Page 3630 – Christianity Today (2025)

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

The worst sin is prayerlessness. Overt sin or crime or the glaring inconsistencies which often surprise us in Christian people are the effect of this or its punishment. We are left by God for lack of seeking Him.
P. T. Forsyth1

We are not free to pray or not to pray, nor to pray only when we feel so inclined. For prayer is not an activity which is natural to us. Prayer is a grace, and we can expect this grace only from the Holy Spirit.
Karl Barth2

Before any habit can be broken or formed, we need to become convinced that change is necessary. Until then, nothing will happen. The natural inclination of our psyches is to maintain the status quo. Something needs to happen to get us off dead center.

What can move us off dead center? Often the happening is the result of an accumulated unhappiness at the way life is going.3 Other times it’s a specific incident, something we read, or a friend finally setting us straight.

Theophan the Recluse wrote at length about what it takes to incite change. Change begins “the moment your heart starts to be kindled with divine warmth. But you must realize that this kindling cannot take place in you while the passions are still strong and vigorous. Passions are the dampness in the fuel of your being, and damp wood does not burn. There is nothing else to be done except to bring in dry wood from outside and light this, allowing the flames from it to dry out the damp wood, until this in its turn is dry enough to begin slowly to catch alight.”4

The “dry wood” brought in from the outside differs from person to person. Some of us require oak logs; others of us are warmed by birch. The following four accounts illustrate quite different ways in which the recognition of our inherent need for prayer becomes real. Perhaps you’ll find yourself in one of them.

Learning Through Personal Trial

John Frey and his wife were driving on Interstate 80 across the flat plains of Nebraska. The monotony of the long drive ended in Kearney, where Frey had a heart attack.

Frey is telling the story in his sunshine-filled office at his Midwest church. At sixty-five years of age, Frey is preparing to retire after more than forty years of pastoring several Christian Reformed churches, but his full head of thick white hair and his trim build suggest a younger man, certainly not one who experienced a life-threatening heart attack just twelve months earlier.

“As I lay in the hospital bed,” he says, “I saw nothing but billowing clouds of the most intense white I have ever seen. Psalm 103:2, 3 ran across my mind: ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. He forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases.’ I had been lying there in extreme pain, but all of a sudden I got a peace that was beyond understanding. I felt clean. It was as if I was being cleansed to match the clouds I was seeing. It’s a fabulous experience to know you can be on the verge of death and be calm and feel clean before a righteous God.”

Frey had been airlifted from Kearney to Lincoln where doctors performed bypass heart surgery. But the story for Frey and his wife was the prayer support they received from others. Never before had prayer seemed so essential, so like food and air to their wilting spirits.

“A Baptist church in Kearney befriended my wife the days we were there. The pastor came daily to pray with me. When we got to Lincoln, a family we didn’t know that lived near the hospital opened their house to my wife and daughters. God’s salt is sprinkled throughout society. When you need it, it’s there. That experience taught me more about prayer.

“I had long known the value of personal prayer. I attended the International Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis in 1969, and there I learned to be open to the moving of the Holy Spirit. I found a freedom in prayer that I didn’t have before. I realized God didn’t want John Frey to be anyone but John Frey. I found a joy in the ministry I never had until that time.

“Those two experiences—the Congress on Evangelism and the heart attack—taught me what I know about prayer. I’m not a perfect pray-er by any means. But I never underestimate its importance. And I’m always open to learning more as God teaches.”

Learning Through People’s Needs

For Doug Hazen, prayer became vital when he felt a burden for the community of Eugene, Oregon: “Last February three things happened almost simultaneously that convinced me to pray for our community.

“First, we had an evangelism conference here at the church, which sensitized me to the needs of this community.

“Second, I read a study done by a University of Washington sociologist that concluded that Eugene had one of the lowest rates of church attendance of any community in the country. The study also showed there was a direct relationship between low church attendance and cult activity. That’s certainly true in Eugene. We’re in the top ten in cult activity and the last of the 215 communities rated in church attendance.

“Third, economic conditions here are not good. We have a couple of families in our church with small businesses who are facing bankruptcy right now.

“I did a lot of thinking about that on my daily commute. I sensed a personal need to pray for this community. I’m just one guy out of 105,000, and I realize I can’t change the world in my own power. But I do have the power of the Holy Spirit to draw from, and the way to tap into that is through prayer.

“Now I find that the evangelizing of our community is a natural occasion for prayer. In a sense, our church’s mission forces me to pray. I don’t pray because I have to, but because it is fundamental to loving people.

“Not long ago we had a critical board meeting. Both the senior pastor and I felt under the gun, and we spent a lot of time praying about it. God gave us the wisdom to deal with the situation, and I remember how comfortable I felt about prayer being the central point of our deliberation.”

Learning Through Books

Books can teach something of life and prayer. Norris Magnuson talked about their importance to him as he sat in the special collections room of the Bethel Theological Seminary library, where he is librarian. In one corner sat F. O. Nillson’s steamer trunk that came over with the first Swedish settlers. The walls are lined with large paintings of other Swedish and Norwegian faithful who led Bethel Seminary after its founding in 1871. An ancient lectern from some early Swedish Baptist church sits imposingly in one corner.

“It’s possible to read about giants of spiritual history and feel challenged rather than guilty about the contrast between their lives and mine. For example, Frank Laubach. The story of his awakening is moving. And his little practical booklet, The Game With Minutes, on deepening one’s walk with God makes the whole process fun. Yet there’s never a question that it’s an enormously urgent undertaking.

“I have also been challenged negatively at times by the things I’ve read. P. T. Forsyth, in The Soul of Prayer, says, ‘The worst sin of all is the sin of prayerlessness.’ That jarred me. Maybe prayerlessness is the root of all negatives. If God doesn’t factor into our life in some way, we’re lost. Prayer opens our lives to God and makes us functioning Christians.5

“In The Struggle of Prayer, Donald Bloesch talks about busyness being the new holiness. I find time to be my biggest problem. Time and the fact that our culture doesn’t want the things that Christ wanted. Servitude, obedience, suffering, hanging on the cross—all of them run counter to our society’s values.6

“My models of prayer have tended to be biblical and historical. That’s probably why I’m an historian. Augustine, Luther, Wesley—all very gifted, learned, and earnest persons—were preeminently persons of prayer. Deep personal encounters with God freed them into their remarkable life works. Jonathan Edwards, the pietist Zinzendorf, Charles Finney, and other notable leaders were similarly marked by prayer. Working in the pietistic heritage of Swedish Baptists as well as in the larger evangelical awakenings, has increased my awareness of the central role of prayer in the Christian story. It has also made me agree with A. W. Tozer when he said, ‘Listen to the one who listens to God.'”

