from Mennonite Central Committee. Let us continue to hold the people of Japan in our prayers. God of healing and mercy, we come before you with our hearts filled with grief as we see the devastation in Japan. We pray that your presence would be felt by those who are grieving, who are injured, who…
Today’s worship piece is small. As you may have seen, I’ve been putting a lot of my worship planning energies into tonight’s Ash Wednesday service. Today’s piece is an offertory prayer that we will likely use throughout Lent. ~Blessings Gracious God, through our offerings of worship, of time, of money, we seek to make space…
**You can find a more recent Ash Wednesday service here. Next Wednesday, March 9, is Ash Wednesday. Here is the service I have put together for my congregation. As always, feel free to use any of this material and adapt it for your own context. I always appreciate a note from those who find my…
So after I posted the prayer of confession this morning I dug into the text (Matthew 5:1-12) and read several blogs and articles about the Beatitudes. I now realize that I got it wrong. Jesus does not call us to do all of that stuff in the Beatitudes. Jesus pronounces blessing on those for whom…
This is a responsive prayer of confession based on Matthew 5:1-12. The assurance of pardon is based on 1 Corinthians 1:30. The intent is that the leader speaks the plain text and the congregation speaks the bold. Italicized words are for all. Prayer of Confession Gracious God, we come before you to confess that we…
Writing words for liturgy is one of the joys of my life. I often write (or heavily adapt) calls to worship, prayers, even the occasional hymn, for the Sunday morning worship services at Peace Mennonite. It’s partly that I love to write them, and partly that I’m pretty picky and often can’t find the perfect…
If you look at the photo of my “Praying Women” notebook from yesterday’s post, you will see a ripped part of a page tinted purple. I’ve got a detail here that you may or may not be able to read. It’s part of a dictionary page that contains the word “prayer.” Cute, right? The poet…
My second entry on this blog was about my practice of using a prayer notebook. My first notebook was decorated with a post-it note on which I scrawled the word “Prayer.” That notebook is now full, and I’m moving on to a more artsy notebook for 2011. My first idea was to use the images…
God of new life, God of life made new, We begin this new year as we ended the last– embraced by your spirit of love your presence of peace your gentle power. We leave behind the old year in the knowledge that Whatever we have done in the service of selfish desire; Whenever we have…
You might say I’m a bit of a prayerbook junkie–a free-church pastor who loves deep liturgy. Also, I should add, an embarrassingly undisciplined person who needs all the help I can get when it comes to the spiritual essentials of daily prayer and Bible-reading. Just before Thanksgiving I received my pre-ordered copy of a new…
Spacious Faith 