Prayer Before Preaching

Pastors, when you assume the pulpit or ambo to proclaim the Gospel of King Jesus, please do not open with a prayer for yourself.^[1] It is not the time or place for such a prayer. Rather, it is the domain for confidently heralding the commissioned message. Such praying may unwittingly contribute to undermining your proclamation of the Word.

While it is true that our Lord Jesus taught “men ought always to pray” (Luke 18:1) and exhorted His disciples to “pray always” (Luke 21:36), He clearly did not intend for everyone to see and hear all prayers.[2] Jesus Himself resorted to remote and private locations for prayer in preparation for ministry. Some contexts preclude public prayer, like what Christ describes in Matthew 6:5-6 taking place among the hypocrites. There is little doubt that hypocritical self-aggrandizement also invalidates such “prayer,” exposing the person really to be “prayer to himself” in an effort to self-justify (Luke 18:9-12). Jesus exposes these Pharisaical and hypocritical motives and those who employ them.

Other contexts may likewise render public prayer inappropriate, even confusing; like, for instance, in church. The Divine Service, of course, employs several pointed and thematic prayers which enjoin the congregation. The Corporate Confession, the Collect of the Day, the Lord’s Prayer, the Great Prayer, and Post-Communion Collect are public prayers during which the Celebrant/Liturgist stands with the congregation, postured toward the focal point of the sanctuary just like everyone else. The pastor/priest hereby stands with the congregation and represents them as one of them in these orated, liturgical prayers. However, an orated prayer by the homilist in the pulpit (such as immediately precedes Gospel proclamation), finds itself awkwardly out of place. Firstly, the preacher’s posture breaks consistency with all the other prayers during the Mass/Service, now facing the congregation rather than the focal point of the sanctuary: The Altar of Presence. He prays facing them, and now, he does so aloud, not silently like in the moments prior to corporate confession. Praying aloud immediately before preaching strikes an unusually discordant tone, since he is not praying for them, with them, as one of them, but rather for himself toward them.

Let us take the most common form of pulpit prayer as our example of this misplaced prayer. It originates from Psalm 19 as nearly a full quote of verse 14: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord. Amen.” In North American contexts, this prayer is often employed before preaching, but it is neither an ancient custom, nor a universal one.

Having scoured the sermon corpora of notables ranging from the Apostle Paul, Saint John Chrysostom, Girolamo Savonarola, Johannes Geiler von Kayserberg, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and more currently Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Charles Spurgeon, none of them opened their preaching by praying a form of Psalm 19:14 or, indeed, publicly orated prayers within the pulpit whatsoever. Not even the radical reformer Thomas Münster (circa 1489-1525), for all of his enthusiasm, ventured into the practice if, indeed, there was such a practice. Records and reports of sermons prior to the nineteenth century evidence no such custom either.

Praying aloud immediately before preaching strikes an unusually discordant tone, since he is not praying for them, with them, as one of them, but rather for himself toward them.

However, once the twentieth-century Pentecostal movement gained traction, with a “worship service” complexion approximating evangelical fundamentalism, the pulpit prayer of Psalm 19:14 and others emerge with regularity, intimating a correlation between the sermon which follows and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, or a more immediate association with the Word of God as the source of authority as opposed to, say, the Office of Holy Ministry and any association it might have with an episcopal hierarchy. This is so much so that pulpit prayer before preaching becomes a hallmark of evangelicalism, that is, of Bible-believing Protestantism, yet remained unknown among Roman Catholic and Orthodox preachers, both priests and deacons. Little by little, it found a home in Lutheran and Anglican pulpits, as well.

The connection with Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism is interesting as both groups emphasize the inspirational role of the Holy Spirit upon “anointed” ministry. The supposed immediacy of the Spirit’s inspiration correlates with sermon preparation. Just like “inspired” prayers diminish the use of form prayers, so too sermons immediately “inspired” by the Holy Spirit diminish the need for sermon preparation. Sermon preparation consists of prayerful entreaty prior to proclamation. But parishioners express how this modern custom leaves them less confident in the preacher and his sermon content.

I have taken surveys at five Lutheran congregations where pulpit prayer before preaching has been the custom, limiting my sample to twenty persons at each parish, for a convenient total of one hundred respondents. The results are telling. 

• Does the preacher’s Psalm 19:14 pulpit prayer seem disjointed from the rest the liturgy?

            Yes: 60                                    No: 22                         Unsure: 18

• Does this prayer increase your confidence that the preacher is fully prepared to  preach?

            Yes: 23                                    No: 67                         Unsure: 10

• After this prayer, do you expect a prepared sermon manuscript or an ad hoc sermon?

            Manuscript: 30            Ad Hoc: 63                 Unsure: 7

• Does this prayer heighten your expectation to hear from Jesus or the preacher in his best effort?

            Jesus: 11                    Preacher: 63                Unsure: 26

According to this sampling, such a prayer sits awkwardly within the Divine Service, neither inspiring confidence that the preacher enters pulpit prepared nor that parishioners are hearing from Christ. One cannot miss the disconcerting parishioner association of such a prayer with ad hoc sermons, which tend to be evocative of Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism. What may contribute to this Lutheran parishioner thinking from the survey could be the words of Psalm 19:14 itself. It moves from a plea that God would keep the psalmist from sinful actions to, now, a prayer for the Lord to supervene the preacher’s words and thoughts so they would have a sanctifying effect of sorts on the preacher himself. The prayer never seems to leave the domain of the preacher’s person: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.” But is the sermon not for those assembled? And is the sermon the product of the preacher’s heart?

Such a prayer evidences a sense of humility and deference, a diminishing of one’s self. But this entirely misses the point of being in the pulpit. The role the homilist fills is that of Christ in His pure preaching of the Gospel. The preacher stands in the stead of Christ, as His royal ambassador imbued with authority, purposed to herald the pre-determined royal proclamation: The Gospel of God. This is why the liturgy endorses the epistolary salutation instead of Psalm 19:14 prayer: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 1:2; Galatians 1:3; Ephesians 1;2; Philippians 1:2; 2 John 1:3). Such words are directed toward the congregation as an announcement. They also associate the preacher with his ambassadorial responsibility to proclaim the great King’s Word to His subjects. These words cannot but signal confidence and set the tenor for what will be peached from Christ: Grace and peace. This message, like Paul’s epistles and the Apostle John’s letter, engenders an expectation of a prepared, carefully considered biblical manuscript, such that will also allow for some extemporaneous extrapolations. Pulpit prayer seems to work in the opposite direction, aside from its clumsy situation amidst the liturgy, bucking the rubrics of the Divine Service.

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^[1] On the opinion that preachers should preach from the pulpit, see https://www.1517.org/articles/use-the-pulpit-please.

[2] See also 1 Thessalonians 5:17, Romans 12:12, and Ephesians 6:18.