Learning Through Ministry

Prayer is not necessarily easier for men and women in local church ministry. Pressures of being “spiritual giants” can inhibit growth. The need for the church to “make it” can turn the leader into an administrator and organizer rather than a servant concerned with the spiritual well-being of those in the flock.

Scotty Clark had just resigned as pastor of the Friends Church in Silverton, Oregon. Constant bickering with the Christian education committee about church programs and infighting with the elders had destroyed what was left of his ministerial idealism. He walked into the church’s prayer chapel, raised his fist and shook it in the face of God. “If this is all there is to being a minister, then I just can’t handle it.” His anger vented, he slumped to his knees and prayed.

“I remember dissecting myself, giving the parts to God: ‘Here’s my mind, Lord, it’s yours. Here are my hands, Lord, they’re yours … I can’t handle this by myself. I’m your servant.’

“It was the most moving prayer experience I have ever had. I felt like the weight of the whole church was lifted from my shoulders, and I became filled with an energy that I haven’t experienced since.”

For thirty days he was on a spiritual high. He slept only about three hours a night. He wrote sermons that flowed in one sitting. He prayed through the list of church families daily. “When I went into the pulpit, I felt a sense of compassion for and an identity with the people that had been totally absent before.

“One Sunday shortly after this experience, I preached a sermon on Jesus’ teaching about the narrow way and the broad way. I called on the people to open themselves to the love and discipline of Christ in a fresh way. After we sang three choruses of ‘I Surrender All,’ eight people, including several elders, came to the front for prayer. Some of them were the ones I had been fighting with. I stepped from the platform and prayed with each one individually. Afterward they said, ‘Scotty, you prayed exactly what I was feeling and thinking.’ That was probably the most profound experience of discernment and positive feedback I have ever had with prayer.

“I was able to give myself to prayer and teaching the Word of God in the remaining five months of that ministry. I felt free to minister rather than trying to make the church go, and I discovered more things about true ministry than at any period of my ministry up to that point.

“Even though prayer has become a bedrock of my ministry, I’m still a babe in the woods when it comes to prayer. I’d like to have a long quiet time with the Lord every morning, but frankly I’ve never been able to achieve that. I pray on the run. When people telephone and ask for prayer, I pray with them right there over the wires. If someone stops me after the morning service and asks for prayer, I pull them aside and pray right there. I pray sentence prayers throughout the day as they become needed.

“I wish I could say I love to pray all the time, but there’s something about this flesh that resists it. I used to think that there were universally applicable techniques to learning how to do it—that if I followed them perfectly God would be pleased and prayer would be easy. I don’t believe that anymore. Now I think God calls us all to a unique style of prayer to fit us. Our task is to discover what our style is. That’s what I pray God will teach me—my style.”

The need to pray is unique. The way it finally bores its way into our souls and becomes a permanent feature of our lives is as unique as our conversion experience, for it is in fact a reflection of our relationship with God. Samuel Chadwick said, “Prayer is the privilege of sons and the test of sonship. It would seem as if God divides all men into the simple classification of those who pray and those who do not. It is a very simple test, but it is decisive and divisive.”7

One Christian leader remembered his intense search for prayer as a young pastor. “I felt so strongly that I needed to pray more; I decided to spend three days alone to fast and pray. Near the end of that time I felt an urging to call a man I had confidence in as a spiritual leader. I asked him to come pray for me.

“He lived quite a distance away and so I told him to come only if it seemed right to him. He thought about it and prayed for a day, and then said he’d come. He came, and I was all ready to prostrate myself before him and let him pray over me. Yet the first thing he did was sit down in front of me and begin to confess all his sins. I sat there thinking, What are you doing? I’m supposed to do that for you. He kept doing it, though, and I remained quiet. Finally, he said, ‘Now, do you still want me to pray for you?’

“Then I realized what he was trying to tell me. I had looked to him as a spiritual giant, able to tell me how to fill my need for prayer. He had the discernment to see that, and he wouldn’t help me until I fully realized that it was a matter between God and me. Once he saw I understood that, we began to talk about my spiritual needs.”

The need for prayer is between each person and God. He may use a friend, books, ministry, or other events to point us to that need, but those are only tools to get us face to face with God. Once there, we have a decision to make.

P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1916), 11.

Karl Barth, Prayer and Preaching (Naperville, Illinois: SCM Book Club, 1964), 21.

Stanton Peele, “Out of the Habit Trap,” American Health (September/October 1983): 42ff.

Igumen Valamo, The Art of Prayer (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 204-205.

Forsyth, Soul, 11.

Donald Bloesch, The Struggle of Prayer (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1980), 147.

Samuel Chadwick, God Listens (Westchester, Illinois: Good News Publishers, 1973), 8.

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

I am therefore not really deeply worried that prayer is at present a duty, and even an irksome one. This is humiliating. It is frustrating. It is terribly time wasting. The worse one is praying the longer one’s prayers take, but we are still only at school.
C. S. Lewis1

Our abandonment of one thing is not sufficient to settle us in the habitual practice of the other, but there is need again of some fresh impulse, and of an effort not less than that made in our avoidance of evil dispositions, in order to our acquiring good ones.
John Chrysostom2

Many problems go away if you just leave them alone. Try to fix them and you only make them worse. Most stomach aches, rainstorms, and sour moods, for example, eventually disappear if you ignore them as best you can.

Other problems go away only if you deal with them thoughtfully, thoroughly, and persistently. They need attention. Left alone they slip into the nagging subconscious, but they never go away. The problem of developing a consistent prayer life falls into this category. Without some effort, prayer will not become significant.

