I can remember the moment I first understood the nature of the pastoral prayer. I was a teenager, and our family spent that summer in the Highlands of Scotland, worshiping with a small Free Church congregation. On our first Sunday, to my great surprise, when the pastor began to pray, the entire congregation rose to its feet. I had expected to sit, listless and half-listening, while the pastor prayed. But, by getting out of my seat, I suddenly knew I was doing something.

There, standing before the throne alongside the gathered saints, I finally understood what every pastor of my life had meant by “Let us pray.” As a congregation, we were not dozing in our pews while someone else prayed. We were not taking notes while the pastor offered a God-directed lecture. We weren’t passive, bored, or idle. On our feet, we were the church, and we were praying.

Years later, researching my book on corporate prayer, I came across an older writer who quaintly asserted that, during the pastoral prayer, the congregation members should be praying “every whit as heartily as [the] leader.” Like those Highlanders standing at attention, when the pastor leads, we must pray.

But it’s this very truth—the pastor is the mouthpiece of the entire praying assembly—that makes the pastoral prayer such a weighty undertaking. In the pastoral prayer, the words of one man become the words of a hundred, and the petitions of every heart rise as one before the Lord. That’s why, in times of national crisis or division, the pastor must resist the temptation to pray for his own whims and instead pray with the knowledge that he brings everyone with him, and that he is bound to give voice to what God himself would have his people pray.

In Caleb Morell’s recent and fascinating article, we glimpse the crisis of the American Civil War and the resulting struggle of pastors to lead their people well in prayer. Morell quotes from primary source documents on both sides of the conflict and then draws out three lessons for pastors in today’s divisive and tumultuous times. In the end, he reminds us that “Pastoral prayers can be perilous for pastors. But what greater privilege is there than to lead God’s people in magnifying God’s sufficiency by asking of him?”

As we seek to magnify God in our own churches, I hope his words will be helpful to pastors—and to the congregations who pray heartily alongside them.

In Christ,