Joint Prayer for Europe and the Hungarian EU-Presodency at the opening worship of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity on 16 January 2011.
Our Heavenly Father in Jesus Christ our Lord!
We praise Your holy name with glory, respect and gratitude for having created our world in love, for Your providence and great sacrifice of salvation.
We are grateful to know that our small and big world is in Your merciful hands. We are grateful that these hands have led the apostles with their mission mandate to Europe, and have always provided people who could truly spread the Gospel, and people who received It with humble joy.
We thank You for the fact that the peoples of our continent were able to form nations and countries in the spirit of faith, hope and love in Christ, conforming to the consequent morality, law and culture. We thank you for providing our wandering Hungarian ancestors with a beautiful home in the Carpathian basin and an eternal home in Your Kingdom.
We confess with penitence and shame the deeds of our nation and the European peoples that were motivated by selfishness, greed for power, violence and other ways of idolatry, and not by love in Christ.
That is why our hearts are filled with gratitude for Your patient and merciful love and the endeavours to reconcile European nations, to find peace, social and economic equity, lawfulness, freedom, democracy and fairness. We thank You for the courage of the founding fathers who first envisioned European integration, and the perseverance of the sons who continued to work towards achieving it.
We are thankful for the fact that our country and nation has served and protected the peace and prosperity of Europe in various forms over the past thousand years. We ask Your fatherly kindness to provide wisdom, courage, humility, readiness and ability so that over the next six months the Hungarian EU presidency shall be able to find wise answers to the most pressing issues of Europe and our nation, real cures to ease our pains, and permanent solutions to the problems we face.
For this imposing but responsible service, the people of Christ living here offer their heartfelt prayer and eager love guided by the Holy Spirit.
We ask You in Christ to listen to our prayer, and bless the service of the Hungarian presidency in Europe.