Let’s assume, for a moment, you want to work at prayer—whether out of love for or obedience to God, you want to make prayer a regular part of your life. What now?

First we must recognize some dangers in pursuing a habit of prayer. Focusing too heavily on the mechanics of prayer can defeat the very purpose of it. Any time the mechanics of prayer get in the way of loving God, they are useless. Dry, joyless prayer results.

It is somewhat akin to the lack of joy you see in some picture takers. You’ve seen them. They abound at vacation spots and scenic overlooks. They are driven to photograph things even if it means discomfort and distraction to themselves and their loved ones—even if it means they miss seeing the very thing they are trying to photograph.

As a confirmed nonphotographer, I’ve tried to analyze this compulsion. From my sanctimonious perch, I’ve decided these people are trying to package their experiences for future reference even as they are happening. Instead of trusting their own senses to store and process the beautiful scenes and new experiences, they feel they must photograph them so they are stored in a “safe” place, outside their own minds.

An experience approached with blind compulsion can obscure many of its aspects. A photograph, even though perfectly composed, exposed, and developed, will never be able to retain the essence of the experience. Photographers are often left holding in their hands lots of memories but have little to remember. Unless we let our full range of emotions enrich our vision, we have lost something most important.

Focusing too heavily on the mechanics of prayer can produce a similar result. We may pray every day for an hour, and yet the product can be dry, lifeless words sent compulsively heavenward. There is an element to prayer that goes beyond definition, that depends on the mysterious working of the Holy Spirit in the lives of men and women.

A further danger, though, is that we will develop the habit of prayer mindlessly, adopting a prepackaged form without considering how it fits our unique needs. Interestingly, research has shown that habits need to be intensely individualized things. People form them in similar patterns, but the actual content of the habits themselves are unique combinations of the action and the person’s personality.

Knight Dunlap, in his book Habits, illustrates this with a laboratory experiment. Volunteers are given some routine mathematical work to do on adding machines. As they are working, an experimenter sneaks up without warning and discharges a pistol behind them. Predictably, the reaction to this loud noise is almost always violent. But the interesting feature of the experiment is what happens when the process is repeated. Some of the subjects react much less violently, while others react even more violently. In either case, the subject is forming a “habitual” way of responding to the stimulus. But the response itself is quite individualistic and cannot be predicted.3

Forming a prayer habit, at regular times and places, does not mean we conform our prayer life so rigidly to someone else’s pattern that we lose the spontaneity of God working in our lives. It leaves freedom, yet gives form to a lover’s anxious desire for the lover. Or as Proverbs 8:34-36 (tlb) says, “Happy is the man who is so anxious to be with me that he watches for me daily at my gates, or waits for me outside my home! For whoever finds me finds life and wins approval from the Lord. But the one who misses me has injured himself irreparably. Those who refuse me show that they love death.”

One young pastor said, “God is like a father who wants a relationship with his son. I can think of a lot of families that don’t have a good father-son relationship. Usually it’s because they don’t talk—or can’t because of years of poor communication. I think God feels toward me like I feel toward my two-year-old son—I can’t wait until he learns to talk so I can figure out what’s going on inside his head, and he can learn to love me as a friend as well as a father.”

How are regular habits formed? The scientific literature on the subject almost always is prefaced with three questions:4

1. Are you committed to breaking the old habit and forming a new one? One of the most important factors in a commitment to prayer is a positive role model. Paul Rees, lecturer for World Vision, says, “I can still remember my father arising early every morning and going into his study for prayer. I knew what was going on in there, and it had an influence on my prayer life that lasts to this day. My sister-in-law is another. She’s past eighty now, but has been a hard-working woman all her life. She conveys this feeling of how incredibly real the Lord is to her and how easy it is for her to listen and speak to him. I always come away from meeting with her renewed in my resolve to make the Lord that real in me so others see him in what I do.”

Christian leaders continually referred to role models of prayer. Often it was a father, mother, grandfather, or grandmother. Sometimes it was a contemporary. Occasionally it was a biblical hero. One leader mentioned the psalmist as her model: “Psalm 61 recognizes the need for making a commitment to pray, and verses 5-8 have always been an encouragement to my prayer life: ‘For you have heard my vows, O God; to praise you every day, and you have given me the blessings you reserve for those who reverence your name. You will give me added years of life, as rich and full as those of many generations, all packed into one. And I shall live before the Lord forever. Oh send your lovingkindness and truth to guard and watch over me, and I will praise your name continually, fulfilling my vow of praising you each day.'”

2. Are you in control of your life to make the changes necessary? When people feel they can control some conditions, success is more likely. One study showed that when students were given a choice in selecting the classes they took, they performed significantly better on exams and reported greater satisfaction with their classes and instructors than did students who had no choice.5 Rigid insistence that filing, for example, be done in one particular way gave less satisfaction to most secretaries than when they were given an opportunity to work out their own procedures within broad company guidelines.

The implications for prayer are obvious. In order to give yourself the best chance to develop the habit, you need to feel you can control yourself and the form the prayer habit takes. Considering the variety of successful prayer practice we see in those around us, this should be possible if a person is willing to look for the alternatives.

Bill Bump, pastor of the Free Methodist Church of Wheaton, Illinois, said, “The most difficult thing about prayer for me was thinking I had to use someone else’s method and match their expectations. Then I discovered that I work best using short periods of intense concentration; so I matched my prayer practice to that strength by having many short prayer times throughout the day. Once I realized this kind of prayer was all right with God, I found my guilt gone and my prayer much more intense.”

3. Are you willing to make the changes necessary? Willingness to act is the final step. Resolve and opportunity do not mean much if action doesn’t follow. If action doesn’t follow the other two steps, then guilt will result. The psychological principle of evaluative consistency says that we have a basic need for what we think about a subject to match up with what we do about a subject.6

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his book, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, put it a little differently. The central cause of spiritual depression, he said, “is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.” The right way to do it, he says, is as the psalmist does in Psalm 42 when he says, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? Why art thou disquieted within me?”7 At some point we must take hold of ourselves and act.

