Prayers by Walter Rauschenbusch: For Night Workers, Artists, Legislators, etc.

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) was a Baptist minister, theology professor, and pioneer of the Social Gospel movement, which dominated American Protestant thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This movement sought to apply the ethical principles Jesus taught and the theological vision he espoused to pressing social concerns, such as poverty, pollution, alcoholism, unjust wages, unregulated factories, child labor, inadequate schools, women’s suffrage, racism, and violence. The son of German immigrants, Rauschenbusch pastored a congregation in the congested and impoverished neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in New York City from 1886 to 1897, where he witnessed firsthand, in the lives of his congregants, the misery of exploited workers. Adults and children alike worked ten- to twelve-hour days, six days a week, and lived in unsafe and unsanitary tenements.

This pastorate was deeply formative for him as he went on to teach in academic settings and to write. From 1897 until his death he taught courses in church history and Christian ethics at Rochester Theological Seminary and published a handful of books: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Prayers of the Social Awakening (1910), Christianizing the Social Order (1912), Dare We Be Christians? (1914), The Social Principles of Jesus (1916), and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). Christianity Revolutionary, which he wrote in 1891, was published posthumously as The Righteousness of the Kingdom in 1968.

In some Christian circles, “social gospel” is a dirty word, as some think it overemphasizes material concerns and detracts from what they see as Jesus’s core message of the salvation of souls. The sermons and writings of Social Gospelers did swing that way, focusing on the this-worldly social implications of the good news of Jesus and not as much on the spiritual, but that’s because at the turn of the century there was a relative dearth in preaching and writing about social issues from an informed Protestant theological perspective that they sought to rectify. Christians were already well versed in the narrative of personal sin and redemption. But the notion of societal sin and societal redemption was underdeveloped territory, so Rauschenberg, Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden, Richard T. Ely, and others moved in to articulate this neglected aspect of the gospel.

The Social Gospel movement makes the kingdom of God its central doctrine. Adherents believe the mission of the church is to propagate God’s kingdom, aka the kingdom of heaven, on earth. It’s a mischaracterization that the movement is concerned only with fixing society and not people. People make up society, and change starts with them—with personal repentance. Social Gospelers would say that as people turn to Christ and are spiritually transformed by him into new creations, those transformed people, in the power of the Holy Spirit, can then, and indeed are called to, “renew the face of the earth” (Ps. 104:30).

Rauschenbusch calls out the passivity of those Christians who say they are waiting for Christ to return to set all things right but don’t participate in the Christ-spirited renewal, the setting right, that is already underway. Of course he still believed in Christ’s second coming; he just also believed it a Christian duty to anticipate that coming with acts of charity and justice. Addressing the complaint that humans are powerless to solve the world’s overwhelming social problems and can never achieve the kind of sweeping regeneration Christ will bring, he wrote in Christianity and the Social Crisis:

We know well that there is no perfection for man in this life: there is only growth toward perfection. . . . We shall never have a perfect social life, yet we must seek it with faith. We shall never abolish suffering. . . . At best there is always but an approximation to a perfect social order. The kingdom of God is always but coming.

But every approximation to it is worthwhile. . . . Everlasting pilgrimage toward the kingdom of God is better than contented stability in the tents of wickedness.

He highlights the horizontal dimension of Christ’s mission and the apostle Paul’s institution of it, claiming that “the essential purpose of Christianity was to transform human society into the kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with the will of God.” He sees the Lord’s Prayer as key, in which we pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. “There is no request here that we be saved from earthliness and go to heaven, which has been the great object of churchly religion,” he writes. “We pray here that heaven may be duplicated on earth through the moral and spiritual transformation of humanity, both in its personal and its corporate life.” God’s salvation is not a salvation from this world but a salvation in and for this world.

The 1892 statement of the Brotherhood of the Kingdom, drafted by Rauschenbusch, Nathaniel Schmidt, and Leighton Williams, comments on the all-too-common truncated view of the gospel:

Because the individualist conception of personal salvation has pushed out of sight the collective idea of a Kingdom of God on earth, Christian men seek for the salvation of individuals and are comparatively indifferent to the spread of the spirit of Christ in the political, industrial, social scientific, and artistic life of humanity, and have left these as the undisturbed possessions of the spirit of the world. Because the Kingdom of God has been understood as a state to be inherited in a future life rather than as something to be realized here and now, therefore Christians have been contented with a low plane of life here and have postponed holiness to the future.

