What Is A Collect?

Using the right name can open doors – ‘just tell them I sent you’. Even outsiders can get a favorable response, not because of who they are, but because of who their friend is, whose name they mention.  That’s what Jesus meant when he told his disciples this:  ‘Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you’. In prayer we approach God with confidence, not because of who we are, or what we have accomplished, but on basis of who Jesus is (his beloved Son), and what he has accomplished (our redemption).  

Now it is perfectly possible to be praying ‘in the name of Jesus’ without actually saying his name; and there are many examples of such prayer in the Bible. (‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner’; ‘Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief’). Yet for us to pray in faith of Jesus, in the confidence that God for his sake will hear our prayer, it is helpful to pray explicitly in the name of Jesus.  

There is an ancient form of prayer called the Collect (perhaps because it ‘collects’ the desires and hopes of the faithful), which does just that. A Collect consists of one concise but flowing sentence, of invocation, acknowledgment, petition, and aspiration, that concludes with the phrase ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (or some variation of the same). Sometimes this is filled out with a doxology that spells out what it means to call Jesus ‘Christ’ and ‘Lord’ – it means we are talking of the one ‘who liveth and reigneth with thee [the Father] in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end’. Whether the conclusion is long or short, the point is the same – the heart of God is open to those who pray in the name of Jesus: ‘For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God’ (John 16:27).

Collects are brief and pithy prayers that follow a certain form – as exemplified in the familiar third collect at Morning Prayer, the Collect ‘For Grace’. 

• First the address or invocation to God (which may include a mention of God’s attributes, to stir up our faith in God’s power and will to grant us our prayer): ‘O Lord our heavenly Father, Almighty and Everlasting God’. 
• Second, sometimes there is an acknowledgment of a divine attribute or work that relates to the petition (‘who hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day’).  
• Third, the petition itself, the request, the terse expression of our need (‘defend us in the same with thy mighty power’).  
• Fourth, sometimes we express an aspiration for a desired result of his granting our petition (‘and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger, but that all our doings, being ordered by thy governance, may be righteous in thy sight’).  
• Fifth, the concluding formula, which pleads the mediation of Christ in whose name we pray (‘through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord’), and which may be extended (in the full form) to acknowledge the Trinity (‘who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end’). 
• The collect is completed with the congregation’s hearty assent (‘Amen’).  

In this form, we focus our attention on who we are speaking to, what we are asking for, what we hope for, and what grounds we have for making the ask. It teaches us to pray.