Steps Toward a Habit of Prayer

Are there steps we can take to form the habit of prayer? Stanton Peele, a social psychologist who has been investigating the problem of addiction for over a decade, has concentrated his study on what is required to break a bad habit and start a new one. Most of his work has been done with reformed alcoholics and drug abusers.8

In studying the pattern of these recoveries, Peele has identified four distinct stages. Although his research has been done with extreme cases, the stages seem to apply broadly.

The first stage is recognizing that the life we are now living is not the life we want to live. We finally, through accumulated unhappiness and recognition of our fallen state, realize that we want to do better. In terms of prayer, it would mean finally recognizing the futility of trying to make it without prayer.

The second stage is a flash of insight, a moment of truth when a decision to change is made. It’s the kind of experience Paul had on the Damascus Road. Life takes a 180-degree turn. In a moment of decision an alcoholic vows never to take another drink, a smoker lays down his cigarettes forever, a heroin user throws away the needle. It may not be easy, but he never looks back. It’s at that point a nonpray-er suddenly decides to pray.

The third stage is putting flesh on the moment-of-truth decision by changing life patterns to accommodate the new lifestyle. For the pray-er this means ordering our environment to encourage prayer. Attend prayer meetings, read literature that encourages prayer, associate with friends who pray and will talk about it with us, make a place and time in our life for regular prayer.

The fourth stage is changing one’s self-perception. No longer are we non-prayers; now we are praying persons and identify ourselves thus.

The next four chapters will look at each of these stages in more detail. We will give examples of Christian leaders who decided to become pray-ers, and we will find that they went through stages very much like the four we just described. Some of the stories resemble Damascus Road experiences. Most of them sound more mundane—they would be mundane, in fact, if they weren’t stories of God working in people’s lives.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 116.

John Chrysostom, “Homilies on Ephesians (Homily xvi),” Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers XIII (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979), 127.

Knight Dunlap, Habits (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 1947), 186.

Frederick Kanfer, “Self-Management Methods,” Helping People Change (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 341.

G. R. Liem, “Performance and Satisfaction As Affected by Personal Control over Salient Decisions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31 (1975): 232-240. Another study showed that when opportunities were available to choose between several alternative ways of doing a complex task, performance improved.T. A. Brigham and A. Stoerzinger, “An Experimental Analysis of Children’s Performance for Self Selected Rewards,” Behavioral Analysis in Education (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt Publishing, 1976).

F. Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1958).

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1973), 2-21.

Stanton Peele, “Out of the Habit Trap,” American Health (September/October 1983): 42ff.

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

In the situation Western man finds himself, we can supply no demonstration of the necessity for prayer or even of its usefulness. It is futile to pretend that prayer is indispensable to man. Today he gets along very well without it.
Jacques Ellul1

You have not because you ask not.
James 4:2

God answers our prayers, and he does not seem to begrudge doing so. He displays good will and cheer—at times, an almost puckish sense of humor.

Consider Genesis 18 where Abraham learns God is going to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham is horror stricken and pleads on behalf of Sodom: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?”

The Lord answers, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Abraham decides fifty might be a touch high: “What if the number is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city because of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there, I will not destroy it.”

Sensing he’s on to something good, Abraham asks, “What if only forty …?”

The Lord agrees.

Thirty?

Again the Lord agrees.

Twenty?

Yet again the Lord agrees.

Abraham pauses, possibly weighing his chances of finding even twenty godly people in a place like Sodom, the 42nd Street of the ancient Near East. Finally he works up his courage for one last request: “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”

God is not angry, probably just bemused. After all, he knows how many godly people are in Sodom: “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

With that, Abraham quits asking, and we’re left wondering: Would God have agreed to spare Sodom if Abraham had asked on the basis of merely one righteous man? Perhaps. But Abraham didn’t try. Was God looking for an advocate for Sodom—someone who cared? Abraham cared, but apparently not enough to risk asking God to save Sodom for the sake of one godly person.

God delights, the Bible says, in giving his people good gifts. Some Scriptures offer God’s help; others command us to make prayer requests so that he can answer them. Question 129 of the Heidelberg Catechism says the answer to our prayers is more certain than our awareness of things we ask for.2 The “problem” of unanswered prayer lies not in any reluctance on God’s part, but in our inability to articulate our requests properly and then accept God’s answer—whether a positive answer or negative. Two problems, in particular, prevent us from seeing our prayers answered.

We Don’t Think To Ask

In many areas of our lives, we simply do not consult God. Vance Havner said that what we used to call worldliness we now call secularization. Both mean we think world first instead of God first. We live in a desacralized, lay world. The sacred dimension to life is no longer assumed, as it was in Abraham’s time. God does not figure in the world’s plans. He is not opposed as much as merely ignored.

The reason that secularization is so dangerous for Christian leaders is that secularization does not harm “religion” at all. A false definition of secularization would be that it is the withering of religion. But as Richard John Neuhaus has pointed out, that has not occurred. If secularization harmed organized religion, we would expect to have fewer churches. But we actually have more. We would expect the proportion of people attending church to be down. But the proportion is greater. We would expect declines in religious rites as opposed to civil alternatives (marriages and funerals), less religious income, less religious literature, and a dwindling of new sects and new movements. But in fact they have all increased. By these standards, religion is doing very well.3

Secularization is growing along with religion. Secularization, properly defined, is a viewpoint that becomes more and more man-centered and less and less God-centered. By that definition we begin to understand the negative impact it has had on prayer life.

A common reason given for prayerlessness is busyness. Often the busyness comes from success. One reason for organized religion’s drift toward man-centeredness is the number of people involved. As churches and organized religion grow, we sense a need to get a rope around the growth—but we forget to let God tie the knot. As management science and demographic technology become more precise, we forget the role God plays in the building of his church. Pure prayer is the sincere crying out of a heart with nowhere else to turn; our fast-changing technology seemingly provides solutions to a lifetime’s worth of turning points, and we are never finally forced to our knees. Our competence in matters organizational leaves no room to lose our dignity before God, the essential precondition of asking for help.

