Blue Knights Chaplain's Corner
There are a lot of voices out there today saying a lot of things. Recently I received a request to sign a petition from the American Center for Law and Justice. They said that Chaplains in our United States military are being reprimanded for ''using overtly Christian language'' in public settings. Since my brother is a 15 year veteran Army Chaplain I asked him to give his personal response to this issue. For those of you who follow this sort of thing you might find his response both thought provoking and eye opening.
Keep on Keep’n on!
Chaplain Dean L. Jackson
15 year veteran
Army Chaplain Keith A. Jackson gives a personal response to the ACLJ petition request
“This will be more than the “few lines” you wanted, but I think the issue is important enough to warrant a thorough response. I’ll warn you up front that my response will contain some fact, but it will be mostly opinion, and it will reflect a perspective you’re unlikely to hear among most evangelicals familiar with the issue.
The ACLJ’s petition is just one strand of a larger jumble of issues that have entangled some politically-oriented evangelical groups and some military chaplains. I disagree with the agenda of these groups and chaplains on philosophical and theological grounds. I question the effectiveness of their tactics to win people to Christ, and I think their strategy will backfire and destroy some outreach opportunities. So far, the Navy and Air Force chaplaincies have been more directly affected by their influence, but Army chaplains have also been influenced, and I suspect that our branch will eventually reap the consequences of their agenda.
Since at least the 1950s, the Army has worked to build a civil rights-oriented, secular-minded, pluralistic institutional environment. The Army chaplaincy led many of the programs that built the Army into what has become one of the fairest, equal-opportunity institutions in the world. A lawsuit in the early 80s, challenging the constitutionality of the Army chaplaincy, also prompted senior Army leaders to examine the role of chaplains and further refine policies and procedures that would help chaplains avoid constitutional controversies. During that same 50-year period, the Navy and Air Force chaplaincies were not able to mature within institutional environments that were nearly as constructive or as fair. Different service attitudes and visions for ministry within those services resulted in Navy and Air Force chaplaincies that are much more theologically and philosophically competitive and contentious.
Within this atmosphere, some Navy and Air Force chaplains have appealed to the influence of external religious groups to help them fight against their service’s policies or their chaplaincies’ practices. In the interest of winning short-sighted ideological struggles, some members of the Navy and Air Force chaplaincies have invited outsiders to define parameters for ministry and design programs of ministry. The ACLJ petition you asked about is the most recent example of that appeal for outside help. Although this current petition was prompted by Air Force chaplain blunders at the Air Force Academy, I can recall a similar and perhaps related situation in the 1990s when several Navy evangelical chaplains appealed to outside evangelical groups during a lawsuit those chaplains had initiated against the Navy. The chaplains charged that they were being discriminated against by chaplains from mainline denominations, that their ministries were being restricted, and that they were not being promoted.
As that Navy case gained momentum, and outside evangelical groups began to weigh-in on the issues, one Navy chaplain claimed that he was facing such severe restrictions that he had been prohibited from praying “in Jesus’ name.” In response, several groups began to encourage chaplains to always pray “in Jesus’ name”. It wasn’t long before the act of concluding prayers “in Jesus’ name” emerged as a kind of “bona fides” for proving a chaplain’s evangelical credentials. Praying “in Jesus’ name” became an indicator of the chaplain’s purity of faith. Chaplains who always concluded their prayers in “Jesus’ name” were members of the “fellowship of the unashamed.” In the minds of many, if a chaplain concluded his prayer with some other ending, it signaled that he wasn’t “born again” or that he had compromised his faith in order to get promoted.
The U.S. military does not and will not (either now or ever in the future) prevent a chaplain from praying according to the dictates of his own conscience or according to theological tenets of his faith tradition as long as he is expressing that prayer among people who are voluntarily subjecting themselves to his spiritual leadership. In a service, at a Bible study, at a prayer meeting – wherever – a chaplain can pray however he wants as long as the people in attendance have a choice about being there. The proposed Air Force policy being petitioned won’t change that.
