Johann Starck

Try to imagine a war fought in your homeland for thirty years. Our country was brought low by a four-year Civil War. What would have been the fallout caused by thirty years of bloodshed? For the first half of the 17th century, armies from all over Europe fought on German soil during the Thirty Years War. When the Peace of Westphalia treaty was finally signed in 1648, a quarter of Germany’s population died, and its economy was in shambles. The damage done to its moral fiber was catastrophic. While most of its citizens still believed in God, many functioned as if faith no longer made a difference in their real lives. A movement called Pietism emerged to revitalize spirituality in dead churches. Nobody aspires to piety anymore. “Don’t be so pious” isn’t something we want to hear. How strange that a word once was used as a term of honor has now become a put-down. Piety in its original sense meant fidelity and loyalty to God. Pietists were people who sought a personal relationship with Jesus with its attending implications for a faith-filled life. Johann Frederick Starck (1680-1756) had pietistic sympathies and served rural and city churches in Frankford. He also was a popular preacher in poorhouses, orphanages, and to criminals on death row. His enduring contribution was a devotional The Daily Handbook in Good and Bad Days. Don’t you love the title? It was, as advertised, a handbook for prayer to address every conceivable situation. Not only did it offer morning and evening prayers and help for the sick and dying, but it also supplied prayers for circumstances I have never seen in print. He wrote prayers for use during and after a thunderstorm, prayers while taking medicine and even prayers for women in labor. His handbook taught future generations how to pray and has been reprinted 160 times, as recently as 1999. His prayer “for those in affliction” leads us to pray: