© 2018 by Paul Marxhausen All Rights ReservedScore
Comments: About the time our worship leadership was endorsing a greater use of musical elements in our church's liturgy, one of our team found this amazing video from The Brilliance. Prayers of The People
It puts a traditional series-of-petitions based prayer time with congregational responses into a contemporary musical idiom, and it works . . . well, brilliantly. We immediately began using "Prayers of The People" song in our own services. I was inspired to experiment with this format and wrote "Hear Our Prayer", concluding it with a spoken Lord's Prayer.
In practice, we have three of our worship leaders share a petition: at present,they write these in advance, which has given them a chance to use gifts of writing and intercession. We then include a spot for the officiating Pastor to pray to the immediate concerns of our congregation.
As yet another option in our time of prayer, I also revisited a Kyrie I wrote, "In Peace", and before the final "help, save, comfort and defend us" line, we leave space for the pastor to share two petitions.
This approach to corporate prayer has been transformational. Our pastors and people testify they are entering more deeply and unreservedly into their prayers. And as with our greater use of music in liturgy in general, this helps the service flow and reduces the amount of "stop, stand, and recite".