A NONPARTISAN PRAYER for the 2024 ELECTIONS

 I invite and encourage you to join with me in a brief nonpartisan prayer expressing our hopes and concerns about the 2024 elections: Creating, Redeeming, and Sanctifying God, with humility in our own spirit but with courage as we walk boldly in the power of your Spirit, we pray without calculation or malice, and apart from all partisan political attachments, for election results that will contribute constructively to the Common Good, better build the Beloved Community, promote ‘a more perfect Union,’ and provide occasions in both sacred and secular spaces - whether recognized as spiritual or not - for the ethical inbreaking of the reign of God ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ We beseech you, based on your justice and loving-kindness for us and for all people everywhere, to so move the hearts and minds and spirits of the voters of this fragile ‘experiment in democracy’ that we might all draw upon our ‘better angels’ and freely choose those candidates who, in their personalities, policies, and approach to leadership, best approximate the inclusive, just, compassionate, equitable, and humane values that are consistent with our faith-based 'passion for justice,' with our denominational identity as 'a proreconciling, antiracist church,' and with our God-given mission to be 'a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.'  We also pray, O God of All-Inclusive Love, that these elections will not in any way be an occasion for any of us, wherever we stand politically, to allow the Evil One to bring about through our own thoughts, words, plans, or deeds, any forms of intimidation, conflict, violence, destruction, or even - God forbid! - death. We make this prayer to you, our only God, the Source of All Life, the Prince of All Peace, and the Spirit of our complete liberation from everyone and everything that would deceive, divide, and destroy us. And while still in prayer together, Most Just, Loving, and Holy One, we remember to thank you once again and always for those forms of sustenance, guidance, and empowerment that enable us to do what it is we most need to do for the betterment of our own lives, in good service to our neighbors in need, and, most importantly of all, to the glorification of your most holy Name. For it is in this very Name, the precious name of our Lord and Savior, Leader and Liberator, Jesus the Anointed One, that we pray and that we praise you in all things, in all ways, and in all places, now and forevermore. Amen. Amen. And amen.

—- Rev. Dr. Ken Brooker Langston, Ph. D., Director of DJAN (Disciples Justice Action Network)