liturgy on Prayer Life

When one prays the hours, one is using the exact words, phrases, and petitions that informed our faith for centuries. . . . We are using the exact words, phrases, and petitions that were offered just ...

Prayer Service for Peace in Israel and Palestine This service is designed as an evening, outdoor prayer vigil using handheld candles. Feel free to modify the order of worship as needed, including...

Training a worship leader (or "liturgist") is a vital task within any faith community. As my friend and former Senior Pastor, Dr. Mark Roberts puts it, the worship leader or liturgist "...

When one prays the hours, one is using the exact words, phrases, and petitions that informed our faith for centuries…We are using the exact words, phrases, and petitions that were offered just an hour...

Your Easter morning services should do two things: put on a rip-roaring celebration for the most joyful event in history and invite newcomers and Christmas-and-Easter attenders to join in, building a ...

A Blue Christmas Service is offered especially for those hurting during the holidays. It’s often offered December 21, the longest night of the year. Some come because they are mourning the death of...

The foundations of my Christian faith were laid in mid-20th century fundamentalist churches. For introducing me to Jesus, I am grateful. However, over the years I have had to cast aside and recover fr...

Independence Weekend Prayer for Unity VOICE ONE — Psalm 133 How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the b...

The Sunday before Easter is Palm Sunday, commemorating Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and beginning Holy Week. Even less-liturgical churches often dip a toe into the liturgical waters, distributing palms...

What is a Benediction?  The word benediction comes from Latin and literally means “good word” ( bene [good] + dicere [to say, speak]). Put another way, a benediction is a blessing ...

Years ago, during a vacation in New Hampshire, Jonathan and I climbed Mount Washington, which is notorious for erratic weather. It can change from sunny and warm to snowing in a few hours. The wind is...

We are again in a moment of intense anger, fear, and sorrow. We've been here too often, lately. In September 2025, prominent activist Charlie Kirk was killed in front of a crowd in Utah. This ca...

What is Liturgy? I know that not all of us come from so-called “liturgical” traditions, but all of us do use a liturgy of sorts. Liturgy is a compound Greek word meaning “public work” that is associa...

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good t...

(Leader) Heavenly Father, we come before you to give thanks as we near the end of 2020 a year of confusion, conflict, CoronaVirus, quarantine, and shut down, But what does it even look like to be trul...

Prayer for Veterans A Prayer for Veterans ©2020 Lisa Ann Moss Degrenia. Updated 11/4/2025.

Liturgical time raises our sights above the dailiness of life to the essence of life.

Inspired by the Book of Lamentations Most Heavenly Father, We lament the coupling of our allegiance to Christ as Lord with a trust in Caesar, as if the halls of power, the chambers of government, a...

The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive ...

I believe there is no liturgy in the world, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more of a solid, scriptural, rational piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England. And thoug...

So, you’re staring at your laptop screen. It’s later at night than you’d like to admit. The Word document is blank and that vertical bar is flashing, daring you to write the first word. You need to st...

As in ancient Israel, thanksgiving had a liturgical form in the communities of early Christians. In talking about tongues, Paul says that one who does not know the tongue cannot join in the “Amen” at ...

[People] need to find words that can reconnect them with each other. That is the gift of good liturgy, yeah. We're not talking about fluffy stuff. We're talking about real life for people arou...

The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don't have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed to attain a spiritual mental sta...

We aren’t just conversing with each other when we recite the Psalms antiphonally or responsively. We are talking to God, too. Reminding one another and God of his promises and our complaints. We are w...

The task of liturgy is to order the life of the holy community following the text of Holy Scripture. It consists of two movements. First it gets us into the sanctuary, the place of adoration and atten...

Much of American spiritual life trudges through the muck of solitary spirituality. Twenty years ago, Robert Bellah described this phenomenon. in Habits of the Heart , with his now famous description ...

Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. it re-points the person praying, taking him somewhere else.

Every call to worship is a call into the real world.

[T]he liturgy helps us enter a counter-intuitive story. In an individualistic culture, the liturgy helps us live a communal life. In a culture that values spontaneity, the liturgy grounds us in someth...