As a chaplain, I enjoy more freedom of content in the sermons and prayers I conduct in chapel than my civilian counterparts experience in their civilian churches because the people who attend come voluntarily, respect my pastoral authority, and have no expectation of launching a church power struggle or pastoral coup. No one in the government, in my congregation, or on my board can control what I preach or how I pray – as long as I’m doing it among parishioners who are attending my service voluntarily. The new Air Force policy won’t change that. However, the military does not offer chaplains a captive audience, and it does not intend to force people to listen to a chaplain’s attempts to evangelize through public prayers at mandatory attendance events.
Military funerals and memorials are confusing for some chaplains and even more enigmatic for military outsiders. As far as the military (and American culture) is concerned, the funeral is the family’s event. Who speaks and what they say is entirely up to the family to decide in consultation with the funeral participants and funeral directors they select. It is the family of a deceased military member, not the Pentagon, that decides if the funeral will include military honors, if it will include a military chaplain’s participation, and if so, then what that chaplain should say or do.
Memorial ceremonies and memorial services, on the other hand, are military unit events. They are planned and conducted by the deceased military member’s military unit. Units seldom conduct both a ceremony and a service for a deceased soldier. The commander decides whether to conduct a ceremony or a service based on what he thinks the deceased would have preferred, and what he thinks would be better for the unit.
Memorial ceremonies are non-religious military ceremonies that can mandate soldier attendance. They usually include eulogies, remarks by the commander and the deceased’s peers, a prayer and meditation by the chaplain, and military honors (a 21 gun salute and taps at a minimum). Commanders make them mandatory attendance events because they see value in having their entire unit turn out to honor the deceased, and in giving unit leaders an opportunity to contextualize the loss, and to reorient the entire unit to resuming its military mission.
Memorial services, on the other hand, are military services that can not mandate attendance. Sometimes they look just like a funeral without the presence of the deceased’s body, other times they look just like a military ceremony, and sometimes they have their own distinctive components that the unit finds meaningful. They are similar to memorial ceremonies, but may include a few more religious or otherwise non-military components. There are many reasons why a commander may choose a service over a ceremony, but most of his reasoning is somehow related to his desire to make it a voluntary event, or his determination to allow a controversial feature to be included in the program.
Since the secular, military unit conducts both these events, the wise chaplain will apply some discernment as he prepares his portion of the memorial. He will craft his remarks and prayers to reflect a deep respect for the deceased, and a broad sensitivity to his spiritually pluralistic audience. Most commanders also look to their chaplains to help all of the memorial participants develop appropriate components for the event and to ensure that nothing bizarre or problematic is included in the memorial.
Evangelical chaplains who may view funerals as evangelistic opportunities should be careful not to use military memorial ceremonies and services as a chance to extend salvation invitations. Hindu attendees at a memorial ceremony conducted for a Hindu soldier would have a legitimate reason to protest a “come to Jesus” prayer and appeal performed by a Christian chaplain. I can’t imagine that a Christian attending the memorial of a Christian soldier would think it appropriate for a Muslim chaplain to lament the loss of the soldier’s soul because he wasn’t a Muslim and then, conclude his remarks with an invitation for attendees to embrace the Prophet of Islam. We would be outraged, and yet that is the exact inconsistency at stake in this current issue.
I question the motives and ministerial tact of any chaplain who insists that he must always pray an evangelistic prayer, “in Jesus’ name”, whenever he is invited to pray at a secular event that is made up of military personnel who don’t have a choice about being there. That kind of behavior will prompt one of three results: it will unnecessarily cause resentment and rejection of Christ’s message by someone in attendance who is not ready to listen, it will cause leaders to stop inviting chaplains to offer public prayers, or it will cause lawyers to prohibit chaplains from performing public prayers altogether.
What is being disputed is not what chaplains can do among members of like faith, but rather what access and influence do chaplains have among people who have a different faith, or who have no faith, or who have no interest in faith, or who have an interest in eliminating the influence of faith. I cast my vote in favor of restricting the narrow-minded chaplains who want to force an “off-the-rack” style of “one-size-fits-all” evangelism on people that they don’t even know how to befriend. The “good news” doesn’t sound like good news when it is unwelcome news. I’m convinced that a relationship with God is a “designer faith.” It takes time, it takes mutual identification, it takes love, and above all, it must be a custom fit.
