Prayer in Worship

Take a moment to consider the things that you do in your worship service every week. Why is that? Who is making those decisions and why? Is it tradition? Is it a comfort zone? Is it the demand to perform? To have something new and fresh? We could spend a lot of time discussing these things that I would call “micro-worship” issues: things that are small and quickly altered for good or ill.

Now take a step back and un-focus the details. What do you do in your worship service? Teaching? Music? Offering? Prayer? Worship is the act of giving glory to God, responding to his many awesome attributes. All of the things we do in our services reflect that, but most of all prayer because the nature of prayer is worship. How then can we expect to plan the details of a service without first having bathed everyone and everything involved in the baptism of earnest prayer?

Every great movement among God’s people from Adam to present day has begun with honesty and absolute devotion in prayer. Often times this has only happened after a historical period of great difficulty. The exodus of Israel from Egypt and the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain and the United States respectively come to mind. God moves when his people pray:

“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

– 2 Chronicles 7:14

The entirety of our worship is dependent on and comprised of our prayers. Without that kind of preparation our services are empty of meaning and we may as well be singing “Carry on my wayward son…” every Sunday. No matter what your role is in the congregation or on stage this week, set aside a time to pray for the service, those planning it and those who need to be there. Try planning a service without any music or a service full of prayer and songs without any preaching. Be open to going where you have never gone and then leading your people there. Here are a few quotes on prayer:

“We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there’s nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all. Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don’t want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of ‘good time’ is seldom in sync with ours.”

– Oswald Chambers

“In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

– John Bunyan

On-the-Go Vocal Conditioning

Have you ever wished for more time on Sunday morning when you have to get yourself and your family ready for church? When you know there’s just not enough time to warm up properly and five minutes in the shower just isn’t going to cut it? There are many tricks of the trade for a speedy warm-up but none of them quite prepare you like sitting down to your piano and vocalizing.

One solution is to simply wake up earlier. Trust me, I just groaned with you. So what is better than singing with your CDs on the way to church? I know I do that anyway, so what’s to stop us from making sure that time is used to warm up? Better yet what if that time actually strengthened our voices?

I’d like to introduce you to Steve Bowersox’s Vocal Aerobics: A Complete Fitness Program For Your Voice. Steve has compiled his years of worship leading experience with graduate level pedagogy into an amazing package of four CDs filled with fun, upbeat vocalizing tunes.

This is a great way to keep your Sunday afternoon vocal exhaustion away for good! Not to mention that something like this is slightly less annoying to anyone who might otherwise avoid riding in the car with you.