00B - Welcome to Bedtime Chapel: Why Family Prayer?
In the busyness of life, why make time for family prayer? How might night prayer impact your family? And how might it impact the wider church?
In this special episode of Bedtime Chapel, James and Natalie share the hopes they have for the way Bedtime Chapel will support their home, your home, and the church community.
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Referenced in the Podcast:
Article on the Plough on the importance of evening prayer: The Witching Hour by Kathleen A. Mulhern
Book by Jesse Zink: Faithful, Hopeful, Creative: Fifteen Theses for Christians in a Crisis-Shaped World
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Full Transcript of Episode
00:00:00 Natalie Thomas
Hello and welcome to Bedtime Chapel's second trailer episode. I'm Natalie Thomas.
00:00:04 James Thomas
And I'm James Thomas. We are deacons in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
00:00:09 Natalie Thomas
And Bedtime Chapel grew out of our shared desire to support families who are trying to center Jesus in a post Christian world.
00:00:16 James Thomas
We offer a nightly prayer service that includes a short gospel reading. In this episode, we're sharing a little bit about the hope that we have for Bedtime Chapel.
00:00:24 Natalie Thomas
Let me start, James, by asking you, my beloved, what's your hope for how Bedtime Chapel will shape shape our family?
00:00:32 James Thomas
Well, my hope for Bedtime Chapel is that it does for us what we're hoping it does for everyone else. This grows, I believe, out of an organic need to center our family life at the end of the day, which is hard. Natalie and I both work full time. We both have demanding secular vocations.
00:00:50 James Thomas
We arrive at the end of the day often exhausted, and the kids are exhausted. The workday ends and then there's the usual routine. We have very small children. Some of you listening may have children of what the Book of Common Prayer would describe, describe as riper years. Your kids may be a bit older, but at the end of the day, it's hard to actually make the last action of any given day in any given family a God centered action, a Jesus shaped action.
00:01:20 James Thomas
In some sense, we're recording this for our family and sharing it with all of you. There are many, many distractions. We are probably wrestling, as some of you are, with the desire to surf the phone at the end of the day and zone out a bit. Although both of us are believers in narrative and the value of good human storytelling, there's a lot out there that the kids are exposed to that's a little more brain melting.
00:01:44 James Thomas
And so again, just to really have this as the final collective family action of the day, I think the original idea was how would we do it for ourselves? And then from there, I hope organically and prayerfully how we might do it for others and how we might share it. And this is the media by which those sorts of things are shared in our generation and in this 21st Christian century.
00:02:07 James Thomas
So that's my hope. My hope, I guess, in a word, is that it works for us and for everyone.
00:02:13 Natalie Thomas
James, that actually makes me think of way, way, way back before we started talking about Bedtime Chapel. I listened to this podcast by the Plough. The Plough, if you're unfamiliar with it, is a Christian journal. And the podcast was talking about the importance of these evening hours. The special guest, I think she wrote an article about it we can link to the plow in the show notes was saying that historically this evening hour has been the night of magic and of fairies and of the unknown.
00:02:44 Natalie Thomas
And that dedicating this hour, in particular of all of the hours to our day to a connection with spirit, with God, is in some ways she was lifting it up as more important or equally important at the very least, as to what we do at the beginning of the day. But so often it gets forgotten because of the busyness and the tiredness of the rest of the day.
00:03:06 Natalie Thomas
I have found that my parenting fuse is shorter at night. It is harder for me to be holy and kind and gentle with my children. And I know that one of my hopes for our family, and I would extend that, as James did to others, is that this gives us a deeper well of compassion and of love to parent from at the nighttime when that well can be shorter.
00:03:29 James Thomas
So you asked me, and we talked a little bit there about how bedtime chapel can shape our family. What are your hopes for how bedtime chapel can shape the church?
00:03:38 Natalie Thomas
Yeah, I'm feeling a bit humble as I start to answer this question. But what I hope for how it will shape the church is that it will actually offer the church a lens into what it looks like to really center children. You know, as we pray on a regular basis. Church or Jesus goes for all of us from something that we do to who we are.
00:04:01 Natalie Thomas
The prayers and the words that we say begin to get rooted in us and have life in us. I'm thinking of the verses in John about abiding in me and fruit being born out of us. And I would say that my hope is that praying at home on a regular basis will support kids and support parents to really feel that sense of abiding deeply in God so that they have a sense of ownership over their faith, which leads to a sense of agency in the church.
00:04:30 Natalie Thomas
We have young people or young families in our churches and we see them as something to form. And what we know is that relationships are two way streets and children are constantly forming us if we're open to them, shaping our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus, what it means to be the church.
00:04:49 Natalie Thomas
And the way that I see it is that the future of our church relies on our ability to really decenter the people of privilege who are currently at the center of the church and to become more open to the people. Jesus was open to the voices and needs of people who are on the margin.
00:05:06 Natalie Thomas
And that can include and begin with truly centering and honoring children.
00:05:12 James Thomas
No. Thank you for sharing all that. I've been reading Jesse Zink's new book, faithful, Hopeful, Creative. Jesse Zink is an Episcopal priest serving in the Anglican Diocese of Montreal and a canon theologian at their diocesan school. And he writes so powerfully in the book about what I have sometimes described from the pulpit as the ravages of modernity, the act by which human beings are devalued and either consumed or actively encouraged to self consume.
00:05:40 James Thomas
And for all the hand wringing that goes on in whatever you want to call it, this family of churches of which Natalie and I are members, you could call it the main line or the old line or whatever about the decline of young people. And that also extends to the Roman Church and the Orthodox churches and Christianity, broadly, the decline of young members.
00:05:58 James Thomas
It really is incumbent on us to speak to very young children and through childhood and through young adulthood and into that really critical period, the formative time, as they transition into the fullness of adulthood and through all the phases of life. And for us, this is our own kind of modest effort. I hope to speak to those that do have young children and are trying to communicate the deposit of the faith into the 21st Christian century and in the face of the ravages of modernity.
00:06:31 James Thomas
And that's exciting to me that we have our own small entry into that, into that dialogue. So I'm excited. I don't know that it will change the church or shape the church, but I am humbled to have the opportunity to make this communication of the Gospel on a night, by night basis with my beloved wife.
00:06:49 James Thomas
So with that I will say thank you so much for listening with us. We're grateful you joined us for our teaser trailer number two. And keep in mind that our nightly prayer service launches on the first Sunday of Advent, December 1st.
00:07:01 Natalie Thomas
And if you want to stay in touch with us between now and then, you can find us on Facebook. Our Instagram. Our handle is Bedtime Chapel on both of those and you can also email us at bedtimechapel@gmail.com we want to hear from you. We want to hear what's working, what you're looking for in a nighttime prayer service.
00:07:19 Natalie Thomas
And until then, we will be praying with you.