We don’t need to squeeze “all the Gospel” into our every utterance. We can trust the Holy Spirit to work in the hearts of spiritually inquisitive people and link the sound bites we’re permitted to utter at opportune times. On my most recent trip to Iraq, I met with an American officer who has never been to church. This person, whom I had never met, had heard me pray (not a “come to Jesus” prayer concluded in Jesus’ name) at a mandatory attendance event sometime last year. Apparently the Holy Spirit got some mileage out of something I said because now, a year later, this officer was still wrestling with some spiritual implication of one of my statements. We talked about God, sin, and salvation for three hours, and at the conclusion of our conversation this person said, “I never trusted ministers to be fair and open minded about the kinds of questions I had. I would never have talked to a minister about these things if I had not heard you pray last year.”
I wonder if the evangelical leaders drafting these petitions have ever had the opportunity to pray at a mandatory attendance event. I wonder if they know what it is like to be legally mandated to attend a supposedly secular, civil event that includes an unadvertised, controversial religious feature. I expect that most of them would protest if their faith group became a minority and members of their organization were unwittingly subjected to a mandatory exposure of the proselytizing efforts of non-Christian chaplains through sermons or prayers. The evangelicals pushing these types of petitions may be prominent ecclesiastical leaders, but I suspect that they lack a balanced understanding of the broader secular context within which many of us routinely operate.
Perhaps more importantly, they don’t seem to understand the social and ethical dynamics involved in ministering effectively and with integrity to members of a totalizing institution. In light of that, I question the validity of their efforts to draft petitions and try to lead chaplains in the direction of ill-advised cultural and regulatory conflicts. I wonder how often these leaders are invited to perform ministerial functions within their secular communities. I wonder if they know how to establish spiritual rapport with leaders or members of a secular community. Just because they may have squandered the goodwill of the people in their own communities does not mean that they have earned the right to demand opportunities to promote anti-Christian resentment in other communities. I am troubled by the efforts any religious organization that wants to force legislation that will either result in a constitutional showdown through which we will all lose, or that will reduce the occasions at which chaplains will be asked to participate.
Several years ago I decided to analyze what made some prayers offensive and others provocative. I began by looking at the Bible to see how prayers are addressed and concluded in scripture. That examination surprised me because the prayers didn’t start and end the way I had expected. I noticed that prayers in the Bible address God in a variety of ways. One of the most common addresses is, “Sovereign Lord,” but I have rarely, if ever, heard an evangelical prayer begin with that phrase. At the same time, it occurred to me that although one of the most common forms of address among evangelicals is the opening, “Dear Jesus,” there is no Biblical precedent for beginning prayers that way. Similarly, there are no Bible prayers which conclude in Jesus’ name. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus did promise his disciples that he would do whatever they asked in his name, and he twice said that the Father would give whatever they asked in Jesus’ name. But when he gave them his most famous lesson on “how to pray,” he did not tell his disciples to conclude prayers in “Jesus’name.” I began to wonder if when we insist on always praying in Jesus name, we are not so much acting out of obedience as we are trying to conjure up some kind of incantational authority. Perhaps it is the “abracadabra” of evangelical formulas.
As I continued with my study, I realized that there are differences between private prayers, personal prayers, public prayers, and corporate prayers. We risk offense when we pray ignorant of those differences or when we confuse them. God encourages me to pray my heart to him but challenges me to engage my mind when I do. The private prayer is obvious; it is the prayer I pray privately. It may be personal or it may be relational. It may be praise, it may be petition, and it may be about God’s goodness, my desires, or someone else’s needs. Private prayers are between me and God – no one else. I can and should pray my heart to God when I pray privately, but when I pray publicly I assume additional, awesome responsibilities.
The public prayer may be more confusing because there are two types: the corporate prayer prayed on behalf of the assembly, and the personal prayer prayed publicly. The corporate prayer is the most restrictive because it assumes that the person praying is praying on behalf of the congregation and that they are in agreement with him. It uses first person plural pronouns and assumes some degree of theological concurrence. I frequently hear people attempting to pray corporate prayers in public even though they have a mixed audience of believers and unbelievers and even though many people in attendance have never signaled any degree of spiritual concurrence with the person praying.
