Simple Church Minute 52--prayer

52—prayer

My name is Tom; this is Simple Church Minute

            Both religious traditionalism, not just Christian, but also some other beliefs, and our civil pseudo-religion, tell us that prayer is something connected to bowing one’s head, closing one’s eyes, and having a serious demeanor.  First Thessalonians chapter 5 verse 17 says, “pray without ceasing.”  This clearly cannot be done with eyes closed, hands folded.   Neither you nor I can drive a car, do one’s job, and a whole bunch of other things with one’s eyes closed.  Might I suggest that following God’s direction, pray without ceasing, requires my attitude being one of my desiring my spirit being in communion with the Holy Spirit at all times.  In Matthew chapter 6 verse 7, Jesus connected saying the same words over and over with being an unbeliever.  From there through verse 13 appear the most often repeated group of words that are repeated over and over as a prayer in traditional churches.  Verse 7 should be a huge hint that that was exactly the opposite from what Jesus was communicating.*

            Now, what I just said is the basis of innumerable teaching in which traditional churches are often followed by doing the same ol’ societally traditional prayers.  Honestly, it isn’t appropriate to stand up and say “The Emperor has no clothes” as in the children’s story when it comes to this point.  First, the Holy Spirit has to speak to your spirit about this.  Second, this is why in the Word, it teaches that every believer is empowered to lead every other one to fullness of faith.  Third, if someone proverbially sticks their foot in their mouth, the brother or sister can be gently corrected by believers they know and trust are looking out for their best and everyone be stronger in following Jesus.  This can only happen if every believer is not just allowed, but encouraged, even expected to minister to everyone else for God’s glory.

            You can email me at simplechurchminute@gmail.com.  For more info on organic church*, visit http://www.simplechurch.com/ or locally at (local website).

On the recording, at this time, it says, “house churches.”  While that phrasing is OK, to say “organic church” is better.  I comment on that in blip 94.

*What is written here is slightly different, and, I am convinced, more correct, than what I recorded in the audio version.

Simple Church Minute 25--guilt, long pastoral prayers

25—guilt and long pastoral prayers

My name is Tom; this is Simple Church Minute

            Today, I’ll cover two non-biblical, post-apostolic traditions.  The first one is the idea of feeling guilty over missing a worship service.  This tradition is a more recent one, dating back only to the Puritans.  They came to North America from England to worship as they chose.  As such, they rejected the traditions of clerical vestments, icons, ornaments, and ornate buildings.  They had their clergy write their own sermons, which came to be very long, theologically in depth pieces, although they did allow those attending to speak or ask questions, unlike most traditions.  For those of you who are not into theological precision in speeches, this was boring.  Since they were both church and state at the time, they fined or put into stocks persons who missed the Sunday sermon.  They also had the Calvinist idea of acting solemn, as part of a realization of how far one was from God’s perfection.

            The second tradition is the long pastoral prayer.  The Puritans developed a tradition of allowing spontaneous prayer.  This eventually changed into a long pastoral prayer—and by long, it could be over an hour long.  Now, within some parts of Judaism, there is a tradition of a public prayer that is somewhat like a review of the major occurances of the Old Testament, but whether that somehow influenced them is not clear.

            Jesus, in Mark chapter 12 verse 40, was talking about the ways of the scribes, and one of his criticisms was, “and for a pretense, make long prayers.”  The important word is pretense.  If one or a group has much to pray about, fine.  But God wants our worship to be in spirit and truth, not pretense, not acting.  Hypocrite was the Greek word for “actor.”

            You can email me at simplechurchminute@gmail.com.  For more info about organic church*, see http://www.simplechurch.com/ or (local website).

On the recording, at this time, it says, “house churches.”  While that phrasing is OK, to say “organic church” is better.  I comment on that in blip 94.

Simple Church Minute 15--Elizabethian pastoral prayer

15—Elizabethian pastoral prayer

NOTE:  I originally wrote a segment for each of the 61 points Frank Viola and George Barna make in their book, Pagan Christianity, about traditions in the institutional church not based on scripture.  After writing it, I chose to not include this segment merely as I felt that in wouldn’t be an interesting radio commentary.

My name is Tom; this is Simple Church Minute

            Methodism in the 18^th century was the immediate spiritual spiritual descendant of the work of British evangelist John Wesley.  This movement introduced some emotion to worship.  People were invited to sign loudly and fervently.  In this respect, they were the predecessor to frontier revivalism, the holiness movement, and the Pentecostal/ charismatic branch of the church.

            They had a pastoral prayer in their worship that covered all the different facets of public prayer.  The notable feature was that it was always done in the dialect the King James Version was written in, with “thee”, “thou”, and “thy.”  Now, this dialect wasn’t around for long; anyone who has read Chaucer and Shakespeare in school realizes that the English language changed greatly in only a couple hundred years, and the English of the KJV is somewhere in between.  When the KJV was released in 1611, the language was already close to archaic in wording.  Nonetheless, in some parts of the church, this dialect lives on in how pastors speak out these formalized prayers, with the trend more dominant in more traditional organizations.  Strangely, on the opposite side is a small branch of independent churches, often with leaders of minimal training, which insist that the King James Version is the only appropriate version of the Bible to use.  The Bible was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek.  In all languages, many words do not have exact equivalents in other languages, and languages change in some ways over time.  We can believe God inspired the original writers to say what they did in languages that had just the right nuance.  We must also recognize that some translators over the years have been influenced by who was paying them, sometimes intentionally, sometimes subliminally.

            You…