Chapel Dedication Prayer
This week marks an historic week for the Midwestern Seminary community, as we welcome friends from around the world to celebrate with us the dedication of our new chapel, the Daniel Lee Chapel. The chapel has been a source of great anticipation and expectation for Midwestern Seminary over the past several years, and many have dedicated their time and resources to see its completion.
It is not often that an institution dedicates a building, and even less often that it dedicates a chapel. So, it is with appropriate gravity and joy that we will gather together on Tuesday to dedicate the Daniel Lee Chapel for the glory of Christ and for his church. I will offer the following prayer at the dedication ceremony. May God be pleased to answer his servant’s prayer for this place.
Heavenly Father:
We come to you today in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, asking your special favor as we gather to dedicate this beautiful new facility and to recommit ourselves to the task of theological education and ministry preparation. We ask for your kind providence to abide on Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary this day, and every day forward, as we exist for the Church. We come before you today in an act of dedication, an act of consecration, and bring our requests before you.
We ask that this pulpit be used only and ever to preach your inspired, inerrant Word, and may those who fill this pulpit always be faithful to divide rightly the word of truth and to proclaim the whole counsel of God. May this pulpit prove to be a model of biblical exposition for students for generations to come, and may this pulpit be a constant force for doctrinal fidelity, demonstrating how to contend earnestly for the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.
In the years to come, may you be pleased to save many by the power of your gospel in this place. May the exclusivity of the gospel, the Lordship of Christ, repentance from sin and faith in Jesus be exhorted, and may the gospel always be preached in this building with full conviction and expectancy.
May in this chapel students find their calls to ministry deepened, their love for Christ enlarged, their gifts for ministry strengthened, their character refined, their biblical, theological, Baptist convictions reinforced, their passion for the gospel enflamed, and may in them grow an unremitting fervor for your Great Commission.
May this chapel only know worship that pleases you; worship that upholds and projects your glory, exalts your Son, and demonstrates the power and working of your Holy Spirit. May it know the singing of Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, the public reading of Scripture, the prayers of your people, and the preaching of your Holy Word.
May this day fill your people, especially Southern Baptists, with an appropriate sense of pride in you, gratefulness in your provision, and a renewed sense of the kingdom possibilities and advances from this seminary throughout the region and around the world. Moreover, may you be pleased to bless the many who have given so much these past several years to see this day come to fruition.
And for us, specifically, as the Midwestern Seminary community, may this day be one of celebration, of seminary growth and health, and joyful institutional accomplishment. May you fill us with a sense of optimism, knowing that you have brought us this far, and surely you will carry us forward to new and greater heights.
Father, there is no pool for baptism, nor is there the tray of communion. We do not gather as a church in this building, but we gather as the church, and we gather for the Church.
And in so doing we ask that if Jesus shall tarry for millennia more, that this chapel will be used for the glory of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, until that day when the kingdoms of this world shall become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, when he shall reign forever and ever.
Amen.
topicsEducation, Southern Baptist Convention
Comments are closed.