Gospel Prism

8/12/06, Saturday

The final day of WorshipGod06 began with seminars, proceeded to corporate worship, and ended with a message by Randy Alcorn. The final worship session featured a 70-voice choir comprised of conferees. This set was the briefest of the conference. It included two songs each from VoV and the Gettys and concluded with an SG classic, I Will Glory in My Redeemer. This was a fitting prelude to Alcorn’s address which was titled Worshipping God as the Source of all Secondary Joys. His presentation was queued by PowerPoint and he had many slides that he skipped over. Randy spoke on the essence of heaven. See Tim Challies for a complete summary of this session.

Speaking of Tim, he attended one of the seminars that started the day and he recommended getting an mp3 of the session. The seminar? Dr Bruce Ware’s presentation on the Trinity. Donna attended this and was highly impressed, too. Dr Ware spoke on the Trinity at CovLife the next day as well (we hung around and heard him). You can get an mp3 of his sermon there for free from the CovLife website.

I attended a seminar by Mark Mullery on Praying Publicly. This was outstanding. Mark provided a 10-page syllabus for his session. Half of the syllabus is comprised of appendices that list benedictions and doxologies from the Bible, major prayers found in the Bible and sample prayers (pastoral and responsive confession). Mark started by noting that public prayer is often used as filler but has three legitimate purposes: responding to God, bringing God’s people before Him, and teaching God’s people to pray. He polled the attendees on times we can pray publicly and stated that these were significant leadership opportunities. Using material from Isaac Watt’s A Guide to Prayer, he detailed 9 types of prayer: invocation, adoration, confession, petition, pleading, profession, thanksgiving, blessing, and amen. He offered suggestions on how to pray effective public prayers: study prayer and apply in private; plan prayer in advance; pray from Scripture; and take special care when addressing God. Before concluding with a short Q&A period, Mark listed these mistakes to avoid: don’t rebuke or correct or teach; don’t pray too long; no opinions on politics or current events.

This was a significant session for me. I am waiting to get the mp3 for review and I am working through the Watts book. I’d recommend listening to the mp3 for all who minister and pray publicly. It may be especially useful for small group and worship leaders.