For Christian leaders, a prime illustration is the church business meeting. One pastor said, “For a long time it seemed like we couldn’t integrate the secular and spiritual aspects of our business meetings. Prayer and Bible study was always something we tacked on at the beginning or the end; in between we did our business without considering the spiritual ramifications. Two and a half years ago we were at our annual board retreat and realized that we hadn’t been praying regularly. So the members committed to a weekly prayer meeting at 6:30 Friday morning. They have been remarkably faithful in attending so they must think it’s working. We’ve started to get better at making spiritual decisions at our business meetings, too. But we still have a long way to go.”

C. S. Lewis in his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, writes, “Those who do not turn to God in petty trials will have no habit or such resort to help them when the great trials come. So those who have not learned to ask him for childish things will have less readiness to ask him for the great ones. We must not be too high minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.”4

We Don’t Ask Correctly

Asking incorrectly is epidemic. One leader remembered his experience as a young air force officer in Japan “in the days when getting assigned to Vietnam was a great thing for your military career.”

He said, “I pulled all the strings I could to get assigned there, and finally the papers did get through. I had also prayed God would help me move up. I would be promoted an additional rank, which meant I would be the youngest person of my rank in the entire air force. In fact, everything in my military career had gone great up to that point.

“I was planning to attend an important religious conference in the U.S. on my leave before going to Vietnam. But when my orders came through, I found they had extended me in Japan one month, and I would miss the conference. I immediately went to see the squadron commander to see if there was any way I could get out of the assignment. He said it was too late, the orders had already come through.

“My shrewd career moves forced me to miss a spiritual experience I had been looking forward to. Suddenly it struck me that I had allowed my career to overshadow God in my life. I had placed so much stock in manipulating my career that I had left out the hand of God. I went back to my barracks and fell on my knees and said, ‘God, from now on my life is in your hands. No more premature pushing and pulling from me. I’ll do my best, and trust you to take it from there.’ That was the first time I really felt free in my prayer to God. It was because I finally realized I was too imperfect to ask for some things in my life, and that I could only pray for God’s will.”

Incorrect requests are often uttered, even by Christian leaders. At times, our prayer requests go unanswered because they are poorly formed or presumptuous. We do not take time to discover what the true, pure desires of our hearts should be, and thus offer up incomplete, half-hearted requests that God would be a fool to answer.5 Just what are the gremlins that invade our psyches, causing such weak, inappropriate requests?

We are impatient. We live in a fast-paced world and want quick answers. Ole Hallesby in his classic book on prayer uses Mary the mother of Jesus as the model for the lesson of waiting on God’s time and judgment. He refers to John 2:1-11, the story of the wedding festivities at Cana when the hosts run out of wine. Mary simply tells Jesus, “We have no more wine.” She then waits for him to do something about it, instructing the servants to stand by and carry out Jesus’ bidding.6

Hallesby says this is a paradigm for our requests: State our condition and wait. Too many of us suffer from prayer fatigue because we feel we have to lay out all possible solutions before God and help him make the decision. We may need to do that for ourselves, but not for God.

Several years ago my sister, a public school teacher, told me she was worrying about whether to accept a teaching contract offered by another school district or stay in her current school. Trying to help, I began asking her some fundamental questions: “What are your real options?” It turned out that neither school had actually offered her a contract yet. (This was in a period of declining enrollments, and teaching jobs were yearto-year question marks.) Her worrying was based on possibilities, not facts.

An Old Testament Example

One of the most instructive stories of a leader who catches himself in sin and confesses with tears is found in 2 Samuel 24. King David, chief of saints, chief of sinners, found himself leading without humility. He had taken a national census—on the surface, a harmless enough thing. But God saw David act out of kingly pride. Immediately after doing it, David realized his error. He went to the Lord and said, “What I did was very wrong. Please forgive this foolish wickedness of mine.”

The Lord, through the prophet Gad, offered David three choices of punishment: seven years of famine, three days of plague, or three months of fleeing before David’s enemies. David, saying it was better to fall into the hands of the Lord than those of Israel’s enemies, chose the three days of plague. Seventy thousand Israelites died before God lifted the plague.

David’s action and God’s response are particularly instructive because the sin was not one of action, like David’s adultery with Bathsheba or murder of Uriah, but one of attitude. It was a subtle case of pride. Because of its privacy, the lessons we learn about confession are all the more instructive for leaders who often find themselves making decisions in the isolation of leadership. Three lessons stand out:

First, true confession does not necessarily come about because circumstances demand it. Taking a national census was not a crime against humanity. No one was threatened by it. A census could be a good thing under certain circumstances. External pressure did not force David to confess this “sin,” even though his chief military leader, Joab, suggested it was arrogant. David was king and could act contrary to his counselor’s advice if he wished. He confessed because his conscience bothered him—he knew he had acted out of pride.

Second, confession must be a sincere conviction of sin. It is not public apology or ritualistic appeasement. David gained no “political” advantage because of his confession. In fact, the country suffered because he confessed. A census probably seemed a normal thing to do. The public demanded no apology; David had nothing material to gain for his confession.

Third, confession is not the end of the story. Far from it. In the short run, confession made things tougher. We don’t know what would have happened to David had he not confessed his act to God. But it is hard to imagine consequences any worse than what ended up happening. Seventy thousand dead from plague—a high price to pay for sin and reconciling with God.

Why did God punish David’s sin so severely? Perhaps he did not want confession confused with appeasement—confession does not mean we’re off the hook. Confession does not make things easier for us. Confession does not make God look the other way about our sin. Confession does not absolve us of our responsibility. Confession prepares us for conversation with God and acceptance of his forgiveness, his terms, his sovereignty.

The Modern Problem

The danger today is not so much in confusing confession with appeasement (we hardly remember God at all, let alone a need to appease him); our danger is in viewing prayer as a means to mental health. Our results-oriented society evaluates prayer this way:

• unless it produces measurable fruits, it’s ineffective.

• unless it has value to us personally, it’s valueless.

• unless it outperforms TM, counseling, personal growth, and home education, what good is it?

This modern mindset predisposes us to look at prayer as a practical tool for our own benefit. Frankly, however, this “can do” spirit does not mesh well with the humility necessary for prayer.

