Cathedral prayer is essentially outward looking. A gathered congregation engages in corporate praise and intercession on the behalf of all creation and for all creation. Prayer is for others not just the participants. It is ecclesial, the church at prayer, and tends to be reliant on designated ministers performing specific ritualised functions.

Monastic prayer is essentially inward looking. Greater emphasis is placed upon the reading of the Psalms and Scripture and the process is essentially one of individual formation. You listen to the word, reflect internally on its meaning and pray for the grace to grow spiritually through this. It is directed towards individual sanctification. There is nothing inherently corporate about this and it could be done alone, although the benefit of the discipline and mutual encouragement offered by doing this with others is recognised in many monastic traditions.

Most acts of worship in College are a combination of both these traditions although one will tend to be dominant in different types of service through the week. Each worshipper will also tend to have a preference to one tradition and an expectation of which will be the dominant one in a particular service. There may also be particular circumstances on a particular day which make us desire to engage with one tradition more than the other.

Given this interplay between two traditions, their expression in worship, individual preferences and particular need, we begin to understand at least one of the reasons why the same theological student, faced with a varied diet of college worship, sometimes finds it helpful and at other times doesn't. If need, preference, expectation and tradition matches, the service is likely to be perceived as more fulfilling than if it doesn't.

The same argument may be applied to a typical Methodist service. As a young youth worker I used to have very little patience with those people who complained about noisy children in Worship. Yet I have to concede that noisy children probably fit better with the praise and celebration of the Cathedral prayer than they do with the quiet reflection of monastic worship. Therefore if your need, preference and expectation are for a service which focuses on monastic prayer, then you are unlikely to be very comfortable with children making a lot of noise!

As an 18th century movement which emphasised personal salvation and holiness and whose founder drew early inspiration from the work of Thomas à Kempis, it would be reasonable to suppose that Methodism would be drawn towards the more individualistic, monastic prayer tradition. Wesley certainly encouraged detailed study of the bible, prayer and extolled his followers "never on any account pass any day without setting aside at least an hour for devotion"². Yet the underlying presumption of the monastic tradition that all life should be spent in prayer isn't present in early Methodism. Instead Wesley favoured the position more often associated with the Cathedral tradition that all life is prayer, picking up Paul's words in Corinthians "whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God" (1 Cor 10:31).

As a 21st century church, it is easy to look at our collective Methodist worship and the personal prayer patters of many of our members and presume the Cathedral tradition is dominant. We sing hymns, use responsive prayers, and emphasise the importance of intercession, rarely leaving much space for silent reflection. Our emphasis is often on praising God and seeking his mercy for the world rather than on personal growth. The 2001 church life survey suggests that Methodists are more likely to have experienced none or only some growth in their faith in the past year when compared with members of other denominations and, perhaps even more worrying for us as leaders of worship, that growth is less likely to have taken place in church.

However to entirely consign Methodist worship to the Cathedral tradition conveniently overlooks the sermon. Arguably, as the open-air meetings of early Methodism gave way in the 19th century to the building bound congregations, the emphasis of the sermon began to shift from evangelism to instruction. This instruction was about content but also, as Gordon Wakefield suggests³, about a methodology which other members of the congregation can model. 'A Methodist layman may spend much of his leisure time preparing a sermon ... he may never think about the methods of meditation; but he sits with his Bible or his hymn-book in his hand actually meditating'* or to put it another way engaging in the monastic tradition of reflection and prayer.

For many Methodists today the reading of scripture and the sermon, during the Sunday service, will be the only times during the week that they will consciously join in the monastic tradition of meditation (in its broadest interpretation) and reflection. Whether they do or not depends on how they receive the sermon, which in turn in part depends on the sermon itself.

Constructing a sermon which encourages personal reflection, prayer and growth both in the moments which follow it and as a source to return to in the following week is not easy. It needs to both relate to and be rooted in the listeners' experience but also challenge that experience in a way which encourages reflective exploration through the process of recapturing the experience, thinking about it, mulling it over and evaluating it** in the light of God's story and while being attentive to the Holy Spirit.

As Christians we need a balanced diet of both Cathedral and monastic prayer. Those who are more comfortable with monastic prayer may need to be drawn into the concerns of the world through the cathedral tradition. Those who are more comfortable with the cathedral may need to be drawn into the mind of Christ through monastic prayer. The challenge for us as preachers is to enable this to happen in Sunday worship.