Prayer (Jun 2026)
"...each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbour..."
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
One of the New Testament verses which has most often come to my mind in recent years is Ephesians 4:25:
Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbour, for we are all members of one body.
I wrote about the wider context for that verse in last August’s post on prayer, where I noted that:
All Christians are called to be people walking in the truth. And presumably this applies broadly. I find it hard to believe that Paul — or any of the other apostles, let alone the Son of God who claimed to be the truth — would approve of Christians telling the truth about gospel matters while endorsing the lies of the world.
And I thought it worth sharing some thoughts about speaking truthfully in the context of public prayer — when we speak both to God and to our fellow believers.
Some years ago, I was on the list of people who led the prayers at services at St Albert’s1 from time to time. I didn’t get much by way of feedback, but I suppose that the repeated regular requests to help out in this way suggested that I was doing an acceptable job.
On each occasion, the church provided a helpful outline of the service, including details of the prayer section: typically a confession, specific subjects to pray for, and sometimes a short set prayer, known in the Church of England as a Collect.
We were also supplied with a 600+ word document titled “Leading prayers”, with instructions such as:
Disciplined prayers. Aim for short and imaginative prayers (4-6 mins for a normal service and 3-4 mins for an all age [service]). Long, rambling prayers are difficult to follow, especially for the outsider…
Structured prayers. Pick 3-4 subjects to pray about (plus the confession and collect)… Public prayers normally flow better with a brief pause between each one rather than multiple “amens”…
Aside from the part about the “amens”, the guidance made sense to me, as did the section on “Outside-focussed prayers”:
Outside-focussed prayers. Concentrate on the world, the nation, the church in the UK and worldwide and the needy (which may include those in the church family who are sick, lonely, bereaved, unemployed etc) rather than only our church activities and recent sermon series. Top tip: check the news as you prepare!
Being a generally compliant sort, I prepared and led the prayers accordingly. I even timed myself while preparing, and tailored the number of words to the time I had been allocated. I also sought to incorporate relevant texts from the Bible, often from the passage that was to be preached on later in the service.
Moreover, as I prepared, I did indeed “check the news”, typically via the BBC News website. And sometimes I did something of a last-minute check to help ensure that my “outside-focussed prayers” were bang up to date.
But these days, and particularly in the light of events of the past six years or so, I now wonder about the wisdom of checking the news for any purpose other than to stay aware of what is being presented as such. For I have come to realise that what is presented to us as “the news” is part of an extraordinarily sophisticated disinformation operation that runs much deeper than I ever dreamt prior to 2020.
This is not to deny that there is plenty of truth in the news. As expert propagandists know all too well, the propagation of lies is far more effective when untruths are deftly mixed in with truth.
But propaganda is nothing new. As I discussed here, Edward Bernays, the “father of propaganda”, wrote in his 1928 book Propaganda about “the invisible governors… who pull the wires which control the public mind... and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world”. For context, Bernays’ uncle was Sigmund Freud, often referred to as the founder of psychoanalysis. And his great nephew, Marc Randolph, was a co-founder of Netflix. It would be hard to overstate the influence of that one family.
The propaganda machine has been active across the Western world for well over a hundred years. At around the same time that Bernays wrote Propaganda, Walter Lippmann, an eminent US journalist, was writing about the manufacturing of consent. And since then the nature and the extent of the media-mediated manipulation of the masses has evolved with the technology available.
One particularly striking and well-documented example of such manipulation is Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s, which I wrote about in this post last year. In the words of the mainstream website schoolhistory.co.uk:
The idea of a large organisation controlling the minds and thoughts of individuals, pushing them towards a specific ideology and certain life choices, may seem like science fiction, or an absurd conspiracy that can be found in books and movies. However, for some it is certainly not a surprising discovery that corporations, organisations and politicians manipulate public opinion in order to fit certain agendas. These are in turn manipulated by even bigger and more powerful organisations, such as the government itself.
The CIA controlling and manipulating civilians’ minds is not fiction: it is a conspiracy that turned out to be true during the 1970s in the USA. Following the Second World War, the CIA was able to gain control over what was being published not only in the USA but in general across the globe. It exerted much influence over what the public should be allowed to see, and what should be concealed. In essence, it ruled what ‘the public saw, heard and read on a regular basis’ (Tracy, 2018).
Operation Mockingbird is a United States CIA campaign that aimed not only to influence the media but also to infiltrate it.
“A conspiracy that turned out to be true… a CIA campaign that aimed not only to influence the media but also to infiltrate it.”
It would surely be naive to think that, in the era of the internet and smartphones, the-powers-that-be — including the CIA — might have stopped seeking to control and manipulate civilians’ minds. The digital age, with its 24/7 news cycle delivered to devices in the hands of billions of people, offers unprecedented scope for narrative control. And I have come to realise that those pushing the propaganda are so deft at what they do that most people, including myself until 2020, are largely unaware of the extent and the scale of their activities.
There are many and various ways through which civilians’ minds are controlled and manipulated: not least film and television, but also music and books, and indeed what is taught in the classroom. But “the news”, and particularly BBC News, is surely among the most effective vehicles for propaganda. As far as I can tell, only a modest proportion of the population question the truth of what they are being told by the Beeb, even in the context of the covid era. Which I find odd, particularly for Christians, who surely cannot have failed to notice the Corporation’s output on transgender issues:
So maybe, just maybe, we should exercise more than a little caution in checking the news as we prepare to lead God’s people in prayer. Perhaps instructions on “Leading prayers” should even warn us against it. For there is a danger that, in incorporating “the news” into our prayers, we are actually doing the opposite of putting off falsehood and speaking truthfully to our neighbours. We risk instead endorsing the lies of the world, and unwittingly promoting the propaganda of those who seek to profit from deception, fear-mongering and war.
Related
These articles — and others linked therein — all of which relate to the BBC:
This general post…
…and particularly the comment:
I am now inclined to ask basic questions about the truthfulness of any unusually high-profile media story that has at least some of the following features:
Strong emotions are evoked
There is widespread mainstream media coverage
Responses to the story are amplified by large social media accounts and/or bots
This article in relation to the time-honoured strategy of Problem-Reaction-Solution:
Why would the authorities stop using it?
And also:
Previous posts on prayer:
May 2026: “…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…”
April 2026: “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God... and it will be given to you”
March 2026: “...let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”
February 2026: “…give your servant a discerning heart... to distinguish between right and wrong”
January 2026: “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him...”
For 2025 posts, a list including the Bible texts can be found at the end of the January 2026 post linked above. All previous posts on prayer can also be accessed here.
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The pseudonymous name for the church I attend, after St Albert the Great, patron saint of scientists, students and philosophers