God here’s a prayer for the church
The messy, institutional church
The one that is dying
The one that is full of too many rules and regulations
and buildings
and other things
Here’s a prayer for this greater church
That I grew up in
and love, and still think
can transform things
I have seen a million churches
God
And through these imperfect vessels
I have witnessed
tears
births
Children giggling in pews
and holy silences
“I don’t worry about the church”
I say God,
And you know,
that most days
I actually mean it
I can love this imperfect thing
even as it is changing to something new
Here’s a prayer for the church
that raised me
and is changing into something
unrecognizable
like a new dawn after a storm
like a movement
Here’s a prayer for church
a thing that happens
in parking lots
breakfasts
phone calls and hugs
May we not get caught up
in “saving it”
That was never our job anyway
And instead catch glimpses of it along the way
I pray
Amen.
Feel free to use/share/adapt with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta “KatyandtheWord”
Author: katyandtheword
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. She now works at Capital CFO plus as the Non Profit Director. All opinions expressed on this blog are her own and do not reflect those of Capital CFO plus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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