When a chaplain attempts to pray a corporate prayer at a public, secular event, and concludes it “in Jesus’ name”, he typically incurs the resentment, if not wrath, of many in attendance. On the other hand if he prayers a clearly personal prayer but never attributes his words or faith to the people he is praying before, then his audience tends to be much more congenial, even forgiving. In some cases he may even be able to get away with praying a personal prayer in Jesus’ name if his prayer has made it clear that he is not praying a group prayer. Personal public prayers need to make it clear that the person praying does not assume he is praying for the audience even though he may be praying about the audience. I’ve observed that most public prayers try to be corporate prayers even when a corporate prayer is not welcome. These prayers assume too much like-minded faith and theology and people often resent that. The personal prayer that sounds like the person praying is rallying God to “gang up” on the audience is the most commonly rejected public prayer offense.
But this praying “in Jesus’ name” is not the heart of the matter. The bottom line is this, there is a sizable element within the American church that advocates an “evangelism of momentum” and for them, the military is “key terrain.” What I mean is that for many evangelical groups, evangelism is largely a matter of cultural conquest and dominance. According to such groups, as long as the religious ball is rolling in the right direction, it is the duty of Christians to keep it moving in that direction. These groups believe that if Christianity can gain a dominant foothold in culture or politics – in any of a society’s systems and organizations – then it is the Christian’s duty to exploit that foothold and prevent territorial incursions by other competing ideologies. This view advocates an “as much as we can get away with” ethic of religious dominance. Its advocates may cringe at the notion of an Islamic teacher leading their children in a Muslim prayer or in reciting the Shahada, but if Christian teachers in public schools can “get away with” leading their students in Christian prayers, then “more power to them!” These groups believe that the military is perfect for this kind of “evangelism of momentum” because it celebrates a history that has been dominated by Christian values and traditions, it offers “insider” ministerial positions to evangelicals who want to learn its system, and it promises to deliver the members of its totalizing institution as a potentially captive audience.
If evangelical ministers want to assert a prophetic voice within their community, they need to learn discernment. We must know how to read our audience. We can’t talk to a secular audience like we talk to fellow believers. A different context begs for different content and different conduct. Unfortunately, many evangelical church leaders don’t seem to understand that. Perhaps it is no coincidence that they rarely have a secular audience. “
Keep on Keep’n on!
Chaplain Dean L. Jackson
15 year veteran
Army Chaplain Keith A. Jackson gives a personal response to the ACLJ petition request
“This will be more than the “few lines” you wanted, but I think the issue is important enough to warrant a thorough response. I’ll warn you up front that my response will contain some fact, but it will be mostly opinion, and it will reflect a perspective you’re unlikely to hear among most evangelicals familiar with the issue.
The ACLJ’s petition is just one strand of a larger jumble of issues that have entangled some politically-oriented evangelical groups and some military chaplains. I disagree with the agenda of these groups and chaplains on philosophical and theological grounds. I question the effectiveness of their tactics to win people to Christ, and I think their strategy will backfire and destroy some outreach opportunities. So far, the Navy and Air Force chaplaincies have been more directly affected by their influence, but Army chaplains have also been influenced, and I suspect that our branch will eventually reap the consequences of their agenda.
Since at least the 1950s, the Army has worked to build a civil rights-oriented, secular-minded, pluralistic institutional environment. The Army chaplaincy led many of the programs that built the Army into what has become one of the fairest, equal-opportunity institutions in the world. A lawsuit in the early 80s, challenging the constitutionality of the Army chaplaincy, also prompted senior Army leaders to examine the role of chaplains and further refine policies and procedures that would help chaplains avoid constitutional controversies. During that same 50-year period, the Navy and Air Force chaplaincies were not able to mature within institutional environments that were nearly as constructive or as fair. Different service attitudes and visions for ministry within those services resulted in Navy and Air Force chaplaincies that are much more theologically and philosophically competitive and contentious.
