Teleprompting prayers

There are two kinds of preachers in the world: those who write out their pastoral prayers beforehand, and those who pray extemporaneously.

Ok, so that's a bit of an oversimplification. But I've found that people (both pastors and laity) can have strong opinions one way or the other.

Those who think all prayers should be offered without preparation often argue that the Holy Spirit works best 'in the moment,' and that preachers should open their hearts to pray on behalf of the congregation in the way the Spirit directs them in a particular worship setting.

On the other hand, those who believe in written prayers tend to emphasize that the Holy Spirit works just as effectively through the kind of careful discernment that goes on in the pastor's study, as the prayer is being written with the confession, petition, praise and thanksgiving of the congregation in mind. (I also recently heard a preacher cite Matthew 6:7-15 as an argument against extemporaneous prayer, although I think that is a bad reading of that text.)

In my own ministry, I've done both. Recently, in fact. During our Holy Week services, I used a lot of written prayers, simply because there are beautiful ones out there related to the great moments of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. Because they use images and allusions from Scripture in such beautifully poetic fashion, I find that offering liturgical prayers in specific seasons of the Christian year can express the church's praise and thanksgiving better than I could ever hope to do.

But my standard practice for pastoral prayers week in and week out is to pray extemporaneously. I do that in part because my congregation pauses in the middle of worship to offer individual witnesses of praise and to lift up prayer concerns. I write notes about those testimonies of praise and prayer during the service and then incorporate them into my prayer. I have found that this allows me to pray a prayer that is more fully of the whole congregation. And it also ensures that the pastoral prayer speaks to the particular joys, thanksgivings, concerns, and petitions of the church in that given week.

I've been thinking about the issue of how we pray in worship since I read a column on Barack Obama's use of a teleprompter by the Washington Post's Michael Gerson. In his column, Gerson pushes back on those who deride Obama's dependence on the teleprompter, arguing that the "careful sorting of ideas and priorities" that written remarks reflect, whether at news conferences or in full-length speeches, is an essential part of the craft of governing.

Gerson is a former presidential speechwriter, of course. So he is hardly unbiased. But what about introducing the teleprompter to church? Sermons, even pastoral prayers, could be scrolled down a couple of screens set at covenient angles in front of the pulpit! And then we could have the best of both worlds - the appearence of extemporaneous eloquence with the grounding of a carefully crafted text.

How is it that nobody's doing this yet??