Alternatives to The Sinners Prayer

I’ve had it up to there with sinners prayers. There’s the sinner’s prayer that is often associated with ‘becoming a Christian’ in the Evangelical tradition, admitting the need for God’s forgiveness and trusting that God has provided that forgiveness freely through Jesus Christ. And then there’s the sinner’s prayer I hear every Sunday as part of the liturgy’s prayers of confession, followed by an assurance of pardon delivered by the leader at the front.

Why am I fed up?

1. A focus on confession of sin and assurance of pardon is just one aspect of the life we have in God. If we take seriously the range of metaphors we have available to understand and connect with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we need to be using a range of prayers that unpack the images associated with liberation, cleansing from shame, reconciliation, belonging, healing and shared suffering, courage in adversity, humbly serving and leading with Jesus as our example, embracing eternal life, learning to love, engaging in our environment. The list goes on.

2. Squeezing our spirituality into the framework of an hour or so of corporate worship runs the risk of distorting our understanding of day to day relationship with God. The shape of much of our liturgy suggests that the first response to a shared experience of God in worship is an awareness of guilt and inadequacy that must be addressed before going on. Is that the framework we want throughout the week? I guess it works for some people, who believe that this must be enacted every day in a cycle of adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication. I believe that this model of prayer does not do justice to the radical and transforming nature of Christian discipleship we are called to.

3. In our efforts to emphasize “salvation” as a free gift of God, received through faith, we have overlooked the ways in which our conversation with God is actually transformed. Why must we continue to come to God as mere sinners? Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”, indicating that we need to be praying the forgiver’s prayer alongside the sinner’s prayer. We could and should be using and modelling the liberated/liberator’s prayer, the cleansed/cleansing prayer, the reconciled/peacemaker’s prayer, the empowered/advocate’s prayer, the suffering/healer’s prayer, the humble/server’s prayer, to name a few.

4. I’m getting tired of hearing ministers telling their congregations, “As a minister of Jesus Christ, I declare that your sins are forgiven through Christ.” Restricting this assurance of pardon to “up front” and “authorized” leaders makes a mockery of our belief in the priesthood of all believers. On Friday night, at a Presbytery gathering, I found myself using the words, “Your sins are forgiven”, as I greeted my colleagues in the ‘passing the peace’ time. Some were visibly surprised that this declaration was coming from an unauthorized source. Others gladly received and returned the assurance. Sharing that phrase embedded in me the reality that I am living in a clean start, not held back by past mistakes and blunders, but also part of other’s fresh beginnings. On Sunday morning at Ashmore Uniting we introduced the sinner’s prayer alongside the forgiver’s prayer and finished with the invitation to the members of the congregation to practice forgiving with the words, “Your sins are forgiven”. It was all in the context of a two week focus on working through anger towards social justice.