A Resource for the Season of Lent
A few months ago our church released a new tool to help our congregation read God’s word and pray together throughout the week. It’s an app called The Reformed Hours of Prayer, which organizes our communal life around seven hours of prayer, from waking to bedtime, rotating new prayers each day of the month.
A few months ago our church released a new tool to help our congregation read God’s word and pray together throughout the week. It’s an app called The Reformed Hours of Prayer, which organizes our communal life around seven hours of prayer, from waking to bedtime, rotating new prayers each day of the month. I and pastor Matt worked on it with Jon Boldt and Seth Copeland, and we continue to make small improvements to it.
As we begin the season of Lent next week Wednesday (Ash Wednesday), I’d like to offer another plug for this resource. Historically, the season of Lent is for giving renewed attention to prayer and fasting. If you’re anything like me, an existing structure and ready-made prayers help you to adopt a new practice. I’d like to tell you a bit about the app, in hopes that you will use it over the coming weeks and beyond.
Background of the app
First, why an app like this? Two key passages guided us.
One is from Psalm 119, which provides the pattern of praying seven times a day:
“Seven times a day I praise you
for your righteous rules.” (Psalm 119:164)
Another is Paul’s command in 1 Thess 5:17 that we “pray without ceasing.” Taken together, the passages show that God’s people are to canvas their days in prayer.
There is strong historical precedent for applying these passages by pausing to pray throughout the day.
Starting in the sixth century, the Benedictines built monasteries on the Rule of St. Benedict, which included eight hours of prayer daily. These monasteries basically Christianized western Europe in the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire, laying the foundation for Christendom and producing massive cultural innovations that have influenced the world to this day. These were innovations in learning, education, science, book production, agriculture, trade, and politics.
The Benedictine hours of prayer were much more elaborate and time consuming than the ones in our app, not realistic for someone with a job and a family. During the time of the Reformation, John Calvin did not want to eliminate the monastic vision of a life fully devoted to God and immersed in practices around the word and prayer. Instead, he wanted them to be simplified so that they could be worked into the life of the average Christian. He advocated a rhythm of four hours of prayer (waking, start of work, midday confession, and evening prayer). In the Reformed tradition, the emphasis has been mainly on morning and evening worship as a family.
Layout of the app
The Reformed Hours of Prayer draws on this rich liturgical tradition in its vision and execution. The prayers in the prayer app are taken from the 1903 Reformed prayer book Prayers for the Family, which itself was developed by modifying older Reformed prayers. The prayers in that book are for morning and evening worship, and are much longer than the ones in the app (roughly 500 words). We edited them down to roughly 160-word prayers that can be said more frequently throughout the day.
The seven hours of prayer borrow from the names of the monastic hours:
Matins means “of the morning” (waking prayer)
Lauds means “praise” (this is the morning devotion of Bible reading and specific prayer)
Terce means “third” (9am, which is the third hour from sunrise at 6am)
Sext means “sixth” (noon, following Calvin’s practice which we use for confession)
None means “ninth” (3pm, Lord’s Prayer)
Vespers means “evening” (this is a devotional time for the family after dinner)
Compline means “completion” (bedtime prayer before sleep)
Each of these “hours” offers an opportunity to commune with the Lord, individually and with others. Matins is the first thing you do when you wake up—pray. Sext is a midday confession, changing daily to move through the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments in a month. These prayers help to shape our community’s ethical life around God’s law. Lastly, Compline is the prayer before going to bed. My wife and I have our alarms set to go off at 9pm (we are usually in bed by that time). At the sound of the alarm, we pause our show-watching or reading to say a prayer together. It helps us to pause and pray about any other pressing matters from the day. I’ll address the other hours later in the article.
Although the app is mainly organized around the hours of prayer, we built additional features for promoting Bible reading, family devotions, and community prayer.
Features of the app
Bible Reading Plan
The main two hours of prayer in the app are Lauds (morning devotions) and Vespers (dinner devotions). One of the key features in Lauds is a Bible reading plan for us to follow together as a church. It is our hope that every member of our church would be regularly reading through the whole Bible. We know that different people may have different histories with Bible reading, so we have created an option to read through the Bible in one year or two years.
The Bible reading plan this year began on September 15. As you follow the reading plan, you can check off passages once they have been read, and the app keeps track of missed passages. The main reading plan is Monday-Friday. Saturday has only Psalms and Proverbs, while Sunday is left open for worship at church and any make-up reading that needs to happen.
The Bible reading plan alternates between Old Testament and New Testament books. I have carefully chosen the readings (not simply based on chapter breaks) so that the readings are roughly the same length every day.
For those families that have children at Trinity Classical School, the school is following the two-year plan, so parents can follow along with what their kids are reading. With this new plan students at TCS will read through the whole Bible six times during their years at the school K-12.
