The Lord’s Prayer for Reconciliation

Our Father who is in heaven, you are the Father of every ethnicity and culture under the heavens and we praise you for making us all unique. 

May your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. May your new humanity invade our world here and now as you reconcile your church across color, class and culture. May we capture your heart for righteousness and justice here and now as you reconcile as back to you and to each other.

Give us this day, our daily bread. May you give us the strength to pursue reconciliation here and now. May your spirit sustain us as we battle against principalities and powers that are seeking to divide us that have been entrenched in our world and country since the fall of humanity in Genesis 3.

Forgive our sins as we forgive those who’ve sinned against us. Forgive us of the ways we’ve sinned against each other and not honored the image of God in each other. Forgive us for being complicit in the sin of racial division in this country. Forgive us for operating out our false selves that sees the other as less then.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Keep us from the sin of seeing the other as less than. Keep us from giving into the temptation to avoid hard conversations and to go with the flow of the division in this world. 

For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever, Amen. Your kingdom is one of unity among your family. Your Holy Spirit power is a reconciling power manifested among your Saints when we gather and you alone get the glory when your church is reconciled as your son prayed as much in John 17; “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

Amen.