This article is based on a section from my book What’s So Confusing About Grace? In a 1960 interview on Meet the Press, Martin Luther King, Jr. famously observed, “It is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours […]
corporate worship
On reading (and singing) the prayers of others
I grew up in the Pentecostal tradition in which we prided ourselves on being “led by the Spirit” to pray extemporaneously (i.e. off the cuff). Consequently, we viewed those “liturgists” who read prayers out of a book as spiritually suspect at best. The idea of reading a prayer, especially a prayer written by somebody else, […]