Within this atmosphere, some Navy and Air Force chaplains have appealed to the influence of external religious groups to help them fight against their service’s policies or their chaplaincies’ practices. In the interest of winning short-sighted ideological struggles, some members of the Navy and Air Force chaplaincies have invited outsiders to define parameters for ministry and design programs of ministry. The ACLJ petition you asked about is the most recent example of that appeal for outside help. Although this current petition was prompted by Air Force chaplain blunders at the Air Force Academy, I can recall a similar and perhaps related situation in the 1990s when several Navy evangelical chaplains appealed to outside evangelical groups during a lawsuit those chaplains had initiated against the Navy. The chaplains charged that they were being discriminated against by chaplains from mainline denominations, that their ministries were being restricted, and that they were not being promoted.
As that Navy case gained momentum, and outside evangelical groups began to weigh-in on the issues, one Navy chaplain claimed that he was facing such severe restrictions that he had been prohibited from praying “in Jesus’ name.” In response, several groups began to encourage chaplains to always pray “in Jesus’ name”. It wasn’t long before the act of concluding prayers “in Jesus’ name” emerged as a kind of “bona fides” for proving a chaplain’s evangelical credentials. Praying “in Jesus’ name” became an indicator of the chaplain’s purity of faith. Chaplains who always concluded their prayers in “Jesus’ name” were members of the “fellowship of the unashamed.” In the minds of many, if a chaplain concluded his prayer with some other ending, it signaled that he wasn’t “born again” or that he had compromised his faith in order to get promoted.
The U.S. military does not and will not (either now or ever in the future) prevent a chaplain from praying according to the dictates of his own conscience or according to theological tenets of his faith tradition as long as he is expressing that prayer among people who are voluntarily subjecting themselves to his spiritual leadership. In a service, at a Bible study, at a prayer meeting – wherever – a chaplain can pray however he wants as long as the people in attendance have a choice about being there. The proposed Air Force policy being petitioned won’t change that.
As a chaplain, I enjoy more freedom of content in the sermons and prayers I conduct in chapel than my civilian counterparts experience in their civilian churches because the people who attend come voluntarily, respect my pastoral authority, and have no expectation of launching a church power struggle or pastoral coup. No one in the government, in my congregation, or on my board can control what I preach or how I pray – as long as I’m doing it among parishioners who are attending my service voluntarily. The new Air Force policy won’t change that. However, the military does not offer chaplains a captive audience, and it does not intend to force people to listen to a chaplain’s attempts to evangelize through public prayers at mandatory attendance events.
Military funerals and memorials are confusing for some chaplains and even more enigmatic for military outsiders. As far as the military (and American culture) is concerned, the funeral is the family’s event. Who speaks and what they say is entirely up to the family to decide in consultation with the funeral participants and funeral directors they select. It is the family of a deceased military member, not the Pentagon, that decides if the funeral will include military honors, if it will include a military chaplain’s participation, and if so, then what that chaplain should say or do.
Memorial ceremonies and memorial services, on the other hand, are military unit events. They are planned and conducted by the deceased military member’s military unit. Units seldom conduct both a ceremony and a service for a deceased soldier. The commander decides whether to conduct a ceremony or a service based on what he thinks the deceased would have preferred, and what he thinks would be better for the unit.
Memorial ceremonies are non-religious military ceremonies that can mandate soldier attendance. They usually include eulogies, remarks by the commander and the deceased’s peers, a prayer and meditation by the chaplain, and military honors (a 21 gun salute and taps at a minimum). Commanders make them mandatory attendance events because they see value in having their entire unit turn out to honor the deceased, and in giving unit leaders an opportunity to contextualize the loss, and to reorient the entire unit to resuming its military mission.
Memorial services, on the other hand, are military services that can not mandate attendance. Sometimes they look just like a funeral without the presence of the deceased’s body, other times they look just like a military ceremony, and sometimes they have their own distinctive components that the unit finds meaningful. They are similar to memorial ceremonies, but may include a few more religious or otherwise non-military components. There are many reasons why a commander may choose a service over a ceremony, but most of his reasoning is somehow related to his desire to make it a voluntary event, or his determination to allow a controversial feature to be included in the program.
Since the secular, military unit conducts both these events, the wise chaplain will apply some discernment as he prepares his portion of the memorial. He will craft his remarks and prayers to reflect a deep respect for the deceased, and a broad sensitivity to his spiritually pluralistic audience. Most commanders also look to their chaplains to help all of the memorial participants develop appropriate components for the event and to ensure that nothing bizarre or problematic is included in the memorial.
