WHY DO WE SAY “WE” AND “OUR”?

Whenever we pray either alone or in church, we say “We believe” as we recite the Creed and “Our Father” when we say the Lord’s Prayer. Should we not say “I believe” and “My Father”? After all, how can I know that those praying with me believe as I believe and acknowledge God as their Father in the same way as I do? I suspect that this sounds like a silly and foolish question, but there is a reason behind my insanity.

Yes, when we gather in prayer as a church family, we pray together and say together that we believe what the Creed says we believe and that we together acknowledge God to be our Father (God being genderless notwithstanding). If we individually or others praying with us individually do not believe the words of the Creed or do not acknowledge God to be Father, we and they would not be in church in the first place.

More importantly, what we are acknowledging is not only our unified beliefs but also the fact that we need one another to live out those beliefs. That is one of the reasons we gather in prayer and praise in the first place. We need one another to live out in our daily lives what we are professing in those prayers. We cannot do it alone. That is the main reason why we say “we” and “our”.

That is true even more so when we pray alone. Yes, we can honestly pray “I believe” and “My Father”. And maybe sometimes we do and perhaps we on occasion should. In that way we are professing a deeply personal belief. And if we think about what we are saying, think deeply and seriously, it gives us pause to reflect whether we are truly living out those beliefs in our daily lives. If you are like me, we don’t do that deep thinking often enough.

If and when we do such reflecting, what we discover is that in living out our faith we have needed the love and support of others. We haven’t done it alone to date and we will not be able to do it alone in the days and years to come. That brings us back to our need to gather in community with those who are helping us live out what we say we believe, to live our lives as a child of our Father in heaven.

The church, for better and for worse, is what it is because of how we have lived out what we say we believe both individually and collectively. And it will be what it will be, in spite of what we say we believe, because of how we live out those beliefs, again, both individually and collectively. None of us is off the hook for when the church is taken to task for not living out what it says it believes just as we all are able to accept some of the praise when we do.

My point, if only to myself, is to be reminded that the words I use when I pray are to be taken seriously and to be reflected deeply and to be lived out as best I can with the help of those who say “we” and “our” with me, alone or together.