pilgrim people

Another reason for praying the Lord's Prayer in public worship every week is that it gives us continuity with the historic Christian church. As we look at the liturgies (orders of worship) of the historic Christian church, we find that the Lord’s Prayer has almost always been a regular part of the worship service in the patristic, medieval, and Reformation eras.

For some, the weekly practice of praying the Lord’s Prayer evokes frightening images of Roman Catholic ritualism. But we should remember that this is an historically Protestant practice. In all of the liturgies of the Reformation – the liturgies drafted by Martin Bucer (1539), John Calvin (1542), Thomas Cramner (1552), John Knox (1556) as well as others – the practice of praying the Lord’s Prayer was included as a regular part of the divine service. Like the Apostle’s Creed and the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer was not deleted from the service by the reformers. In reforming worship, they sought to remove superstition and idolatry, but they held fast to those things that they believed were biblical and useful, not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Instead, they sought to maintain the biblical practice and instruct Christians on the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer through useful catechisms which were written, published and used for the benefit of the people.

Moreover, the Reformers not only found this practice to be biblical, but also, like everything they included in the divine service, they found evidence of this practice in their study of the ancient church fathers. Whole expositions and treatises on the Pater Noster (Lord’s Prayer) appear in the writings of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian and others. The Reformers sought to maintain the continuity of worship in the church, passing down to future generations the good and biblical practices of previous generations.

This wisdom continued in the seventeenth century with the Westminster Assembly’s Directory for the Public Worship of God, in which we find these words: “And because the prayer which Christ taught his disciples is not only a pattern of prayer, but itself a most comprehensive prayer, we recommend it also to be used in the prayers of the church.” In the Reformed tradition, this practice of praying the Lord’s Prayer in public worship has continued down through the ages up to the present day.

Sadly, however, this is not the case in many evangelical congregations today. Influenced by the revivalism of people like Charles Finney (1792-1875), much of the modern church has abandoned useful, historic practices in cavalier fashion. The fact that so many evangelical churches have jettisoned the custom of praying the Lord’s Prayer in public worship reveals the “chronological arrogance” (to borrow a term from C.S. Lewis) prevalent in our contemporary culture.

We must be careful, however, not to conform ourselves to that way of thinking, but instead recognize the wisdom of those saints from generations past who, in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ, made diligent use of this model prayer. May we too, as disciples of Christ, pray this prayer in faith and allow it order and give shape to our communication with our heavenly Father.