On Sunday, MAR 31 our church celebrated our 3rd Anniversary. Throughout this week we’ll be posting highlights from our third year together.
The simplest way to understand our theological convictions is to get to know the place where we are rooted and called: Englewood, CO. The simplest way to understand our philosophical convictions is to get to know a paradigm made up of the trajectories UP-IN-OUT. Together we are moving UP toward the Father, IN toward ourselves and each other, and OUT toward our parish, the city of Englewood.
We were only a couple of months into meeting together in 2016 when we decided to implement something we call “Prayers of the People”. These prayers were an effort to help our church move UP toward the Father. We wanted these prayers to give voice to things our congregation and city were feeling, experiencing, lamenting, and celebrating. We wanted these prayers to be borrowed and original, carefully written and genuine, wide-reaching and local, personal and corporate. The nature of these prayers was to celebrate the character of God and petition him to act in accordance with his character in the world. At the same time, we wanted these prayers to protest injustice and oppression that we see and experience around us. Through petition and protest we have used these prayers as a rally cry, a declaration from week to week that both solidifies our convictions and strengthens our relationship with the Father.
After a few different version we landed on one we really liked and we’ve used that version for over a year now. For our 3rd Anniversary we wanted to revise these prayers to include even more and to clarify some of our petition and protest. We’ve prayed this new version of our prayers together for two weeks now and we’re very pleased with how they turned out.
The hope in writing these is not just that they would be used during our Worship Gatherings. We hope these prayers are used throughout the week by our parishioners and others. Sometimes the words we come up with just don’t suffice and having something to guide us is extremely helpful as we connect with the Father through prayer.
CLICK HERE to see and use our revised Prayers of the People. CLICK HERE find other prayers we’ve written for Black History Month, in response to shootings and other acts of violence, as well as prayers for the season of LENT.
Join us on a Sunday evening sometime to see how we pray through these prayers together.