While I wouldn’t say I’m part of the Social Gospel movement, I’ve definitely been positively influenced by it—I’m not in the bandwagon of denigrators—even as I try to integrate and balance its wisdom with Jesus’s other proclamations.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an appreciator too. He wrote in Stride toward Freedom (1958),

Rauschenbusch had done a great service for the Christian church by insisting the gospel deals with the whole man, not only his soul but his body; not only his spiritual well-being but his material well-being. It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion which professes to be concerned about the soul of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar that soul, is a spiritually moribund religion waiting for the day to be buried.

(King was killed, remember, at a workers’ rights rally.)

The Social Gospel movement advocated social change, seeking the betterment of industrialized society through the application of biblical principles. It contributed to the New Deal and other progressive governmental programs in the US and Canada in the 1930s and ’40s and prefigured elements of liberation theology, which emerged in Latin America in the late 1960s.

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My entrée to Rauschenbusch’s thought was through his published prayers. I had been conditioned to treat as suspect any products of the Social Gospel movement, so I was not expecting to be as moved as I was by his petitions and thanksgivings to God, which convey his deep and wide concern for the world, and which I’ve found meaningful to lift up in my own prayer time.

His collection includes prayers for employers, homeless children, immigrants, consumers, judges, legislators, artists, doctors and nurses, journalists, the environment, and so on, as well as prayers for morning, evening, and mealtime.

The following is a selection of prayers from Walter Rauschenbusch, Prayers of the Social Awakening (Boston and Chicago: The Pilgrim Press, 1910), which is in the public domain. I have lightly edited them, mainly for gender inclusivity. All headings, save for the fourth one (which I updated the language of), are Rauschenbusch’s.

Grace before Meat

“Our Father, thou art the final source of all our comforts, and to thee we render thanks for this food. But we also remember in gratitude the many men and women whose labor was necessary to produce it, and who gathered it from the land and afar from the sea for our sustenance. Grant that they too may enjoy the fruit of their labor without want, and may be bound up with us in a fellowship of thankful hearts.”

Prayer for This World

“O God, we thank thee for this universe, our great home; for its vastness and its riches, and for the manifoldness of the life which teems upon it and of which we are part. We praise thee for the arching sky and the blessed winds, for the driving clouds and the constellations on high. We praise thee for the salt sea and the running water, for the everlasting hills, for the trees, and for the grass under our feet. We thank thee for our senses by which we can see the splendor of the morning, and hear the jubilant songs of love, and smell the breath of the springtime. Grant us, we pray thee, a heart wide open to all this joy and beauty, and save our souls from being so steeped in care or so darkened by passion that we pass heedless and unseeing when even the thornbush by the wayside is aflame with the glory of God.
          Enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all the living things, our kin, to whom thou hast given this earth as their home in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised dominion with ruthless cruelty, so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail. May we realize that they live not for us alone but for themselves and for thee, and that they love the sweetness of life even as we, and serve thee in their place better than we in ours.
          When our use of this world is over and we make room for others, may we not leave anything ravished by our greed or spoiled by our ignorance, but may we hand on our common heritage fairer and sweeter through our use of it, undiminished in fertility and joy, that so our bodies may return in peace to the great mother who nourished them and our spirits may round the circle of a perfect life in thee.”

Prayer for Employers

“We invoke thy grace and wisdom, O Lord, upon all people of goodwill who employ and control the labor of others. Amid the numberless irritations and anxieties of their position, help them to keep a quiet and patient temper, and to rule firmly and wisely, without harshness and anger. Since they hold power over the bread, the safety, and the hopes of the workers, may they wield their powers justly and with love, as older siblings and leaders in the great fellowship of labor. Suffer not the heavenly light of compassion for the weak and the old to be quenched in their hearts. When they are tempted to follow the ruthless ways of others, and to sacrifice human health and life for profit, do thou strengthen their will in the hour of need, and bring to naught the counsels of the heartless. Save them from repressing their workers into sullen submission and helpless fear. May they not sin against the Christ by using people’s bodies and souls as mere tools to make things, forgetting the human hearts and longings of these their brothers and sisters.”