Prayer Cards
Another feature in the morning devotions during Lauds is the Prayer Cards. I have used paper prayer cards for my own prayer life for the last few years. The app now gives an opportunity for building a prayer card stack on your phone.
My experience is that building prayer cards takes some intentional time (1-2 hours) and some planning. I would recommend using the web app to build these (at liturgy.dev) so you can use your computer and time with a keyboard instead of on your phone. You can assign prayer cards to each day of the week, and the app provides a built-in structure using the acronym ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication). Here are some suggestions of what to fill in on each of these prayer cards.
Adoration: For each day, begin by praising God for one of his divine attributes (holiness, love, power, wisdom, sovereignty, justice, etc.). Maybe include a verse with each attribute (e.g. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts…” Isaiah 6:3).
Confession: For each day, choose a begetting sin to bring before the Lord to ask for his cleansing and transformation (anger, lust, laziness, gossip, etc.). Again, consider including a verse for each sin that you are confessing (e.g. “...for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” James 1:20).
Thanksgiving: For each day, choose something to tell the Lord you are thankful for (work, church, family, friends, God’s provision, the Holy Spirit, etc.).
Supplication: For each day, list people who you want to be regularly praying for on that day (family members, non-Christians, church leaders and ministries, missionaries, cultural issues, your dreams for the future, etc.)
I can’t tell you how many answers to prayer I have experienced in doing prayer cards like this over the past several years.
One other great feature about the Prayer Cards in Lauds is that you can make “Community” prayer cards. While the ACTS cards are private, and only you can see them, when you make a Community card everyone in the church gets that card added to their stack so they can pray for you. You can specify how long you want people to pray (e.g. 3 days), and after that time, the card will disappear from everyone’s phones.
Dinner Devotions
From my perspective, Lauds is the first hour of prayer that I would love to see incorporated into the life of our congregation. But after Lauds, Vespers is a close second. The purpose of Vespers is to equip church members to have devotions at their dinner tables. In particular, I want to equip dads as the spiritual leaders of their families to lead their children.
The Bible calls parents to be the primary disciplers of their children, and the way it instructs them to do that is by utilizing important hours of the day:
“And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut. 6:6-7).
Included in these hours are waking and going to bed. But also: “when you sit in your house,” which I would take to mean when you sit down for a meal, specifically dinner.
A note on dinner devotions: I think one barrier for many fathers in training their children from the Scriptures is that they feel like they don’t know what to do. They didn’t have a father who taught them the Bible, and so they have never seen it done. They might think they don’t know the Bible or theology well enough to teach their children.
Well, the purpose of Vespers is to give a very simple plan for fathers. There is a song for a family to sing before dinner to the tune of Tallis’ Canon (my family sings this every night):
Lord Jesus be our holy guest
Our morning joy, our evening rest
And with our daily bread impart
Thy love and peace to every heart.
After dinner, the Vespers section has a Bible passage to read out loud and a written prayer. I have selected 365 of the most important Bible passages in the Bible that correspond to the days of the year. The passages are short (generally not even a whole chapter). If a child grew up hearing these passages/stories year after year, over the course of their childhood they would gain a pretty good overview of the main themes of the Scriptures.
A suggestion for best use: When I read these passages with my family, I usually make sure everyone has a Bible in front of them. (You can buy very inexpensive hard back versions of the ESV Bible on Amazon. It is nice to have a stack of Bibles handy around the house.) If someone is having dinner with us, even if they are a non-Christian, I’ll make sure they have a Bible, too. I find that many non-Christians are interested in reading the Bible and talking about it provided they are not going to be lectured or pressured into doing anything.
Before I read the passage, I remind everyone, “After I read this passage, we are going to go around and everyone will say a verse that stuck out to them.” They don’t necessarily have to say why it stuck out to them.
Afterward, I read aloud the written prayer. Sometimes I will just read the prayer, or give an option for people to add some “popcorn prayer” to the end—simple, more personal prayers that everyone in the family can add to the written prayer.
The reason I explain all of this is because I think it is very simple and really doable for any parent. It might take 10-15 minutes. If this small discipline can be introduced into the life of a family, it will have a profound spiritual effect on everyone.
One of the ways I think the Reformed Hours of Prayer is different from other daily office resources is that it is simple. You don’t have to make decisions. Here is a short, doable thing.
I have been using the app in my own personal life, and it has greatly helped me pray more with my wife and friends, and to lead my family more into devotions at the dinner table.
I am praying that the Lord uses it to bring the liturgical patterns of Sunday morning into the rhythm of the rest of our weeks—individually and with our families. Actually using this app will take some discipline and commitment. So, in that sense I don’t think it is easy. But, with the Spirit’s help, it is doable. On one of my prayer cards for our church I have listed “Liturgical Culture”—and my hope is that this app helps to answer that prayer for our community.