Evangelical chaplains who may view funerals as evangelistic opportunities should be careful not to use military memorial ceremonies and services as a chance to extend salvation invitations. Hindu attendees at a memorial ceremony conducted for a Hindu soldier would have a legitimate reason to protest a “come to Jesus” prayer and appeal performed by a Christian chaplain. I can’t imagine that a Christian attending the memorial of a Christian soldier would think it appropriate for a Muslim chaplain to lament the loss of the soldier’s soul because he wasn’t a Muslim and then, conclude his remarks with an invitation for attendees to embrace the Prophet of Islam. We would be outraged, and yet that is the exact inconsistency at stake in this current issue.
I question the motives and ministerial tact of any chaplain who insists that he must always pray an evangelistic prayer, “in Jesus’ name”, whenever he is invited to pray at a secular event that is made up of military personnel who don’t have a choice about being there. That kind of behavior will prompt one of three results: it will unnecessarily cause resentment and rejection of Christ’s message by someone in attendance who is not ready to listen, it will cause leaders to stop inviting chaplains to offer public prayers, or it will cause lawyers to prohibit chaplains from performing public prayers altogether.
What is being disputed is not what chaplains can do among members of like faith, but rather what access and influence do chaplains have among people who have a different faith, or who have no faith, or who have no interest in faith, or who have an interest in eliminating the influence of faith. I cast my vote in favor of restricting the narrow-minded chaplains who want to force an “off-the-rack” style of “one-size-fits-all” evangelism on people that they don’t even know how to befriend. The “good news” doesn’t sound like good news when it is unwelcome news. I’m convinced that a relationship with God is a “designer faith.” It takes time, it takes mutual identification, it takes love, and above all, it must be a custom fit.
We don’t need to squeeze “all the Gospel” into our every utterance. We can trust the Holy Spirit to work in the hearts of spiritually inquisitive people and link the sound bites we’re permitted to utter at opportune times. On my most recent trip to Iraq, I met with an American officer who has never been to church. This person, whom I had never met, had heard me pray (not a “come to Jesus” prayer concluded in Jesus’ name) at a mandatory attendance event sometime last year. Apparently the Holy Spirit got some mileage out of something I said because now, a year later, this officer was still wrestling with some spiritual implication of one of my statements. We talked about God, sin, and salvation for three hours, and at the conclusion of our conversation this person said, “I never trusted ministers to be fair and open minded about the kinds of questions I had. I would never have talked to a minister about these things if I had not heard you pray last year.”
I wonder if the evangelical leaders drafting these petitions have ever had the opportunity to pray at a mandatory attendance event. I wonder if they know what it is like to be legally mandated to attend a supposedly secular, civil event that includes an unadvertised, controversial religious feature. I expect that most of them would protest if their faith group became a minority and members of their organization were unwittingly subjected to a mandatory exposure of the proselytizing efforts of non-Christian chaplains through sermons or prayers. The evangelicals pushing these types of petitions may be prominent ecclesiastical leaders, but I suspect that they lack a balanced understanding of the broader secular context within which many of us routinely operate.
Perhaps more importantly, they don’t seem to understand the social and ethical dynamics involved in ministering effectively and with integrity to members of a totalizing institution. In light of that, I question the validity of their efforts to draft petitions and try to lead chaplains in the direction of ill-advised cultural and regulatory conflicts. I wonder how often these leaders are invited to perform ministerial functions within their secular communities. I wonder if they know how to establish spiritual rapport with leaders or members of a secular community. Just because they may have squandered the goodwill of the people in their own communities does not mean that they have earned the right to demand opportunities to promote anti-Christian resentment in other communities. I am troubled by the efforts any religious organization that wants to force legislation that will either result in a constitutional showdown through which we will all lose, or that will reduce the occasions at which chaplains will be asked to participate.