Prayer for the Unemployed

“O God, we remember with pain and pity the thousands of our brothers and sisters who seek honest work and seek in vain. For though unsatisfied wants are many, and though our land is wide and calls for labor, yet these thy sons and daughters have no place to labor, and are turned away in humiliation and despair when they seek it. O righteous God, we acknowledge our common guilt for the disorder of our industry which thrusts even willing workers into the degradation of idleness and want, and teaches some to love the sloth which once they feared and hated.
          We remember also with sorrow and compassion the idle rich, who have vigor of body and mind and yet produce no useful thing. Forgive them for loading the burden of their support on the bent shoulders of the working world. Forgive them for wasting in refined excess what would feed the pale children of the poor. Forgive them for setting their poisoned splendor before the thirsty hearts of the young, luring them to theft or shame by the lust of eye and flesh. Forgive them for taking pride in their workless lives and despising those by whose toil they live. Forgive them for appeasing their better self by pretended duties and injurious charities. We beseech thee to awaken them by the new voice of thy Spirit that they may look up unto the stern eyes of thy Christ and may be smitten with the blessed pangs of repentance. Grant them strength of soul to rise from their silken shame and to give their brothers and sisters a just return of labor for the bread they eat.
          And to our whole nation do thou grant wisdom to create a world in which none shall be forced to idle in want, and none shall be able to idle in luxury, but in which all shall know the health of wholesome work and the sweetness of well-earned rest.”

Prayer for Artists and Musicians

“O thou who art the all-pervading glory of the world, we bless thee for the power of beauty to gladden our hearts. We praise thee that even the least of us may feel a thrill of thy creative joy when we give form and substance to our thoughts and, beholding our handiwork, find it good and fair.
          We praise thee for our brothers and sisters, the masters of form and color and sound, who have power to unlock for us the vaster spaces of emotion and to lead us by their hand into the reaches of nobler passions. We rejoice in their gifts and pray thee to save them from the temptations which beset their powers. Save them from selfish ambition and the vanity that feeds on cheap applause, and from the dark phantoms that haunt the listening soul.
          Let them not satisfy their hunger for beauty with mere tricks of skill, devoid of spirit. Teach them that they are but servants of their fellow beings, and that the promise of their gifts can fulfill itself only in the service of love. Give them faith in the inspiring power of a great purpose and courage to follow to the end the visions of their youth. Kindle in their hearts a compassion for the joyless lives of the people, and make them rejoice if they are found worthy to hold the cup of beauty to lips that are athirst. Make them reverent interpreters of you, they who see thy face and hear thy voice in all things, so that they may unveil for us the beauties of nature which we have passed unseeing, and the sadness and sweetness of humanity to which our selfishness has made us oblivious.”

Prayer for Lawyers and Legislators

 “O Lord, thou art the eternal order of the universe. Our human laws at best are but an approximation to thine immutable law, and if our institutions are to stand, they must rest on justice, for only justice can endure. We beseech thee for the men and women who are set to make and interpret the laws of our nation. Grant to all lawyers a deep consciousness that they are called of God to see justice done, and that they prostitute a holy duty if ever they connive in its defeat. Fill them with a high determination to make the courts of our land a strong fortress of defense for the poor and weak, and never a castle of oppression for the hard and cunning.
          Save them from surrendering the dear-bought safeguards of the people for which our foreparents fought and suffered. Revive in them the spirit of the great liberators of the past that they may cleanse our law of the inherited wrongs that still cling to it. Suffer not the web of outgrown precedents to veil their moral vision, but grant them a penetrating eye for the rights and wrongs of today and a quick human sympathy with the life and sufferings of the people. May they not perpetuate the tangles of the law for the profit of their profession. Aid them to make its course so simple, and its justice so swift and sure, that the humblest may safely trust it and the strongest fear it. Grant them wisdom so to refashion all law that it may become the true expression of the fairer ideals of freedom and brotherhood which are now seeking their incarnation in a new age. Make these our brothers and sisters the wise interpreters of thine eternal law, the brave spokespersons of thy will, and in reward bestow upon them the joy of conscious fellowship with thy Christ in saving people from the bondage of ancient wrong.”

