A Call to Prayer and Worship
A Church bell is a call to prayer, worship, remembrance, and celebration. At Mariners’ Church, we ring our bell as a call to worship, to remember those who have died before us, as a Sanctus bell to highlight the consecration of the bread and wine, and to honor those lost at sea during special services.
This is a story I have told in an early edition of “Words from the Rector” about the ringing of a church bell:
“I once met a newly installed Rector at a historic church in another city, and I asked her how often they rang their bell. She sadly replied that the bell doesn’t work. She said, “I’ve never heard it ring in the ten months I’ve served here”, and told me she thought there was something wrong with the pulley.
This can be a sad metaphor on how the Church as the body of Christ approaches prayer. Prayer doesn’t seem to many people, even Christians, to be a very important aspect of practical life, so we just leave it broken. “Thoughts and prayers” are often mocked in media and entertainment as a worthless response to the evils of our days like mass shootings and other tragic events.
After talking to this Rector of ‘The Church of the Broken Bell’, I asked if I could hop on the roof and see if we could figure out what was wrong with it. She agreed.
As it turned out, she was correct that the pulley was old and rusted. It needed to be replaced. I came back a couple days later and replaced it just before Easter Sunday. The first time this pastor heard the bell ring was to celebrate Christ’s resurrection! (“Words from the Rector”, July 14, 2023)
In his book called “Water to Wine“, Brian Zahnd says:
“The sound of Christianity is the church bell. The sound of the post-Christian secular West is the sad dearth of the church bell. The church in the West is no longer public or prayerful. We are now private… The church bell is a good metaphor of how the church should be public. The ringing of a church bell is a public act, but it’s not a political act. The church bell is a public call to prayer.” (pg. 72)
We are going to start ringing the bell again to call Detroit to mid-day prayer on Thursday’s lunch hour. Beginning on Thursday, August 28th, we will be having a special service to honor those lost on the Edmund Fitzgerald. A group of distance swimmers will swim legs in the route from the site of the vessel’s sinking in Lake Superior to Detroit! It will culminate with a memorial and prayer service at Mariners’ Church (see https://www.edmundfitzgeraldswim.org/ for details). This will be the first of several 50th Anniversary memorial services and events we will have this year.
This prayer service will restart our mid-day Thursday prayer at 12:10, starting on September 4. Our hope is that once again we can be a respite of prayer during the work week for downtown Detroit. Would you consider being part of this as your weekly worship routine even if you don’t work downtown?
We are blessed to have the honor of publicly declaring times of prayer and worship to downtown Detroit. We have a responsibility and privilege to continue declaring Him to our community.
As the bell starts to ring calling us to pray on Thursdays again, please consider your own personal prayer life. Our corporate worship on Sundays is supposed to be a beautiful extension of our personal walk with the Lord.
It is our privilege to be His Body! The way we each respond individually to His call to be One with Him matters, not just to us individually but to the whole Body. So, are you asking God to reveal Himself and His love to you every day? Are you taking the time to let Him ‘mold’ you into being more like Him? When these practices are incorporated in our everyday lives, we come to corporate prayer and worship with gratitude and expectation. For we desire a greater move of the Spirit in us and our community.
“I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of the LORD!” (Psalm 122:1)
May we desire more of His transforming Presence in us, as we declare this verse with the psalmist.
Blessings and Peace,
Rev. Todd and Dr. Christiane