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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.

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 difficulty.

Yet in all of these services, prayer focused on medical issues like arthritis, cancer, and flu while omitting spiritual or international concerns.

Their absence points to a kind of selfishness in prayer. The irony is deep. When we pray for our ailing mothers-in-law, we are trying to be unselfish. And we are failing by lack of proper context.

Another reason for my distaste is the attention getters. In each service, there was one person or more who just talked too long. He or she was not calling attention to the power of God to intercede but to the power of personal pain. Pious exhibitionism is no better than any other kind.

The fact that L., who has severe arthritis, had a good day on Tuesday, a bad day on Wednesday, and saw the doctor on Thursday is simply not of wide enough interest to merit observation during public worship. Any of us who suffer from arthritis know how deeply we need God to survive it. Public mention in such detail, though, does not invoke God so much as offend others. Those who suffer in private have as much guarantee of God's presence as those who suffer in public.

Public exhibitionism about private pain is not prayer: it is not addressed to God so much as addressed to a human crowd for human sympathy.

Writer Annie Dillard sums up the problem we face. We don't want prayer to be impersonal so much as we want it to be appropriately personal.

"During the long intercessory prayer, the priest always reads 'intentions' from the parishioners. These are slips of paper, dropped into a box before the service begins, on which people have written their private concerns … 'for a baby safely delivered on November twentieth, we pray to the Lord.'

"Suddenly the priest broke in and confided to our bowed heads, 'That's the baby we've been praying for the past two months. The woman just kept getting more and more pregnant!'

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