Prayer for the Primates’ Meeting

Posted On : January 5, 2011 2:34 PM | Posted By : Admin  

Archbishops’ prayers for the upcoming Primates’ Meeting in Dublin

With the Primates’ Meeting only a few weeks away, Archbishops Thabo Makgoba and Phillip Aspinall have written prayers asking that God bless and empower the Primates in their “heavy responsibilities of servant leadership”.

Prayer for the Primates’ Meeting, from the Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba, Archbishop of Cape Town.

Lord Jesus Christ, you washed your disciples’ feet., and called them to follow your example. Bless the leaders of our churches as they gather at the Primates’ Meeting. As they take counsel together, give them grace to grow in prayer and fellowship, so they may bear one anothers’ burdens and share one anothers’ joys, and find mutual support in their heavy responsibilities of servant leadership.

Refresh and encourage them as they meet, and empower them to lead your people in lives of faithful worship, witness and service, that bring your redemptive gospel to this broken and needy world. Amen

 Prayer for the Primates’ Meeting from the Most Revd Phillip Aspinall, Archbishop of Australia

Gracious God, in your Son Jesus Christ you reveal the fullness of your truth and life and reconcile us to you and to each other. Grant that that this meeting of the Primates of the Anglican Communion may follow more closely your way, know more deeply your truth, and live more clearly your life.

Give the Primates grace to speak the truth in love, to listen to the voice of your Spirit and to live and proclaim your good news of reconciliation and peace for all the world. We ask this through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the way, the truth and the life and who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

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It is good that 2 of the Angican Communion Archbishops, at least, have some hopes of a useful outcome from the projected meeting of the Primates Council in Dublin.

Those Primates – mainly from the ‘GAFCON’ Provinces – who have stated that they will boycott this meeting, can scarcely blame the compliant Provinces who wish to simply ‘get on with’ the business of being in Communion with one another, that they will have no say in this important Instrument of the Communion’s deliberations of the  future of the Communion’s policies.

The fact that the Archbishops of South African and Australia (not the Abp. of Sydney who is not a Provincial Primate and who probably would have been one of the dissenters anyway) have asked for the Holy Spirit’s guidance upon this meeting, is a sign that these two Provinces are interested in the provision of an eirenic solution to the problems that exist in the world-wide Communion at this time.

Our prayers in new Zealand are being asked and I, for one, will certainly add the Primates’ Conference to my prayer list.

Father Ron Smith