Prayer

A major topic last week in Perspectives was prayer. I want to share a few things about it that particularly stuck with me. First, something that the speaker said:

The quickest way to kill a prayer meeting, is for one person to say a long, meaningful, theologically profound, and poetic prayer. After that, everyone else will be too intimidated to pray. Lots of short, one-sentence prayers that build on each other work much better to bring a group together in prayer.

I cannot recall exactly how many times I have heard people say that they are too intimidated to pray with other people. Even when I have convinced someone like that to come to a prayer meeting, they often come away feeling like the experience just confirmed that their fear that they aren't good enough at praying to pray in groups.

Second, this is a quote taken out of one of the readings. Specifically, it is from "Prayer: Rebelling Against the Status Quo" by David Wells.

To pray declares that God and his world are at cross-purposes; to "sleep," or "faint," or "lose heart" is to act as if they are not. Why, then, do we pray so little for our local church? Is it really that our technique is bad, our wills weak, or our imaginations listless? I don't believe so. there is plenty of strong-willed and lively discussion -- which in part or in whole may be justified -- about the mediocrity of the preaching, the emptiness of the worship, the superficiality of the fellowship, and the ineffectiveness of the evangelism. So, why, then, don't we pray as persistently as we talk? The answer, quite simply, is that we don't believe it will make any difference. We accept, however despairingly, that the situation is unchangeable, that what is will always be. This is not a problem about the practice of prayer, but rather about its nature. Or, more precisely, it is about the nature of God and his relationship to this world.

Unlike the widow in the parable, we find it is easy to come to terms with the unjust and fallen world around us -- even when it intrudes into Christian institutions. It is not always that we are unaware of what is happening, but simply that we feel completely impotent to change anything. That impotence leads us, however unwillingly, to strike a truce with what is wrong.

Are you guilty of that? I know I am. I doubt there has been a single community I have ever been in for which I failed to spend a lot of time thinking about the shortcomings. Often I have even spent a great deal of time expressing these feelings to at least one other person. Yet how much do have I spent praying for God to bring about change? Usually very little if any. How would our Churches change if we really put as much effort into prayer as we put into our complaints? How would this world change if we traded all of our complaints for prayers?

Perspectives

On Tuesday I begin taking Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. It is a 16 week class, complete with homework and tests, all about Christian Missions. I have been aware of it since sometime in college, but have never had a good opportunity to take it. Now it has come to Santa Barbara, so I jumped at the chance to take it.

The first week was quite good. I cannot do the topics justice in just a few sentences, but here is one of the thoughts that really struck me: In the Bible, God's blessing and God's purpose are almost always found together in the lives of followers. Often we have a tendency to divorce these things. On one side, this leads to a "health and wealth" gospel. On the other, it leads to seeking out the things of God on our own strength, and letting the pursuit of the things of God become more important than the pursuit of God himself.