“Our Father” …Oh Brother!

A little over 30 years ago as a brand-new Christian, I found myself at a “prayer meeting” held in someone’s living room. The older folks were seated on the sofa or the chairs; the folks like me with young knees were kneeling on the carpet. Everyone was taking turns praying the “Lord we just wanna” litany so common in Evangelical groups. You know, that’s the one that always goes, “Lord, we just wanna thank You now for Your goodness and mercy toward us, Lord. And Lord we just wanna praise you now that you are gonna grant us [Fill in the request here], Lord, because You know that we need this, Lord. And Lord, we know that You are gonna grant this to us, Lord, because we ask this in JESUS’ holy name. Amen.”

Whatever Evangelical church or prayer group that I visited in those days seemed to follow this exact same form of prayer with only minor modifications, depending on the skill of the one praying, and his tolerance for redundancy in repeating the word “Lord” endlessly. Every group was led by one or two of the more articulate brethren, considered “spiritual” for their ability to make long prayers artfully laced with bible verses and faith lessons, intended more to impress the others in the room than God, who presumably doesn’t require instruction in such things.

Anyway, there I was at that prayer meeting and my turn came up. Out of the blue I decided to pray the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” I began, and went through the whole thing. As I was praying with eyes closed, I heard a couple of folks shifting uncomfortably in their seats. When I finished, no one joined me in the final “Amen”. There was silence, until one of the elder members cleared his throat and interrupted the meeting to say, “It’s OK people, Michael is one of our new brothers here and doesn’t seem to know that we born-again believers don’t pray formulaic prayers.”

I took that to mean I had committed some sort of spiritual faux pas. Eager to learn the nature of my error, I asked some folks about it after the meeting. Everyone acted embarrassed for me, as if I had shown up to the meeting wearing my underwear on the outside of my pants. “It’s OK,” one or two folks assured me, “We have all done dumb things at prayer meetings before”. Finally one brother flat out told me, “We don’t pray written prayers; God only hears the prayers we offer in our own words”. This was news to me. “But, didn’t Jesus give us this prayer and tell us to pray it?” I asked. “No,” came the reply, “Jesus only meant that it should be viewed as the model for how we pray”.

Well now I was really confused! According to Luke’s account, Jesus said, “When you pray, say, ‘Our Father…’ ” There is no mention of the prayer as being a model; Jesus simply said “Pray this”. Even Matthew’s account, which records the Lord as saying that we should pray “in this manner” does not directly imply that the prayer He taught us was intended as a mere framework to guide us, especially when we take the accounts of Matthew and Luke together as a whole.

But my confusion didn’t end there. I thought to myself that even if we agreed on some ill-defined basis to take the Lord’s Prayer as nothing more than a model, I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who actually followed that model. The “Lord, we just wanna” model I heard almost everywhere bore not even a passing resemblance to the supposed model of prayer our Lord gave to us. And oh yes, if we born-again believers didn’t pray formulaic prayers, how did “Lord, we just wanna…in Jesus’ name” creep in to become the standard Evangelical formula of prayer to God?

Furthermore, I wondered what we born-again believers had against written prayers. Were not the Psalms “written prayers”? Weren’t they used by Israel and by the early Christians in their services? Don’t many Evangelicals privately pray the psalms in their devotionals at home? Haven’t many “praise bands” incorporated the Psalms into the songs they play at church? “But the Psalms are scripture,” one brother suggested to me, “They are the words of God, not the words of men”. OK, that sounded pious. But then I wondered, when we offer our own prayers at our meetings, aren’t those prayers “the words of men”? “That’s different!” he insisted, growing impatient with my endless questions. “God wants us to only pray to Him in our own words!” Summarizing what he was telling me I asked, “So God doesn’t want us to pray in the words of men unless of course they are our own words, and at the same time God doesn’t want us to pray to Him in His words, or in the words of Jesus?” I believe the conversation abruptly ended at that point.

In the years that followed I became more acquainted with historic Christianity and discovered that the strange contempt for “written prayers” so common to Evangelicals was not at all shared by our forefathers in the faith. While frequently praying to God in their own words, the ancient Christians also freely used the Psalms and certain other prayers written by holy and respected men of the faith. The early Church was also liturgical, meaning that it followed a defined structure in its worship services, which eventually was written down and standardized among the churches, together with most of the prayers that had been composed specifically for it. The liturgical structure that the earliest Christians followed was based naturally on inherited Jewish models, but developed a rich Christian content as the Church emerged from Judaism to form its own identity.