Only one step further and the Christian leader begins to apply that pragmatic spirit to ministry and make prayer the magic wand that produces good fruit in the local church or religious organization. To be sure, it is almost always done subconsciously. But isn’t that attitude the root of the lament, “I’ve worked so hard at this ministry; why doesn’t God make me feel better about it?”

An even greater danger awaits the successful ministry, which is a greater threat to the prayer of confession than a failing ministry. H. B. London, pastor of the First Church of the Nazarene in Salem, Oregon, says, “It’s hardest for me to pray properly when I am self-righteous. The moment I find myself good enough or adequate, I think I’ve got it made. When things are going well, it’s easy for me to put prayer in the category of just one more successful program.”

Prayer can be cathartic. Prayer can relax us. Prayer can make life more rewarding and fulfilling. A recently released paperback “proved” prayer was a good thing because scientific studies have shown it to do all these things. It can resolve conflict, get rid of guilt, and overcome negative complexes.

But there are days when prayer does not do any of those things. There are days when unresolved sin blocks the positive effects of prayer. It takes time to work through these things with God, and on those days, the positive psychological effects of prayer may be lacking. If we have come to view prayer as nothing more than a psyche-boosting (or church-building) technique, we are bound to be disappointed. Transcendental meditation probably has a better track record when it comes to simply making one “feel good.”

One pastor confessed, “Some days prayer isn’t joyous. When it isn’t, I repent because I believe we’re commanded to rejoice in the Lord always. We ought to feel guilty when we’re not happy in God. But sometimes we aren’t. And if you think of prayer as just a time to feel good, chances are you will run away from God.”

We must recognize the bankrupty of thinking of prayer as the way to feel good, to be guilt-free. That is an impossible, inappropriate goal. In many ways, guilt is the surest proof of God. Guilt is not the weight of an imperfect upbringing, a decadent society, a mind twisted by legalistic parents. Guilt is God calling us back to prayer so he can tell us the reason we were created. Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard said, “A man could not have anything upon his conscience if God did not exist, for the relationship between the individual and God, the God-relationship, is the conscience, and that is why it is so terrible to have even the least thing upon one’s conscience, because one is immediately conscious of the infinite weight of God.”4

The prayer of confession lightens, then finally removes that weight and breaks ground for us to sow our seeds of request and petition.

E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1972), 36.

Arnold Dallimore, Spurgeon (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984), 14.

Tertullian, “On Prayer,” Ante-Nicene Fathers 3 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980), 690.

Quoted in Context, June 1, 1983, p. 4, from Soren Kierkegaard, Parabola.

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

Cartoon in Punch of a man praying at bedside saying: “Is there some way you could help me, but make it look like I did it all myself?”
Note in the “Personals” section of the Chicago Tribune: “Thanks to God and Jesus Christ for prayers answered. K.W.G.”1

Prayer of the Selfish Child
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my toys to break
So none of the other kids can use ’em …
Amen.
Shel Silverstein
2

An old man wistfully reads the Hebrew Scripture’s promise of a Messiah to come. Night after night he reads until the light or his energy wanes. Each night he prays, O, that I could see the Messiah before I die!

Silence is his only answer. Still he prays.

Then one night he prays and, instead of silence, God answers: I have heard your prayer. You shall see the Promised One.

Not sure he has heard correctly, the old man continues his yearning prayer on the nights that follow—yet the answer grows stronger, more firm. You shall see him. You shall hold him and touch the Messiah.

Simeon’s joy was great. He was probably already an old man when God told him he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. The promised coming of the Savior was ancient, and few really believed it any more. For a man of Simeon’s age, it was too much to hope for. Yet God said it would happen—and the promised day did come.

In the temple Simeon took the baby Jesus in his arms and said, “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people.”

Simeon’s experience in the second chapter of Luke is the paradigm of true thanksgiving. What better reason for giving thanks to God than the fact that we have all been given the chance to see the Savior? We have not held the baby Jesus in our arms, but we have been given the joy of holding him in our minds and hearts. If every other facet of our lives were negative—if we were poor, homeless, and friendless—we would still have this reason to be thankful: the fact of Jesus Christ.

Our human nature being what it is, however, very often we find the fact of Jesus Christ is not enough to help us maintain an attitude of thanksgiving. Gratitude is one of the most difficult emotions to express and maintain.

Perhaps our culture is partly to blame. Gratitude is particularly hard when everything comes easily, when our relative wealth makes us think we can, by birthright or the sweat of our brow, get whatever we need. Why should we be thankful when we’ve earned it on our own?

For Christian leaders, the problem is even more complex. Leaders are victim to all the gratitude-limiting pressures of a wealthy society, but as helping professionals they also suffer the ingratitude of those they serve, both lay workers and fellow leaders. Christian leaders are assailed from two directions: a sated society and a sometimes thankless Christian community.

The Problem of Wealth

Wealth is not a worldwide phenomenon. Other cultures have to still struggle to earn their daily bread, to keep their families warm and safe. Westerners who live in those cultures for even a short time discover new meaning to the word gratitude. Missionaries are typical.

Franklin and Phileda Nelson went to Burma as missionaries in the 1940s. They served there eight and a half years before the government closed the country to further missionary work. They returned to the United States where Franklin served several churches in various pastoral roles.

While in Burma they worked among remote tribes, and Franklin found his sense of gratitude for God’s providence rekindled:

“In the Burmese hill country, the only way to get to remote villages was by ‘shank mare.’ (That’s walking, in case you’ve never heard the phrase.) It was not at all uncommon for me to walk twenty miles a day in the dry season. When I got back to the States and worked as a pastor and church leader, I rarely walked a mile a day; the telephone and car made walking unnecessary.

“In Burma, if one of us got sick, the nearest hospital was ten days away. In the States, medical care is minutes away.

“In Burma, we’d go months without bread. Once we asked our daughter Karen to say grace before a meal, and she said, ‘Why do I have to pray for my daily bread when I don’t ever get any?’ I have often coveted that experience for our youngest daughter who never had to wonder where her food came from. It’s hard to have that sense of helplessness and humility so vital to prayer when you sit down to your daily bread and don’t even think about how you got it.

