Pastors' Columns
Pastor's Pulse
Connected Christians
February 2008
“Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.” – James 5:16
We often think of prayer and repentance as intensely private and individual acts. In worship we confess our individual sins in silence. While we experience corporate prayer, for most of us prayer is usually a very private matter. This is certainly true, but it is not the whole truth. Repentance and prayer, the key practices of the Lenten season, are also actions of the community, of the Body of Christ. James speaks of prayer being “powerful and effective” in the context of confessing sins to “one another” and praying for “one another.”
We live in a world where we have fewer face-to-face encounters with people. We are surrounded by cell phones, iPods, internet connections and so on. We communicate without showing our faces (C.S. Lewis’ great book Till We Have Faces only becomes more relevant for us). The church is a community. More than that we are the Body of Christ (I Corinthians 12:12-13). We need to be in face to face contact. This certainly includes worship services but it also includes much more. Do we, in the words of James, confess our sins to one another? Do we pray for one another? All of this suggests personal contact.
The fact that we are presenting a Bible study on the internet is not intended to be a substitute for face to face connections. We all need corporate worship. We all need group prayer, group Bible study and group sharing. We plan to provide these opportunities especially during Lent. At the same time we would like to hear from you. How can we help each other be more connected as the Body of Christ?
Are you in regular contact with brothers and sisters in Christ? No one can be a Christian in isolation. We all need each other.
“We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers …” — I Thessalonians 1:2
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