Prayer – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

The Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas (Akron, 1921-1926)

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

I’ve been telling you that it was during his pastorate in Akron, Ohio, that Lloyd Douglas began to develop his distinctive theology, and last time I promised to summarize the message he preached during those years. Perhaps the best way to begin is to share some of the prayers he offered from that same pulpit; for, as I explained in an earlier post, Douglas believed that the church’s primary mission was to offer people a chance to worship. He felt that a lot of the racket of the street had found its way into the typical Sunday morning service, and he did what he could to “make worship worshipful” (his words).

So! Instead of following a laundry-list approach, outlining his beliefs as bullet-points, I think it would be best to begin with the things he said to God, in worship. Douglas thought that praying off-the-cuff in a church service was one of the worst things a minister could do, because it gave his parishioners the misimpression that the preacher was on a first-name basis with God. Instead, Douglas wrote out his prayers carefully and read them from the pulpit. After his death, his daughters retyped some of these prayers and collected them in a small bound manuscript volume, in preparation for publication of some of his sermons.

The first time I read them, I was surprised. Douglas’s main concern was to bring the gospel up-to-date so that people could live their faith vibrantly in the twentieth century; and yet his prayers were extremely conventional, using Elizabethan language (Thee’s and Thou’s). Over time, however, I realized that this was consistent with his theology. For him, God was (and is) the “sacred presence… Our Father…

Lord of the vast spaces and the unceasing years; Lord of the stars and seas, mountains and forests; Lord of all powers and energies; Lord of the nations; and Lord of our lives who are Thy children.

Make us conscious of Thyself at this hour. Give us understanding that Thy Spirit is in this place, and recreate our desire to live according to Thy will…
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, n.d., p. 4. In Douglas Papers, Box 3, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

I do notice, however, a slight but significant change in his prayers over the years, so I’ll come back to them from time to time in this blog, showing you how his developing theology revealed itself in the things he said to the Divine.

Here are some of the prayers he offered during his years in Akron (1921-1926). One parenthetical note: in both his sermons and his prayers, Douglas used commas and hyphens as breath marks. Since these things were written for use in the pulpit, he punctuated them in a way that would indicate where to pause, although this often meant that he did not follow standard rules of punctuation. Although this habit makes reading his works tedious at times, it also gives us an indication of how his sermons and prayers sounded to the people in the congregation, which is valuable information for later generations like us. I usually remove the distracting punctuation when I share a quotation with you in these blog posts, but today I’ll leave it in, so that you can hear these prayers as he actually uttered them:

Tell us – Our Father – WHY we live.

For a little while we breathe, we love, we strive, we fall – our little orbits change. We seem the helpless children of an inexorable Fate – blindly driven, and very tired – homeless strangers, eager to find a better way for our weary feet.

And then Thou comest with Thy Fatherly assurance that we are Thy children. And, into the sad, bitter chalice of our years, we find love poured – with all its smiles and tears – and, quaffing this, we are content.

So lead us on – triumphant in this faith – until our rest be won.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 7: Akron, Ohio, October 16, 1921.

Some of the words rhyme (years/tears; on/won), and if you follow the breath marks, there’s a kind of poetic cadence. That’s characteristic of Lloyd Douglas the Preacher. He wrote poetry and often included these creations at the conclusion of his sermons. His aesthetic faculties were finely tuned. Nor is this just a stylistic remark that I’m making, for it tells us something important about his theology. He believed that God should be approached with awe and that our prayers should be expressive – and even beautiful.

He offered this prayer over a New Year’s Day communion service:

We invoke Thy divine blessing upon this sacred feast, spread before us, symbolic of the Love and Courage and Faithfulness of Him whose name is graven upon our hearts.

Do Thou bless these symbols of His deathless affection for our souls [long hyphen]

And give them power to renew within us an abiding consciousness of Thy presence, and to restore unto us THE JOY OF THY SALVATION.

And in this newfound strength may we go forth, into the privileges and responsibilities of THE NEW YEAR – prepared for whatever may betide us – whether of joy or of pain.

May we thus meet all the experiences of life, with smiling faces and exultant hearts – walking confidently and fearlessly as Thy children.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 8: Akron, Ohio, January 1, 1922.

Through these prayers, we begin to see glimpses of some of Douglas’s most heartfelt beliefs. We see reverence for a God who is bigger than we can imagine; a passionate devotion to Christ; the importance of connecting with Them here and now; and what follows naturally from forming and maintaining such a connection (strength, joy, peace, confidence).

