I’ve taught worship on occasion, but I also teach a lot about public prayer in the preaching curriculum here. The place where we start with that is what I call the exile of public prayer from worship. What that means is that we’ve gone from a time when worship was structured largely around the prayers of worship to where now prayer is a minimal element. You find that in extreme Bible church situations where the sermon is everything in a service, so whatever music you have that leads up to that, you might have prayer that will transition into a sermon.
You have it on the other end, too, with full-blown production oriented worship where prayers are said typically by musicians as transitions between either sets of music or components of the program. In either case, prayer is no longer the principal structuring backbone of worship.
Prayer has stood in the ages. Prayer has stood over preaching, as well as music, as the backbone of worship.When you begin to recognize that there are different kinds of prayer and Scripture, then you can see that these different kinds of prayer provide the structure for a dialogue in worship. For instance, when we gather for worship, we do so because of God’s invitation. The call, the divine call to worship, is followed then by a divine invitation to God to be present in worship. We call that an invocation or a prayer for God’s presence.
What happens when you come into God’s presence? You praise him for his attributes, his works. Those are prayers of adoration. When you come in to the presence of God, you become mindful that you are a sinner and that you need God’s pardoning graces and so you have confession.
The structure of worship should be articulated and provided by the different kinds of prayer and worship so that worship is more than just preaching, and worship is more than just music. If you ask the average person today something about worship, the odds are very high that they are going to go immediately to the subject of music. Or they might go right to the subject of the sermon.
Prayer has stood in the ages. Prayer has stood over preaching, as well as music, as the backbone of worship. One of the things I try to do with students in a preaching curriculum here is to teach them the different ways of praying that have provided that structure, classically and historically. It does not have to do with whether the music is old or new. It does not have to do with whether the sermon is 20 minutes or 40 minutes. It has to do with structuring worship in a way that represents that divine human interaction that worship is supposed to be. Prayer does that.