Several years ago I decided to analyze what made some prayers offensive and others provocative. I began by looking at the Bible to see how prayers are addressed and concluded in scripture. That examination surprised me because the prayers didn’t start and end the way I had expected. I noticed that prayers in the Bible address God in a variety of ways. One of the most common addresses is, “Sovereign Lord,” but I have rarely, if ever, heard an evangelical prayer begin with that phrase. At the same time, it occurred to me that although one of the most common forms of address among evangelicals is the opening, “Dear Jesus,” there is no Biblical precedent for beginning prayers that way. Similarly, there are no Bible prayers which conclude in Jesus’ name. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus did promise his disciples that he would do whatever they asked in his name, and he twice said that the Father would give whatever they asked in Jesus’ name. But when he gave them his most famous lesson on “how to pray,” he did not tell his disciples to conclude prayers in “Jesus’name.” I began to wonder if when we insist on always praying in Jesus name, we are not so much acting out of obedience as we are trying to conjure up some kind of incantational authority. Perhaps it is the “abracadabra” of evangelical formulas.
As I continued with my study, I realized that there are differences between private prayers, personal prayers, public prayers, and corporate prayers. We risk offense when we pray ignorant of those differences or when we confuse them. God encourages me to pray my heart to him but challenges me to engage my mind when I do. The private prayer is obvious; it is the prayer I pray privately. It may be personal or it may be relational. It may be praise, it may be petition, and it may be about God’s goodness, my desires, or someone else’s needs. Private prayers are between me and God – no one else. I can and should pray my heart to God when I pray privately, but when I pray publicly I assume additional, awesome responsibilities.
The public prayer may be more confusing because there are two types: the corporate prayer prayed on behalf of the assembly, and the personal prayer prayed publicly. The corporate prayer is the most restrictive because it assumes that the person praying is praying on behalf of the congregation and that they are in agreement with him. It uses first person plural pronouns and assumes some degree of theological concurrence. I frequently hear people attempting to pray corporate prayers in public even though they have a mixed audience of believers and unbelievers and even though many people in attendance have never signaled any degree of spiritual concurrence with the person praying.
When a chaplain attempts to pray a corporate prayer at a public, secular event, and concludes it “in Jesus’ name”, he typically incurs the resentment, if not wrath, of many in attendance. On the other hand if he prayers a clearly personal prayer but never attributes his words or faith to the people he is praying before, then his audience tends to be much more congenial, even forgiving. In some cases he may even be able to get away with praying a personal prayer in Jesus’ name if his prayer has made it clear that he is not praying a group prayer. Personal public prayers need to make it clear that the person praying does not assume he is praying for the audience even though he may be praying about the audience. I’ve observed that most public prayers try to be corporate prayers even when a corporate prayer is not welcome. These prayers assume too much like-minded faith and theology and people often resent that. The personal prayer that sounds like the person praying is rallying God to “gang up” on the audience is the most commonly rejected public prayer offense.
But this praying “in Jesus’ name” is not the heart of the matter. The bottom line is this, there is a sizable element within the American church that advocates an “evangelism of momentum” and for them, the military is “key terrain.” What I mean is that for many evangelical groups, evangelism is largely a matter of cultural conquest and dominance. According to such groups, as long as the religious ball is rolling in the right direction, it is the duty of Christians to keep it moving in that direction. These groups believe that if Christianity can gain a dominant foothold in culture or politics – in any of a society’s systems and organizations – then it is the Christian’s duty to exploit that foothold and prevent territorial incursions by other competing ideologies. This view advocates an “as much as we can get away with” ethic of religious dominance. Its advocates may cringe at the notion of an Islamic teacher leading their children in a Muslim prayer or in reciting the Shahada, but if Christian teachers in public schools can “get away with” leading their students in Christian prayers, then “more power to them!” These groups believe that the military is perfect for this kind of “evangelism of momentum” because it celebrates a history that has been dominated by Christian values and traditions, it offers “insider” ministerial positions to evangelicals who want to learn its system, and it promises to deliver the members of its totalizing institution as a potentially captive audience.
If evangelical ministers want to assert a prophetic voice within their community, they need to learn discernment. We must know how to read our audience. We can’t talk to a secular audience like we talk to fellow believers. A different context begs for different content and different conduct. Unfortunately, many evangelical church leaders don’t seem to understand that. Perhaps it is no coincidence that they rarely have a secular audience. “
posted by Pastor Dean at 7:27 PM
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