Holy and Triune God,
Father who makes, Son who mends, Spirit who breathes on dust until it stands up and sings,
we come to you this day not with a program, but with a people.
We bring before you the churches who walk alongside us in this fellowship.
You know them better than we do.
You know their steeples and their storefronts,
their fellowship halls that smell of burnt coffee and good casseroles,
their sanctuaries with creaky pews and faithful saints.
You know their names. You know their addresses.
You have numbered the hairs on their heads, and the leaks in their roofs.
So make them flourish, Lord.
Not as the world counts flourishing, by size or splash or spectacle,
but as you count it: by faithfulness, by fruit,
by the long obedience of ordinary Tuesdays.
Plant them like trees by streams of water,
that yield their fruit in season,
whose leaves do not wither,
even in the dry years. Especially in the dry years.
Lord of the harvest, raise up leaders.
Go into the pews and the youth rooms and the church kitchens and tap someone on the shoulder,
the way you woke young Samuel in the night.
Call them by name until they answer,
Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.
And give the rest of us the wisdom to notice
when you are calling someone we have overlooked.
For the pastors of these churches, we pray for eyes.
Open their eyes as you opened the eyes of Elisha’s servant,
to see the hills full of horses and chariots of fire,
to see that the Kingdom of God is not a rumor but a reality,
already pressing in at the edges of every potluck and every prayer meeting.
Deliver them from the temptation to become managers of religious goods.
Give them a gospel that is not advice but announcement,
not good views but good news,
not a moral improvement plan but the mighty act of your holy love at the cross.
And give them courage, Lord, for the trail is narrow.
It is narrow, and it is uphill, and some days it is lonely.
When the crowd heads for the wide road and the easy answer,
steady their feet.
When they are tired, and they will be tired,
let them hear the footsteps of the One who walked this trail before them and is walking it with them still.
For the congregations, we pray for love. Not a thin love.
Not the greeting-card kind.
We pray they would know the width and length and height and depth of the love of Christ, a love that surpasses knowledge and still insists on being known.
Batter their hearts, Triune God.
Break through the polite reserve and the quiet fear,
until they are overwhelmed by a love they did not earn and cannot lose.
And because no church is an island, entire of itself,
make each of them a gift to the place you have planted them.
As you told your people in Babylon,
let them seek the welfare of the city, and pray for it,
for in its welfare they will find their own.
Let them be good neighbors in the full and holy sense of that word.
Let them be the kind of people the neighborhood would miss
if they ever went away.
For the children, Lord, we pray for joy.
Let them love to be in your house.
Let them run down the center aisle as if it belongs to them, because it does.
Let them know the names of the saints, and let the saints know their names.
May they grow up suspecting, deep in their bones,
that the people of God are their people,
and that the table of God has a seat with their name on it.
For the elderly, we give you thanks.
They are the ones who planted trees whose shade they never expected to sit in.
And now, look, they have become the shade.
Grant them integrity as they cast it.
Let their years ripen into wisdom and not into bitterness.
Let them bless what they will not see finished.
And when their strength fails, remind them
that their worth was never measured by their strength.
And for all who lead, lay and ordained, young and seasoned,
we pray for the meaning of a call.
We ask not only that they walk worthy of the calling to which they have been called, but that they would find the calling worthy of their one and only life.
Let them wake up some ordinary morning and know,
with a quiet and unshakeable gladness,
this is what I was made for.
Now hold these churches, Lord, in the hollow of your hand.
When they succeed, keep them humble.
When they fail, keep them hopeful.
And when they are weary, bring them back again to the cross,
where your holy love has already done what most needed doing,
and where the whole Church is made new.
We pray in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
One God, now and forever.
Amen.
This conversation was originally published on Trygve Johnson’s Substack, Kingfisher Study, and is republished here by the PreachFor Foundation. Read the original conversation and subscribe to the Kingfisher Study.
