Evening Prayer Services

Beginning during the height of the 2020 Covid lockdown, I have, in my role as pastor of Montreat Presbyterian Church (“MPC”), produced and electronically distributed a weekly, pre-recorded, online midweek prayer service. 

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Isolated from one another and without access to in-person worship during the pandemic of 2020, congregants and community members expressly asked for increased online pastoral contact and voiced a need for any spiritual content that church leadership could provide. In mid-2020, I produced some early, fumbling, pre-recorded prayer services, experimenting with the liturgy and struggling through the suddenly urgent need to advance, quickly, my own technological skills.

 

With the authorization of the church’s session, the encouragement of viewers, and the collaboration of the worship committee, I began producing and distributing prayer services weekly, settling by January 2022 on a weekly Evening Prayer service of less than ten minutes’ duration, emailed as a video link on Tuesday evenings.

 

In the early days of producing the services, I used various Daily Prayer liturgies from both the 1993 and 2018 editions of the PC(USA) Book of Common Worship. By early 2022, I had eliminated Morning, Midday, and Night Prayers from the rotation, and I based all the ensuing weekly prayer service offerings on the Evening Prayer liturgies (Saturday through Friday) in the 2018 edition of the Book of Common Worship. 

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Excerpted from Keith Grogg, Spiritual Theologies of Medieval Women Mystics Applied to Evening Prayer Services: Their Impact on Participants (2024 Doctor of Ministry dissertation, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA)