A Few Things You Could Pray For

A Few Things You Can Pray For
1 Kings 8:31-40

I just had a phone call from the rector of the church where I am to preach on Sunday. It will be Pentecost, and I thought they were asking me just because they wanted a guest preacher for that festival, but she had apparently forgotten, or forgotten to tell me, that the church is also celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its moving from being a mission to being a parish (the time when it had ceased needing financial support from the diocese and became able to support itself financially). In a sense she now wants the church to move from being a parish to being a mission—that is, to being outward-looking in mission. That (she told me) will be the theme of the church’s prayers on this Sunday. Surely that is a great theme for a church’s anniversary celebration, and hardly a prayer God could resist..