The following prayer was offered at an Easter service, if I’m not mistaken:

Liberate our souls, today, Our Father, by the power of that LOVE that dwells in the heart of Christ.

Unloose our chains, by the Influence of that TRUTH that makes men free.

Banish our fears of DEATH by the LIGHT that streams from the door of HIS BORROWED TOMB.

And cause us to walk, unafraid, the road that leads to liberty and life, following the nail-pierced footprints of him who knows the way – along the plain paths of daily duty, and through the shadowed valleys, and up the steeps of pain – confident that we shall AT LENGTH reach the hillcrest, and FACE THE DAWN.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 9: Akron, Ohio, April 16, 1922.

In the next blog post, I’ll dive more deeply into his beliefs, but these prayers give us a good jumping-off point. He believed in a God of majesty, yet also believed that God was available to every one of us, to guide and empower us “along the plain paths of daily duty, and through the shadowed valleys, and up the steeps of pain.” This last prayer is perhaps the best, most concise summary of what he thought Christian life was all about (at least as of 1926):

Attune our hearts to the symphony of Thy heavenly grace, that we may evermore understand Thy will for us, in our daily lives, and realize increasingly the peace Thou wouldst have us bear in our souls.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 10: Akron, Ohio, October 10, 1926.

For a free PDF copy of the booklet, The Secret Investment of Lloyd C. Douglas, fill out the form below:

Praying from the Pulpit As If Ordering Pork Chops from the Butcher

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

In the summer and fall of 1920, Lloyd Douglas published a series of articles in Christian Century magazine called, “Wanted – A Congregation.” The series was aimed at ministers who were discouraged because they had low attendance at their church services. Throughout his life, Douglas was blessed with well-attended churches. In fact, while he was at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, the congregation voted to build a new structure because there was not enough room for the crowds that wanted to hear him. He published this series during his tenure at that church.

The passage quoted below is from the 5th article in the series: “Wanted – A Congregation, Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” published in the Christian Century on September 9, 1920:

“We preachers have become dreadfully poor psychologists. There is an instinctive heart-hunger for the mystical in worship that we have been unable to satisfy with our crude, bungling attempts at ritual and the rasping dissonances of the alleged music rendered by our untrained choirs. There has been entirely too much extemporaneous and ill-considered matter introduced into our ‘services of worship.’ Our ‘free’ pulpit prayers, for example, have been so very free that they jar unpleasantly on the sensitive ear of the naturally devout. Indeed, our public prayers are filled with impertinences that are only saved from being blasphemous by the fact that we know not what we do. We pick up disgusting tricks of addressing The Absolute in terms of a contemptuous familiarity. How often one hears preachers mouthing that raucous phrase whose vogue the reverential fail to comprehend, ‘Now, Lord, just send us’ – whatever-it-is – in the same inflection one uses when telephoning the butcher, ‘Now, Sam, just send us a few lean pork-chops, this time, can’t you? No; no sausage, today, thank you. Yes – that will be all, Sam. Thanks – very much!’

“Now, this will not do! Some of us have been wondering what is the matter with our churches; and some of us have been berating the generation for its godlessness. Many of us may find, upon investigation, that we have disgusted our potential constituency with our unwitting want of reverence. Many a sensitive man would greatly prefer to take a book of essays with him to a shady bend in the river, on Sunday morning, than attend our church; whereas his whole soul cries out for a much closer contact with the divine than he can achieve by his communion with nature. But – it is a great deal better for that man’s spiritual welfare that he should go out, Sunday morning, and watch the river, than to go to some church where the music is so ugly it positively frightens one, and the preacher talks to the Great Unseen as if he were chaffing with his next-door neighbor over the back fence. Let it be repeated – this will not do! We who have been committing these serious blunders must mend our ways!”

From “Wanted – A Congregation, Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” Christian Century, September 9, 1920, Volume 37, Number 37, pp. 14-17.

For a free PDF copy of the booklet, The Secret Investment of Lloyd C Douglas, fill out the form below:

A Prayer for Insight

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

Lloyd Douglas wrote out the prayers he uttered in worship, because he did not want to make them up on the spur of the moment. They were meant to be thought-provoking, as well as to lead the congregation in prayer. Here is one of them, reprinted in The Living Faith, p. 299:

We beseech Thee to make known to us more and more clearly each day the duties we are expected to perform if we are to fulfill our destiny. We plead for that serenity of spirit which trusts confidently that Thy will may and must and can be done on earth as it is done in heaven.

For a free PDF copy of the booklet, The Secret Investment of Lloyd C Douglas, fill out the form below: