Why Don’t We Pray for Business?

Mark Roberts—one of my favorite pastor-scholars—considers why we don’t pray for the realm of commerce :

I’ve been participating in church worship services for fifty years. I’ve heard or offered thousands of prayers in the context of congregational worship. Yet I cannot remember either hearing or offering a prayer that focused on – or even mentioned – business. In my pastoral prayers at [Irvine Presbyterian], I would regularly intercede on behalf of government officials, members of the military, teachers, police officers, firefighters, parents, grandparents, pastors, churches, and mission partners. But I cannot remember offering prayers for bankers, lawyers, realtors, salespeople, and the like. Nor can I recall praying for business institutions: banks, law firms, corporations, small business, brokerage firms, etc. This seems especially odd to me now, given the fact that the majority of working people in my church were in business settings such as those I just mentioned. Why didn’t I pray for them in the activity that took up so much of their time and meant so much to their lives? Why didn’t I pray for the companies they worked for or, in many cases, owned?

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