Most Evangelicals, while generally taking a stand against the idea of liturgical worship, in fact almost always follow some sort of routine structure in their services. It never occurs to them that this represents a form of liturgy, albeit based entirely on contemporary models rather than on the ancient Christian one.

Earlier Christianity’s easier acceptance of written prayers was rooted in their understanding that the Holy Spirit was the guide of the Church. The same Spirit which guided Israel in the formation of its Temple worship and various feasts was also immediately recognized in the New Testament era as the guide of the “Christian Israel” in its worship. While not equating the prayers and liturgy of the Church with the scriptures, the early Christians nevertheless recognized the same Author behind them, and received many prayers written by “holy men of old” (2 Peter 1:21) into its experience if they had gained the universal “Amen” of all God’s people. Over time the Church gained many prayers by this process, which represented God’s ongoing direction to His people and His instruction in how they ought to approach Him in Christian worship.

Evangelicals today are largely unaware of this entire period of historical development representing God’s work within His Church. They tend to see the only true historic Christianity as existing in the book of the Acts of the Apostles (Most of which they misinterpret in an effort to make the practices of the apostolic Church resemble their own as much as possible) and then leapfrog fifteen centuries or more ahead to whatever point in the Reformation aftermath that they can again comfortably identify with. Anything between those two periods of time—the great “flyover country” in contemporary Evangelical understanding—is tragically dismissed by them as “tainted by Catholicism” and therefore untrustworthy.

Such an unrealistic approach to Christian history has locked Evangelicals into a vicious cycle. Considering the historic Church to be untrustworthy, they ignore it. By ignoring it, they never learn the truth about it. They exist entirely within an historical vacuum of their own making, which is the only environment capable of preserving both their skewed views of earlier Christianity and their post-modern interpretations of scripture.

As a former Evangelical Protestant myself, I deeply understand the rationale behind this mindset. But I can also vouch that when one bravely sets it aside and engages in an unbiased study of Church history, often against the solemn warnings of fellow believers, an entirely different picture emerges than the one painted by Evangelical leaders determined to maintain their positions. “The truth shall set you free” goes the adage, and seldom is this better proven than when one learns the truth about the Church.

The history of Christianity, best understood when traced from its origins forward through time, reveals not only the schisms and departures from apostolic orthodoxy, but also that very orthodoxy itself. Every believer I know who has made such a study was shocked to learn that the Church and the true belief it embodies did not entirely disappear off the face of the earth until Martin Luther happened along, but continued healthy and intact through the entire first century and into the second, third, and fourth centuries and well beyond that even to our very day in the form of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Evangelical teaching that the Church lost its bearings after the apostolic age until being entirely corrupted by Constantine is proven by actual history to be a modern fable designed to justify Evangelical theological innovations and rejection of the Church. A study of history not only proves this, but something else as well.

A study of Church history proves that Jesus kept His promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church. The witness of the Holy Spirit can be clearly seen in the life of the Orthodox Church in every generation. The ancient liturgical worship of the Church, rooted in Judaism and filled with many Christian prayers written by holy men inspired by the Holy Spirit, reveal to us nothing less than the Mind of God in the midst of the Body of Christ. It is this which has largely become “The Abandoned Mind” in modern Evangelicalism. Seeking to reinvent the Church according to their own understanding, Evangelicals have abandoned far too much of the patient work of the Holy Spirit in God’s people, which represents their own Christian inheritance. They fail to recognize the great spiritual poverty this has brought upon them. Acting as if the only relevant work of the Holy Spirit is what happens in their lives, they fail to give proper respect to the work of the Spirit in all generations and thus, in a very real sense, oppose Him.

“The Abandoned Mind” of God must be recovered by Evangelicals if they are to reunite with their Christian heritage and the Church founded by Christ. The flap over my praying of the “Our Father” at an Evangelical prayer meeting was the catalyst that helped me begin to recognize how out of step we had fallen with the Mind of God revealed in history. When sincere Christians strongly react against reciting the very prayer which Christ Himself gave us, you have to see that something has gone terribly wrong, and Evangelical traditions have overshadowed and nullified the very testimony of God Himself.

Lord have mercy!