Church in a Church

Guiding Prayer for Today

As our week is to be focused on reciting the Lord's Prayer three times each day, take a moment before reading on to quiet your heart, quiet your mind, your thoughts, you body.  As the stillness and quiet begins to take over your senses, slowly begin to recite this paraphrase of the prayer Christ taught us to pray...

Our Father, who is in heaven, your name is holy.

May your kingdom come here on earth 

as it already has come in heaven.

Give us today all we need.

And help us to forgive others as you forgave us.

Help us not to fall to temptation, 

but deliver us into righteousness.

For everything on earth, under the earth, 

and above the earth are yours...

all glory, all honor, all power forever and ever. 

Amen.

In his book, Praying with the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today, New Testament scholar Scot McKnight tells a story about an experience he and his wife had while on sabbatical in Italy. They were traveling around the country seeing many of the churches and ancient cities in which people of the faith lived, died, and ministered.

They came to the tiny town of Assisi where one of Christianity's most famous saints lived and began his ministry: St. Francis.  Needless to say, because of St. Francis's importance to Christians of all denominations, Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and so on, his hometown became an important place of pilgrimage.  

Just outside of the town was a tiny church where two other important saints had apparently been baptized.  Because of the crowds flocking to the area, this church also began to draw large amounts of pilgrims.  The church (pictured above) was small which meant very few people could enter at a time, leaving many to stand outside in the elements every day.

The answer?  A much larger, beautiful basilica (church) was built over the tiny church.  The small, ancient church became a church within a church!

Now, Scot grew up and still is a practicing Baptist.  This means that he, like most of us, grew up believing that when we pray, we pray what is on our hearts.  Most of us are aware of other traditions that use written prayers or liturgies, but they seem very foreign to us.  We find it difficult to appreciate them because they either don't seem from the heart or we find difficulty allowing those prayers to become our prayers.

Scot was in this same boat...until he went inside the small church within a church.  As he emerged from his private time of worship within the small church outside of Assisi, he noticed many other Christians waiting their turn to enter.  But as they waited, many sat in prayer and worship in the large basilica, reciting prayers they had been taught to pray through their particular Christian traditions.

This is when everything changed for Scot.  What he realized was that when he went inside the tiny, private church, that was his time to lift up his personal prayers from the heart to God.  He prayed his prayers.

But, when he rejoined the greater congregation in the larger church and began to lift up ancient prayers of the faith with his fellow believers, he was no longer praying his prayers for himself; he was praying the church's prayers for the church.

This is why the Lord's Prayer is essential to this time of fasting.  As we pray this ancient prayer together, we must realize that there are millions of Christians around the world who are also lifting up that very same prayer to God with us.  We are praying not only for the church, but with the church.  

We should never abandon those prayers which we feel laid on our hearts.  That is our time with God in the private sanctuaries of our hearts.  But it is also good to be reminded of the importance of praying this ancient prayer of the faith together.  In doing so, we not only lift up our own prayer to God, but we also lift up the church's prayer together in joint worship to our King.  We move from our small sanctuaries into the larger sanctuary of the church universal.

As you conclude your time of devotion and mediation today, look back again at the paraphrase version of the Lord's Prayer at the top of this post.  Read and pray this prayer again.  But this time be reminded that as you pray this prayer today, you pray it with your fellow believers in the hope and faith that God's kingdom has truly come to this earth and is being made known through you and through me.

-Pastor Patrick