“I don’t in any way blame people here for not knowing what God can do. We’re victims of our prosperity. But I sometimes wish we had a few more hard times so people could experience first hand how wonderful it is to be totally dependent on God.”

The Problem of Thankless Followers

One denominational official lamented that for him one of the hardest things about leadership has been developing lay and professional leaders in churches, only to have them quickly forget “from whence cometh their help” and turn their backs on their benefactors as soon as they begin to make it on their own.

I asked my father, who recently retired after thirty-five years of teaching at a Christian college, if he had any regrets about his fruitful professorial career.

“I guess it would have to be the lack of gratitude by students,” he said. “I never had very high expectations about students thanking me. They are in school at a difficult age—late teens and early twenties. Their identity crisis makes it a hard time psychologically for expressing thankfulness. But I did notice a steady decline over the years in what gratitude there was. It was almost as if students were never taught to be thankful. And even though I didn’t expect much gratitude, I missed it all the same.”

Gratitude is one of those curious emotions that grows or shrivels in direct proportion to the amount we receive from others. Pastors, especially, seem to get caught in the middle of a two-flank attack: our wealthy society discourages it, and the nature of the pastoral task often seems hopeless, helpless, and thankless. Over the past generation or two, a subtle devaluation of the pastoral role has occurred that rivals the devaluation of the dollar. In the same span that has seen the dollar shrink in buying power by almost half, the role of the pastor in the local community has probably shrunk even further. The natural respect once shown is a thing of the past. The gratitude that goes with respect is even less.

Interestingly, you don’t find many pastors publicly bemoaning their reduced status. But in terms of their functioning in the community, in terms of their spiritual lives, the danger is that cynicism about the task can subtly creep in and rot the roots of thankfulness.

Gratitude Based on God Not Man

What’s the solution? Perhaps to focus on the natural opportunities of Christian leadership, not its shortcomings. The call to ministry is not strictly parallel to other professional career paths. God guides his chosen leaders in profound ways. We sometimes feel frustrated with our inability to discern God’s will for our lives. The factor most often overlooked in such cases is that gratitude for guidance is actually one of the things that increases its intensity. Recognition that God has directed in the past is what increases the volume of his voice in the future.

Some helpful insights for gratitude can be found in the twenty-sixth chapter of Deuteronomy. This passage outlines three elements to thanksgiving:

The first is a concrete expression of thanks. “Take some of the firstfruits of all that you produce from the soil of the land … and set it down in front of the altar of the Lord your God” (vv. 2-4). God says that when the Israelites arrive in the land and have conquered it and are living there, they must present to the Lord the firstfruits from each annual harvest. They are to take it in a basket and hand it to the priest at the temple.

It is almost paradoxical but still true today: giving increases gratitude. Psychologists tell us that the human mind grasps the concrete far more easily than the abstract. By giving a concrete expression of thanks, the abstract reality (our feeling of gratitude), the crucial part, becomes more real to us.

Sometimes the concrete gift is prayer itself. Gib Martin, pastor of Trinity Church in Burien, Washington, said, “Bonhoeffer wrote that the Psalms were God’s gift to the church, and when we have nothing else to give God, we can give those back to him in the form of prayers. I have tried that and reaped the benefits.”

The second element is to remember difficulties God has seen you through. Verses five to nine say that after the priest has accepted the gifts in the name of God, the people should recite a brief history of their being freed from Egypt and given a new fertile land. In this illustration, the children of Israel remember what it was like to live in Egypt. For us it is the remembrance or recognition of what we are like without God. After all, that is the crucial factor. What is it like not to hold the Messiah in our hearts and minds? Bleak, desolate, hopeless.

One Christian leader said she uses the harder times of her life to combat current crises: “I’m a person who is always ready with plan B or C if plan A doesn’t work out. I think my experiences have forced me to develop that attitude. I once had three major surgeries in three months. I had no control over what would happen with my life then. Remembering those brick walls helps me understand God’s sovereignty and the potter/clay relationship.”

Perhaps for today’s Christian leaders, fellowship needs are greater than any other. Most local churches, for example, are one-person pastorates, and most are operated in entrepreneurial fashion. Fellowship languishes under such conditions. No camaraderie with staff, no employer to unload on, no evaluation sessions to tell you how it’s going. Ministerial associations usually turn into brag sessions rather than brainstorming sessions. The minister feels cut off from the warmth of peer support.

Again, Franklin Nelson’s experience on the mission field is instructive. “Like the pastorate in the States, the mission field can be lonely. I remember when our first daughter was born. Several days after her birth I had to visit some villages. It would take two weeks. After a couple days out I began to feel sorry for myself. I was alone, climbing steep hills, no one to talk to and tell about my new daughter.

“I asked the Lord for some sign that he was with me. I didn’t know what I wanted him to do because I didn’t know what would help me. As far as I knew, it was impossible to cheer me up. But I asked God to do it anyway.

“The middle of that afternoon I came to a village. It was a new Christian village that was just beginning to get grounded spiritually, so I didn’t expect the warm welcome of old friends. But to my surprise, they came out en masse singing a welcome song. I hadn’t planned on spending the night there, but they asked me to. They took me to a hut they had cleaned up very nicely. I decided to stay.

“This overwhelming hospitality and love, totally unexpected, answered my prayer. It was simple, something we expect almost as a matter of course back home. But it was just what I needed at that time.”

Remembrances of God’s love in good times and bad can stimulate our gratitude.

The third element is to be grateful for what the Lord has made out of us. After reciting the litany of our once-lost-now-found status, the Lord says to “rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household” (v. 11). Like Simeon who held the baby Jesus and rejoiced, we should be ever aware that God has worked, is working, and will continue to work in our lives.

For Christian leaders, then, the key to developing a deep thankfulness is to not base our gratitude on the uncertain status of wealth and prosperity, nor the fickle gratitude of those we serve. The Christian leader’s gratitude must be based on a deep satisfaction in ministries faithful to God’s will.

Gordon Johnson is a semi-retired pastor of College Avenue Baptist Church in San Diego. Before coming to California, Gordon had been dean of a Christian college and had held several pastorates.

“Gratitude for me comes only when I focus strictly on what God has done in my life. For example, I pray for guidance more often than anything—and God has always answered.

