When Politics Makes Christians Lonely…
This prayer was offered by Rick Barry as part of our June 19 Faith and Politics Prayer Call. You can sign up for future calls at the bottom of this page.
God,
Your church is supposed to function in ways that are distinct from the world, but we are too often just as individualist in our thinking, isolationist in our behavior and lonely in our hearts as the world around us.
We pray, especially today, for all of the ways that political loneliness has infected and afflicted members of your church.
We pray for brothers and sisters whose relationships have broken over political commitments.
We pray for parents and children who no longer share important parts of themselves with each other, or no longer talk entirely.
We pray for faithful Christians who have been exiled from their home churches over commitments to justice and righteousness in our civic life.
We pray for those who are struggling in their faith and feel cut off from you or cut off from your body because of the way politics has seemed to change the character of the communities that taught them the faith in the first place.
Your word promises that you hear the cries of the afflicted and the abandoned. You set the lonely in families. You weave people together into a new people group. You seat enemies together around a common table. And you teach people to sing in harmony, even in disparate tongues.
Let us be that to our brothers and sisters.
In the midst of a political culture that sets us at odds with one another, teaches us to fear one another, to ignore one another, to protect us from one another, teach us to love one another instead. At a time when pundits and commentators are rightly frightened about the implications of loneliness in our politics, make your church—your gathered body!—a powerful rebuke to the isolation, loneliness, and social separatism of our time.
Make us part of that work. We will be clumsy at it, because it's new to us. But through the teaching rebuking and training in righteousness of your word; through the still, small voice of your Spirit; and through the fellowship of our siblings in the Lord, we ask you to help us persist, secure in the knowledge that the clumsy and imperfect work that gets started now will be brought to completion by the author and perfecter of our faith on the day he returns.
It is in his name and for his glory we pray.
Amen.
Rick Barry is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Christian Civics.
Throughout the 2024 election season, the Center for Christian Civics will be leading twice-monthly prayer calls, featuring guided prayer for the complex relationship between faith and politics in a polarized era. To get reminder emails and login links about these calls, fill out the form below!