Welcome!

I'm the senior minister in an Anglican church where I am the only paid minister. I have been in paid ministry since 2000, when I graduated from Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia. I've worked in Sydney Diocese, Melbourne Diocese, the Diocese of Gippsland in Victoria, and now the Diocese of Grafton in NSW; and I've led services ranging from an average of 8, up to four hundred or so. If you want to know how to lead congregations of a thousand or more, this is probably not the blog for you!

I love teaching and training; love passing on the joy of being engaged in (organised) ministry, whether it's what you do in the hours you have free from family and work commitment, or it's your life's work; love seeing people take the first few tentative steps, then gather confidence, and then out-strip anything I could teach them.

In my last church there were quite a few keen beans who wanted to learn how to lead services, and I started this blog to encourage them - and others that I believed would be gifted leaders - to give it a go. Now I'm eager to encourage members of my current church to grow as leaders or discover their gifting, and I'm bubbling over with things to pass on from the past 19 and more years.

So I'm writing this as a living growing library of service leading principles, advice, and practicalities, that I can modify and update as I get wiser, and continue to learn from my own experience and other people. I plan to use it as a training resource for the people I am leading, but at the same time, I'd love it to be a resource for people I've never met, who want to have a go at leading services in their churches, Anglican or otherwise.

If there's anything on this blog that you'd like to copy and paste, feel free; if you want to print something, click on its title, then scroll to the bottom, where a 'print' button should have magically appeared.

Tuesday, 5 April 2016

4. Prayer Part 1

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Now here, I need to point out what doesn't seem to be apparent:  If you attend an Anglican church, and the services follow the ones set in the prayer book, there are prayers throughout the service.  It's a 'prayer book', right?  The old BCP is the Book of Common Prayer, ie, the prayers we pray in common, when we are gathered together.  Then there's An Australian Prayer Book, and A Prayer Book for Australia, and so on. 

 Some of the prayers are prescribed - that is, if you are following that order of service, that's the prayer you use, word for word.  They are written out in full in the prayer book and they are read out, some by the service leader, some by the congregation together.  Others are 'intercessions' - prayers prayed on behalf of someone or something else - and these are not prescribed, the prayer leader decides what to say.  

 In Anglican churches, I've several times heard people complain that their church isn't prayerful enough - maybe they mean that their church doesn't spend a lot of time praying other than the set prayers, or maybe that when people pray non-set prayers, they don't seem very enthusiastic.  And that is quite possibly true.  Sometimes I think what they really mean is that they don't feel as if they are praying when they say a set prayer, and not a lot of non-set prayers are said in their church.

 The danger of using prescribed prayers is that you can be thinking about something completely different when your lips are going through the motions.  So, as you are observing, take note of whether you get the sense that the service leader is truly praying, or whether they are just saying what they've been told to say.  Then when you are leading a set prayer, work hard at 'being in the moment' (love the jargon) - think about what you are saying, and say it from the heart.
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