At one point I preached a sermon series on prayer and as part of the series I preached 8 sermons on the Lord’s Prayer. To emphasize that prayer as a model I used it to shape the liturgy for the 8 weeks. So the first week the sermon was in the section on “Our Father in Heaven,” and so on. At the end of the congregatonal prayer the congregation was invited to pray each line that was in bold print and underlined, as our rendition of the Prayer.
It was a lot of work to design, but is now something I hope to do at some point in each congregation I serve. It was certainly helpful for me in gaining appreciation of this prayer as a ’shaper’ of prayer. Interestingly enough though, when from that point on we made the words of this version the one we occasionally ‘recited’ in worship, a few people expressed that they missed the standard version.
Here is the (a bit cleaned up) file for the last Sunday of that series if you’d like to see it.
Lord’s Prayer Liturgy sample in pdf format
The whole thing is really a mashing of the Heidelberg Catechism Q & A’s, thoughts and translation from a commentary by Andrew Kuyvenhoven and the words Eugene Peterson uses in the Message, trying to get a simpler contemporary rendition together.
