The Paternoster – A Formative Christian Practice for All Followers
I’d like to frame the next group of featured” posts that will be showing up here on gathering in light. I will be continuing to post my thoughts on the Lord’s Prayer, and how it can and should be used as a missional discipleship tool in churches from Anabaptist and Quaker, to emerging and missional, to Orthodox and Catholic (and everyone in between) churches. The main points of thinking that will be presented here is: how the Lord’s Prayer ought to be something practiced by all Christians on an ongoing basis, comparisons between the Qaddish, an early Jewish Prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer, as well as thoughts on each of the petitions and how they should inform the church’s overall missional engagement with the surrounding culture. I am posting these thoughts in about 800 words, in hopes to spread out the conversation and encourage dialogue.
This project is something I have been working on and thinking about for the past year, and have recently lectured on at Fuller. Ultimately I would like to get these thoughts published in a journal if they fly here. Your feedback will be very appreciated and useful in my further developing of these thoughts.
Prayer is an open activity by which we participate with God in bringing about his will.”
~Dallas Willard
The Paternoster – An Important Practice in the Life of the Church
The Lords Prayer is one of the clearest rituals Jesus gave us. He commanded that the prayer become an ongoing practice for his disciples, this is evident by him saying in Luke 11:2, When you pray, say ” and in Matthew 6:9 Pray then in this way ” It is important to note that he utilized the indicative form of lego
(legete,2nd person declarative form of speak
),
you say(this that follows),” a declarative form that should be understood as him commanding his disciples to pray this specific prayer. Joel Green, in his commentary on Lukes Gospel says,
Luke depicts the act of praying Jesus model prayer as a habit whose repetition could never be dismissed as an exercise in rote learning or ineffectual recitation. Jesus followers pray in this way because this is a distinct practice of Jesus followers. Such practice nurtures dispositions appropriate to the community of Jesus followers; through its repetition the message of this prayer would engrave itself into the life of the community.”
Unfortunately the Protestant church, back lashing against the Roman Catholic church, has moved away from praying this prayer as a regular expression of worship. Reworking this prayer or disregarding it in hopes of avoiding vain repetitions” does a great injustice to the church and its practice, because it misses the point for which Jesus gave us the prayer. Stanley Hauerwas says,
Some things are too important to be left up to chance. Some things in life are too difficult to be left up to spontaneous desire things like telling people that we love them or prayer to God. So we do them out of habit. Thus in church we generally do the same things over and over again, week after week, telling the same stories and singing the same songs.”
Not only is it important to pray this prayer because Jesus commanded it, but when we pray this prayer we are allowing ourselves to be shaped into the kinds of people Jesus intended us to be. Joel Green says that not only is the ever-present discipline of Jesus own prayer-life important to be mirrored by individuals but also suggests that when the disciples wanted to learn how to pray, Jesus gave them this prayer as a community-forming prayer. For Jesus disciples their saying the Lords Prayer distinguishes them from other groups, even from John the Baptizers disciples who had their own distinguishing style of prayer.
Community Forming Prayer and The Mission of Jesus
More importantly, this prayer transforms those who pray it; Green says, it nurtures [the] dispositions” of those who follow Christ. Christians that have moved away from this prayer, need to return to it, we need it engraved in our communities, allowing it to restore a distinct pattern of life, worship, and prayer. This is our prayer, the one Christian” prayer handed to us from our Lord, we didnt choose it, as Hauerwas says, It chooses us. It reaches out to us, forms us, invites us into the adventure called discipleship.”
If it is so that the Lords Prayer really does transform us, we will find ourselves living its very words. To use Richard Fosters categories, prayer not only transforms the inward (piety and daily life concerns) and upward (worship) parts of the community, but it should also transform the outward (service and mission) parts. Not only should we as Christians regularly pray the Lords Prayer in the form transmitted to us through the Gospels, but we should also allow it to function as our own community-forming idea of mission (the outward). We should see that these words located in the prayer are intrinsically tied to Jesus’ own mission. Using the Lords Prayer as a paradigm for missional formation will help to bend our wills and shape our identities toward the Kingdom.
Posts so far on the Lord’s Prayer
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