 Presbyterian Leaders’ Forum  The Presbyterian Layman Volume 32, Number 5, Posted November 11, 1999
A Message from the Moderator World Communion Sunday has come and gone and the world of Christ’s disciples and God’s children remains. One of the gifts that comes with being moderator is the opportunity to visit congregations, presbyteries, and other institutions of the church and to see the variety of ways that Presbyterian bodies are carrying out Christ’s ministry. Reading the Mission Yearbook of Prayer or some of the other church publications will keep us aware of the ways particular groups are responding, here and abroad, to God’s call to be with “the least of these,” our sisters and brothers. Few of us can pray for every ministry undertaken in Christ’s name but each of us has the privilege of praying on a regular basis for ministries of healing, teaching, feeding, visiting, mentoring, advocating, welcoming, comforting, and confronting.When the church’s witness is marred by controversy and, not infrequently, hostility, we are called to pray for adversaries and to celebrate wherever the Gospel is being incarnated in our weary, hurting, and discouraged world. Prayer will not feed the hungry or house the homeless or displaced, silence the meanness or disturb the self-righteous but it will keep us more ready to be used by God in God’s efforts to bring about a new heaven and a new earth. We cannot pray for God’s new day without seeing where and how we have fallen short in our own discipleship, where we have closed our eyes to what is so clearly set before us as a call to be Christ’s women and men in God’s world. Whether we are standing, sitting, kneeling or even lying down, whether our hands and bodies are tense with intent or relaxed and open to receive God’s word to us, whether our prayers are those someone else first uttered or born in our own minds and hearts, prayer is our privilege. Prayer is a gift from God whose heart and hands hold all whom God created and loves. God offers us, in the redemptive work of Christ, a way to stay focused and to be nurtured in seeing and sharing in God’s continuing efforts to create a new heaven and a new earth. Thanks be to God. Freda Gardner |
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