Liturgy in the Wilderness: How the Lord's Prayer Shapes the Imagination of the Church in a Secular Age

What you pray . . . shapes what you believe . . . shapes how you live. 

The Lord’s Prayer is a beautiful, subversive passage of words given to the church by Jesus. It forms our imaginations and—given time—transforms us. And today, we are in desperate need of renewed imaginations. Christians are living in a wilderness of secularism. The historic Christian faith is seen as absurd at best and dangerously oppressive at worst. Followers of Jesus must begin to imagine life as a faithful minority who are ever seeking to subvert what is evil with good, what is hateful with love, what is corrosive with nurture.

In Liturgy in the Wilderness, Anglican priest D. J. Marotta shows how the Lord’s Prayer provides a framework in our secular age for understanding, believing, and living in light of Jesus Christ. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re planting seeds that can split concrete. We’re dripping water that can wear away granite. We’re shifting spiritual tectonic plates that lie deep beneath culture, society, and the depths of our own hearts. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, our imaginations are stirred, moved, and transformed. We’re taken apart and put back together. We’re stripped of our idols, addictions, and false hopes. We’re offered new words of trust and mission. And we begin to see the world differently—the way Jesus saw it.

With this book, Marotta awakens our hearts to the beauty, sustaining power, and bounty of the Lord’s Prayer and shows us how to live faithfully in the wilderness.