Our Clark County commissioners and now the Washougal City Council are both in the process of adding prayer to their public meeting agendas.
I am all for prayer. I’ve been doing it since I was a small child. It has been my experience that real prayer is best accomplished in private. What these two bodies seem to be proposing for themselves is a public display of prayer. Jesus Christ highly disapproved of this (Matthew 6:5-6) and spoke against it.
So to our county commissioners and to the city council, I say, “If you want to pray, pray!”
A public display of prayer, however, is not prayer at all. It’s a complex statement aimed at whoever is watching.
