Throwback Thursday: How Not to Pray in Public
This was published April 1, 2022. — Ed.
Some years ago, at a denominational event that lasted for three days and two nights, I noticed that an entire series of worship services and devotions, one after another, were consistently and uniformly casual and sloppy. I don’t explicitly remember the content from these services and devotions, but it wasn’t terrible. At worst, it was innocuous, that is, it was simply the weakest of the weak hymns from LSB or it was bland statements extolling how much God loves us, while at it is best, it was quite good. That is to say I remember that we sang a couple of Lutheran Chorales and there was some decent exegesis and application at times. I didn’t go there with high expectations in this regard and I wasn’t there to judge the worship and devotions. I expect these things to be uneven for all sorts of reasons. What caught my attention was that these 9 or 10 different pastors, all of whom would describe themselves as “missional,” all acted and behaved in identical ways and used the same ceremonies, all of which were strange to me.