When Public Prayer Gets Too Personal
January 1, 2000
It happened four times in two months—in churches scattered across the continent. It made me uneasy. I attended Sunday worship with mainstream Protestant congregations in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, West Virginia, and California. In each service the pastoral prayer was interspersed with personal, intercessory prayers by worship attenders. Why did I—one who loves both prayer and populism—squirm during this form of piety? Because these prayers were overwhelmingly personal. A dear friend articulated my concern. He is facing cancer in a private part of his body. He stopped going to church because he is afraid that part of his body will be mentioned during prayer. Public prayer that fails to distinguish between the personal and the private can really hurt people. Another friend of the same generation winced when he heard his church service broadcast on the local radio station: "And now let us pray for R. who has prostate cancer and a female doctor." The invasion of privacy hurt the person being prayed for as well as embarrassing those present in the sanctuary. Prayer that is too personal goes from being "good" personal to "bad" personal in an instant. Keep public prayer public
I recognized another cause for my distaste for overly personal intercessory prayer as I left the fourth of these otherwise magnificent services of worship: no one mentioned anything truly public. All the intercessions were individual, individualistic, even. "Heal my mother-in-law who has the flu" is an important intercession. The flu is no laughing matter, as anyone who has ever had it knows. Still, why did the people of Indonesia receive no intercessions? What about currency crashes or floods or transpersonal events? Surely these rival the flu in ...
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