It is something of a truism that seminaries are not great at teaching preaching.   Thinking does vary on this: some believe that preachers cannot be taught, simply improved; others that you can take someone who cannot preach and make him a preacher.  What is certain is that any student who simply relies on the preaching experience he has in the seminary classroom will be inadequately prepared for the preaching ministry.   Seminary preaching needs to be supplemented with experience in the local church, at the old folks home etc.

Yet there is another thing that is not done well at seminary, something which is rarely noticed and which is consequently something of a dying art: pulpit prayer.

In fact, pulpit prayer should be a vital part of the worship service.  It is at those moments that the pastor has the task of leading the people into the very presence of God.  This is an awe inspiring task, not to be undertaken lightly.  Such leading should be clear, suffused with biblical allusions and shaped by biblical thought patterns.  It should be built on the foundation of a solid grasp of the mediation of Christ and should reflect that in its content. 

Often Protestants concentrate so much on the sermon or the singing as the contact point between God and the congregation that we forget the importance of prayer.  Yet corporate prayer is surely a means of grace (Shorter Catechism 88) and it thus requires that those leading worship pay as much attention to what they say in their prayers as they do to their sermons.  The congregation should come away from the service believing that they have met with a holy and gracious God; and public prayer is a key element of that.

To listen to a lot of public prayer in churches is too often like listening in to a private quiet time -- and that is not meant as a compliment.  The erosion of the boundary between public and private and the relentless march of the aesthetics of casualness have taken their toll here.  It seems that unless somebody prays in public precisely as we think they might do in private, we all fear that this might be a form of affectation which prevents the prayer from being `authentic' -- whatever that might mean.  Yet often there are people in the congregation on Sunday who have come from a week of pain, worry and confusion; they may be spiritually shattered; they might barely be able to string two words of a prayer together; and at this moment a good pastor can through a well-thought out and carefully expressed prayer draw their eyes heavenwards, lead them to the throne of grace and give them the words of adoration, confession, thanksgiving and intercession which they cannot find for themselves.

As an antidote to this lack, ministers should spend some time each week reading the prayers of others.   The Valley of Vision is a great little collection of Puritan examples.  Spurgeon's The Pastor in Prayer is simply amazing -- that he could pray spontaneously like that speaks volumes of his private devotions.  Matthew Henry's A Method of Prayer is also invaluable as providing guidelines on public prayer.  And not one of them contains or recommends ever having a sentence in a public prayer which contains the phrase `we just want to....'

We live in a world where casualness reigns supreme and where things like Twitter have made even otherwise thoughtful theologians sound like scriptwriters for the local fortune cookie company.  If the ideal sermon is now 40% stand-up comedy, what of pulpit prayer?  Humanly speaking, the outlook is somewhat bleak.  Pulpit prayer is a dying art form, and the church -- and we -- are impoverished.  The recovery of this may yet bring many pastoral benefits to the church pf which we in our age of technical solutions and pastoral pyrotechnics, can barely dream.