Praying as the Body: Toward an Augustinian Imagination for Corporate Christian Prayer

This dissertation is a theological exploration of liturgical prayer based on a congregational case study, one that focuses on the actual prayers of a specific worshiping community. The analysis of the prayers at The Summit Church, a congregation in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, leads to an initial conclusion: prayer times at these worship services were relatively short, focusing almost exclusively on matters related to the congregation’s mission and outreach efforts. People at Summit say that they pray a great deal, and they do—but not during corporate worship.

This dissertation interprets this seeming contradiction by drawing on two sources of cultural history. The first looks at the local history of Summit and its adoption of contemporary worship forms. The Summit Church is paradigmatic in its blending of two liturgical theologies and their sets of practices—one from the Pentecostal revival of the mid-twentieth century and the other from the Church Growth movement of about the same period. The convergence of these commitments can explain the reduction of prayer time in light of pragmatic considerations aimed at increasing service attendance.

The analysis of the congregation’s transcribed prayers reveals further connections among the prayer acts themselves and both sources of liturgical theology. The primary way God’s presence is sensed in worship is through the conversion of non-Christians, and so prayers are devoted almost exclusively to that end. The prayers themselves affirm the importance of the congregation’s commitment to mission—and its desire to increase the number of baptized Christians by proclaiming the gospel to those who have not yet accepted it—in decisions about how the church prays.

A second source of cultural history helps explain why Summit and other similar congregations have made such proclamations—and the corresponding propositional claims about God—the centerpiece of their liturgies. Catherine Pickstock’s historical reading of shifts in sacramental theology reveals that all liturgical acts, including prayer, have been altered by modern-era philosophical commitments. Specifically, Pickstock foregrounds a series of liturgical changes that have subordinated the role of the gathered body of Christ in the Western church’s imagination since the late Middle Ages. This change signals a loss of an ancient understanding of Christ’s body as comprising three mutually constitutive components: his incarnate historical body, the sacramental body, and the ecclesial body. Certain segments of Protestantism have prioritized claims about the historical body, and this has led to the kind of mission-focused liturgical praying seen at Summit.

The final section of the dissertation applies an Augustinian theology of the body to liturgical prayer. Saint Augustine’s theology of totus Christus, treated most thoroughly in his Expositions on the Psalms, offers corrections to a Western church that has lost a robust theology of the gathered body. Augustine suggests a different way of looking at the church’s role in prayer by working with the multiple interactions that the body of Christ has with its head and priest, i.e., Jesus Christ. The questions raised by looking at Summit Church thus open a way into a renewed imagination for liturgical prayers for all churches, not only Protestant, evangelical, or free church congregations. Adding an Augustinian liturgical theology to a missional emphasis like Summit’s—that is, teaching the church to pray for converts so that more voices will praise Christ and will be prayed through by Christ—is a way to enrich the prayers of the people of God.