Prayer against War

“O Lord, since first the blood of Abel cried to thee from the ground that drank it, this earth of thine has been defiled with human blood shed by the hand of siblings, and the centuries sob with the ceaseless horror of war. Ever the pride of kings and the covetousness of the strong have driven peaceful nations to slaughter. Ever the songs of the past and the pomp of armies have been used to inflame the passions of the people. Our spirit cries out to thee in revolt against it, and we know that our righteous anger is answered by thy holy wrath.
          Break thou the spell of the enchantments that make the nations drunk with the lust of battle and draw them on as willing tools of death. Grant us a quiet and steadfast mind when our own nation clamors for vengeance or aggression. Strengthen our sense of justice and regard for the equal worth of other peoples and races. Grant to the rulers of nations faith in the possibility of peace through justice, and grant to the common people a new and stern enthusiasm for the cause of peace. Bless our soldiers and sailors for their swift obedience and their willingness to answer to the call of duty, but inspire them nonetheless with a hatred of war, and may they never for love of private glory or advancement provoke its coming. May our young men and women still rejoice to die for their country with the valor of their parents, but teach our age nobler methods of matching our strength and more effective ways of giving our life for the flag.
          O thou strong Father of all nations, draw all thy great family together with an increasing sense of our common blood and destiny, that peace may come on earth at last, and thy sun may shed its light rejoicing on a holy kinship of peoples.”

Prayer for Conferences and Conventions

“We praise thee, O God, for our friends and fellow workers, for the touch of their hands and the brightness of their faces, for the cheer of their words and the outflow of goodwill that refreshes us.
          Grant us the insight of love that we may see them as thou seest, not as frail mortals, but as radiant children of God who have wrought patience out of tribulation and who bear in earthen vessels the treasures of thy grace.
          May nought mar the joy of our fellowship here. May none remain lonely and hungry of heart among us. Let none go hence without the joy of new friendships. Give us more capacity for love and a richer consciousness of being loved. Overcome our coldness and reserve that we may throw ajar the gates of our heart and keep open house this day.
          Lift our human friendships to the level of spiritual companionship. May we realize thee as the eternal bond of our unity. Shine upon us from the faces of thy servants, thou all-pervading beauty, that in loving them we may be praising thee. Through Christ, our Lord.”

Evening Prayers

“O Lord, we praise thee for our sister, Night, who folds all the tired folk of the earth in her comfortable robe of darkness and gives them sleep. Release now the strained limbs of toil and smooth the brow of care. Grant us the refreshing draught of restfulness that we may rise in the morning with a smile on our face. Comfort and ease those who toss wakeful on a bed of pain, or whose aching nerves crave sleep and find it not. Save them from evil or despondent thoughts in the long darkness, and teach them so to lean on thy all-pervading life and love, that their souls may grow tranquil and their bodies, too, may rest. And now through thee we send Good Night to all our brothers and sisters near and far, and pray for peace upon all the earth.”

“Our Father, as we turn to the comfort of our rest, we remember those who must wake that we may sleep. Bless the guardians of peace who protect us against those of evil will, the watchers who save us from the terrors of fire, and all the many who carry on through the hours of the night the restless commerce we require on sea and land. We thank thee for their faithfulness and sense of duty. We pray for thy pardon if our covetousness or luxury makes their nightly toil necessary. Grant that we may realize how dependent the safety of our loved ones and the comforts of our life are on these our brothers and sisters, that so we may think of them with love and gratitude and help to make their burden lighter.”

“Accept the work of this day, O Lord, as we lay it at thy feet. Thou knowest its imperfections, and we know. Of the brave purposes of the morning only a few have found their fulfillment. We bless thee that thou art no hard taskmaster, watching grimly the stint of work we bring, but the father and teacher of people who rejoices with us as we learn to work. We have naught to boast before thee, but we do not fear thy face. Thou knowest all things and thou art love. Accept every right intention however brokenly fulfilled, but grant that ere our life is done we may under thy tuition become true master workers, who know the art of a just and valiant life.”

“Our Master, as this day closes and passes from our control, the sense of our shortcomings is quick within us and we seek thy pardon. But since we daily crave thy mercy on our weakness, help us now to show mercy to those who have this day grieved or angered us and to forgive them utterly. Suffer us not to cherish dark thoughts of resentment or revenge. So fill us with thy abounding love and peace that no ill will may be left in our hearts as we turn to our rest. And if we remember that any brother or sister justly hath aught against us through this day’s work, fix in us this moment the firm resolve to make good the wrong and to win again the love of our sibling. Suffer us not to darken thy world by lovelessness, but give us the power of the children of God to bring in the reign of love among people.”