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    Beyond Elementary School Christianity
    Brian Zahnd

    In his groundbreaking book, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, James W. Fowler describes spiritual development in a series of stages from zero to six. Fowler describes stage two as the faith of school children. This is a stage where metaphors are often literalized and a strong belief in the just reciprocity of the universe is held dear. At this stage of faith the idea that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people is a controlling axiom. I won’t summarize all the stages here, but Fowler describes stage five as the capacity to acknowledge paradox and experience transcendence.

    Fowler’s final stage is characterized by compassion and the view that all people belong to a universal community. This is the mature stage where the spiritual journey breaks out of the paradigm of “us versus them” that dominates so much religious thought and controls so many religious institutions.

    In his forthcoming book, A More Christlike God, Canadian theologian Brad Jersak comments on Fowler’s stages of faith and the current plight of evangelicalism making this stinging observation: “Entire streams of Christendom are not only stuck at stage-two faith, but actually train and require their ministers to interpret the Bible through the mythic-literal eyes of school children. Growing up and moving forward is rebranded as backsliding; maturing is perceived as falling away.”
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  • My 4th of July Prayer

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    My 4th of July Prayer
    Brian Zahnd

    Father God, Creator of heaven and earth—
    You have made all the peoples of the earth for your pleasure,
    You have appointed the nations of the world for your glory.
    As a people who have pledged allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ,
    We pray today for the nation in which we dwell.
    We pray you would grant us to be governed by good and wise leaders;
    That we would be governed in such a manner that we may live in peace.
    We pray you help this nation strive for righteousness and justice;
    That your care for the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the alien—
    Would flow like a mighty stream through our nation.
    May we be a people of humility, generosity and compassion.
    May the weakest among us, the unborn and the unfortunate, the elderly and the ill—
    Be shown your justice and mercy.
    We pray that we who are the followers of the Prince of Peace and his kingdom,
    Would be a peaceable people seeking to live in peace with one another.
    We pray that hate and acrimony would give way to love and harmony.
    We pray that the church of Jesus Christ in our land would be found faithful.
    We pray that we would be a faithful witness to the kingdom of God;
    That the church in this nation would be a city set upon a hill;
    That the church in this nation would faithfully model the way of salvation—
    The way of following Jesus Christ.
    We ask all of this in the name of your Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
    Amen.
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  • You Are What You Pray

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    You Are What You Pray
    Brian Zahnd

    I am a religious person because I pray.

    In that sense I have a solidarity with all who pray.

    I have more in common with the Egyptian Muslim who prays five times a day than with the European secularist who never prays.

    I have more in common with the Indian Hindu who prays to Brahma than with the American consumerist who prays to nothing at all.

    I have more in common with the mystic Rumi than with the Deist Jefferson.

    (That the majority of American evangelicals feel more at home with an Enlightenment secularist than with a Muslim mystic shows just how secular we really are.)

    I am a Christian because I pray as a Christian.

    I pray to the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

    I pray in the name of Jesus Christ.

    I pray the prayer Jesus gave his disciples to pray.

    I pray the prayers of the Church.

    How we pray is how we are formed.

    The Hindu is formed by Hindu prayers.

    The Jew is formed by Jewish prayers.

    The Christian is formed by Christian prayers.

    The Muslim is formed by Muslim prayers.

    The secularist is formed by not praying.

    Those who refuse to pray the liturgical prayers of a received tradition are on the verge of becoming a secularist.

    They have followed the dictates of Voltaire and Jefferson and rejected the authority of religious tradition.

    They endorse Voltaire’s cynicism and Jefferson’s scissors.

    If they pray at all, they pray their own prayers, which is to say, they’re not being formed by prayer—
    They’re only wishing.

    They wish for what they want and call it prayer.

    Window shopping imagined as prayer.

    This is the prayer of the consumerist, the secularist, the atheist.

    But Christian tradition knows better.

    The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you want him to do—
    But to be properly formed.

    We are formed as Christian people as we pray Christian prayers.

    “When you pray, say…” -Jesus

    BZ
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  • My 4th of July Prayer

     

    This Sunday I led our congregation in this “4th of July Prayer.”

    Father God, Creator of heaven and earth—
    You have made all the peoples of the earth for your pleasure,
    You have appointed the nations of the world for your glory.
    As a people who have pledged allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ,
    We pray today for the nation in which we dwell.
    We pray you would grant us to we be governed by good and wise leaders;
    That we would be governed in such a manner that we may live in peace.
    We pray you help this nation strive for righteousness and justice;
    That your care for the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the alien—
    Would flow like a mighty stream through our nation.
    May we be a people of humility, generosity and compassion.
    May the weakest among us, the unborn and the unfortunate,  the elderly and the ill—
    Be shown your justice and mercy.
    We pray that we who are the followers of the Prince of Peace and his kingdom,
    Would be a peaceable people seeking to live in peace with one another.
    We pray that hate and acrimony would give way to love and harmony.
    We pray that the church of Jesus Christ in our land would be found faithful.
    We pray that we would be a faithful witness to the kingdom of God;
    That the church in this nation would be a city set upon a hill;
    That the church in this nation would faithfully model the way of salvation—
    The way of following Jesus Christ.
    We ask all of this in the name of your Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
    Amen.

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  • I Am Prayer

    I am prayer.

    This is what David said.

    (Psalm 109:4. It’s exactly what he said.)

    What a mystery prayer is.
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  • (Un)Answered Prayer

    The unspeakable had happened.
    Jerusalem was destroyed.
    The Temple was burned down.
    Israel was exiled from their promised land.
    It was the greatest calamity imaginable.
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