The Pastor in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #2): Ministry to People Who No Longer Need a God

“Nothing is more fundamental to religion than prayer. . . . Martin Luther declared that religion is ‘prayer and nothing but prayer.’ The nineteenth-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote that ‘to be religious and to pray—that is really one and the same thing.’ And Schleiermacher’s contemporary, the German poet Novalis, called pray

The church is the house of ministry because it is a place of prayer. The pastor prepares his people for ministry by teaching them to pray, by creating space for his people to pray for others and be prayed for. We receive the being of God through giving and receiving ministry. Prayer is the most directed, embodied way to live out of the disposition

For all the tension we feel in the secular age, and its making of divine action opaque, prayer simply but profoundly directs the pastor’s attention back to divine action.

A more faithful—and realistic—option is to simply, but profoundly, teach people to pray, so that instead of buying up their immanent attentions, we can together as a community take on a broader purview that is open to see the movements of divine action coming in and through the encounter of persons in ministry.

This cultural observation blindness Taylor has called “the immanent frame.” We all live inside this constructed frame that imposes levels of attention that make divine action questionable, even for those of us who would never define ourselves as atheists. We

in a post-Durkheimian age religion would be completely severed from people’s conceived history, fading into one’s individualized and completely buffered sense of the self as a completely self-chosen identity.

In a paleo-Durkheimian time, there is no divide between the functions of the social, political, and religious life. They are all the same, so embedded that they’re basically one.

But the pastor can, as a primary element of his vocation, help his people be open to God arriving, even in his immanent frame.

When our lives are no longer completely embedded in the religious social practice and political organization of the ancien régime, what it means to be American or British is to identify with the nation. It is to have part of your identity squarely rest on a collective historical national identity