Day 4 #formationFOUNDATIONS | Get to Know Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

Today's the fourth day of our #formationFOUNDATIONS series. In case you're new here, you can read more about this series or start from the beginning at sacredordinarydays.com/FF. Our goal for this series is to help you...

• LEARN about different spiritual practices that you can adopt for your own walk. You will learn how to make the most of your Sacred Ordinary Days planner or the FREE Essentials Workbook you got when you joined our newsletter list, which has all the most essential pages from the planner that we don't want anyone to miss out on.
  
  
• PRACTICE these things on a daily, weekly, and seasonal basis. You will be able to lay (or bolster up) a strong spiritual formation foundation by clearing the space for your new spiritual practices to deepen.
  
  
• SHARE your experience with people who speak the same language. You'll get to know the other members of our community, who are some of the wisest, most interesting, super fun, and most real people I know by following along on Instagram or Facebook or inside Common House, our ecumenical online community.
  
  

 DAY 4 | Get to know Common Prayer

"One Church. Praying, singing and serving together. Across traditions and denominations." That's the subtitle of Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Enuma Okoro's Common Prayer: a Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. It's about unity and community. With all of the denominations and differentiation in the Christian Church, it can often seem--or truly be--divided instead of united. But God calls us to unity. Personal devotion and communal prayer are both necessary and both attest to God's nature of being deeply intimate and also being in perfect community. Prayer is a communal practice. 

The prayers and songs in this book are designed to be prayed together, but even if you aren't physically with other people, you can be sure that others are praying with you throughout the world. They originate from the early church and mysteriously connect us with believers who came long before us. The hope is that these prayers are alive and fresh, but not new. 

The introduction to Common Prayer says, "Common Prayer helps us to see ourselves as part of a holy counterculture, a people being 'set apart' from the world around us (and the world inside us) to bear witness that another world is possible. We're invited to become a peculiar people, living into a different story and orienting our lives around a different set of values than those that are taught by the empires and markets around us. In an individualistic culture, liturgy helps us live a communal life. In an ever-changing world, liturgy roots us in the eternal..."

Since falling in love with the ways liturgies can connect us, I've used Common Prayer alongside my family and weekly small group members for a number of years now.

We have found that truth is not only received passively, as from a teacher, but also actively, as it is lived out in the context of communal prayer, gathered around Jesus. For this reason we place a great deal of importance on the idea of growth in the context of relationship. 

The daily prayers, songs, and readings in Common Prayer are structured in a responsive manner. Each day there is a phrase of prayer that is repeated throughout the liturgy. We have extracted those repeated phrases and included them at the beginning on each daily page in Sacred Ordinary Days as prayers to meditate on throughout the day. They might be prayers of praise, thanksgiving, confession, etc.

So tell us...

What are your favorite resources for prayers or liturgies? Share a photo!

Head over to Instagram or Facebook and share your post using #formationfoundations and tag us @sacredordinarydays, please! Or, join the conversation inside Common House, our ecumenical online community. 

Next week we'll jump into Week 2 of Formation Foundations where we'll focus on daily practices. We'll always share the latest blog post in the series at sacredordinarydays.com/FF when it's live. So, check there each day for the latest!

If you'd like to use the planner alongside us, you can order one today or get August for $4. You might even already have a planner, either the new Academic year or the previous Liturgical year. If not, today's the day to order yours since they just started on August 1st!