“When I was serving a church in Chicago, I had two job offers at once. One was to become dean of students at a Christian college. They asked first, and after interviewing there, I was pretty convinced I would go if the college trustee board approved the call. I went back to Chicago and preached in my church on Sunday morning. After the service representatives from another church in the area came up and asked if they could take me and my family out to dinner. We had no other commitments, so I agreed. At dinner they asked me if I would come to pastor their church. I was thrown into a terrible confusion. Why is God doing this? What is he trying to tell me?

“That week an official letter of invitation came from both the church and the college. I prayed about both at length and finally wrote a letter of acceptance to the college and a letter of rejection to the other church. My wife typed the letters, and I remember sitting on the edge of my bed that evening looking at them both. I felt sick, plagued by inner doubt. You’re just getting emotional about this, I thought. Get them in the mail and that will give you some peace.

“I walked to the corner mailbox and dropped the letters in. But when I got back home, I felt sicker and sicker about the whole thing. About eleven o’clock that night I called the post office to see if I could get the letters back. ‘Too late,’ they said. They had already gone.

“The next morning I called the college president and asked if he would please ignore the letter he was about to receive from me. I did the same with the pastoral search committee. Then I got on a train and went back to the college for one more look. By the end of that visit I decided being dean of students wasn’t for me, and I turned down their invitation. I also declined the invitation from the other church.

“Looking back, I think God used the invitation from the church to get me to rethink the way he was working in my life. He used that and my dis-ease during my prayers.”

Had Gordon not asked the fundamental question of What is God trying to tell me in this? his prayer for guidance might have been the much more self-centered Please God, which of these offers will be the best for me?

If we gauge our gratitude on worldly wealth and opportunity, we may someday find ourselves in Franklin Nelson’s shoes in Burma with no worldly wealth to celebrate. If we gauge gratitude on the thankfulness of those around us, human nature will disappoint us. Nine of ten healed lepers ran away without thanking even Jesus.

If, however, we gauge gratitude by the way God has worked in our lives, then nothing the world withholds can dispel our thanksgiving, and we can even rejoice in the pettiness of those around us because we can say, “Lord Jesus, thank you for the opportunity of working with these your children so obviously in need of your love.” To those who seek, God provides the grace to be gracious.

Cited by Martin Marty in Context (October 1984): 2.

Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 15.

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or stimulate it where it does not.
François de la Rochefoucauld1

God does not need praise by men, but he knows apriori, that when men cease to praise him, they begin to praise one another excessively.
Isaac Bashevis Singer2

As I sit to write this chapter on love, I feel most unloving. Things have gone wrong all day. The weather doesn’t help—it’s muggy, the air heavy and oppressive, sapping my energy as the August rain drips outside. Perhaps the dreariness affected my associate. This afternoon he did something totally out of character, and I responded in kind. I got home late for supper, and my wife, not knowing when I would arrive, had nothing prepared. She offered to put slices of tomato and cheese on top of a piece of bread and grill it for me. Ugh. My stomach cringes, and all I can think about is that I have to go back to the office and write this chapter on love. Feeling as I do, how can I write about the love of God as a motivation for prayer?

The Psychologizing of Love

We might call it the psychologizing of love. Love has come to be defined as the conglomerate of several different behaviors. This “ingredient” view of love reminds me of the report cards we received in grade school. Half of the card reported on something called citizenship. I was rated in areas like deportment, industriousness, participation, helpfulness, and cleanliness. If I scored well in all these areas, I was a good citizen of that class.

Too often we have attempted to do the same thing with love. We’ve taken a listing of loving behaviors, such as the one found in 1 Corinthians 13, put check marks by the ones we have observed in ourselves, and resolved to work on the ones we find missing. The problem is, love is both larger and more simple than such a list.

First, it is larger. Perhaps all the behaviors in such a list truly are the fruits of love. Still, in the case of love, the whole is larger than the sum of the parts. There is a reality to love deeper than such analysis can provide.

Second, love is also simpler. Reduced to its essence, love is a total orientation of one’s being to the object of desire. Whether that object is a person, god, race, or ideal, love demands we prioritize the rest of life to meet whatever demands that object requires. Behaviors are important and can be improved or developed. But if they are divorced from a central object of desire, they lose their meaning. Christian behavior is only important if related to faith in Christ.

No group of people is more susceptible to the negative effects of reducing love to a set of behaviors more clearly than Christian leaders who deal with Christians daily, often at the crisis points of their lives. For pastors, the desire to help people is particularly strong. And what better place to start than with their overt behavior? The subtle temptation is to begin to reduce problems to observable behavior, which can be effective—until it begins to obscure the whole person’s stance before God.

Judy Morford, an associate pastor at Cedar Mill Bible Church in Cedar Mill, Oregon, finds this a particular danger for those who do a lot of counseling. Judy, who does counseling at Cedar Mill, says that dealing with people problemso much has convinced her people need to be dealt with as more than the sum of their behaviors:

“We have tended to psychologize everything. For example, if someone has some schizophrenic behaviors, they may be labeled schizophrenic. Psychological tests designed to spot abnormalities may indicate schizophrenia. But as I talk to the people, I discover they are functioning in the mainstream of society, apparently not needing to be institutionalized. They do have some abnormal behavior patterns, but something prevents those patterns from dominating their lifes. Often, after probing, I’ll find it’s their faith that’s holding them together—praying Christians able to function in spite of their problems.

“When a high school youth gets in trouble for drinking, the tendency is to brand that youth a drinker and troublemaker, when his behavior may be prompted by a very specific thing—an argument with a close friend, for example. Psychological categorizing has made us go to two extremes: identifying people as behaviors on the one hand, and making people unresponsible for their behaviors on the other. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Or to put it another way, without recognizing the reality of sin and God’s dealing with it, you can’t properly understand human beings.

“Pop psychology has affected the way we treat one another. People use terms nowadays that only psychologists used five years ago. Self-esteem, neurotic, anxiety, and many other words are all used now by the general population. The danger for Christians is that what we once viewed as spiritual problems are now being categorized as psychological problems, and that can lead to a cheapening of our relationship with God.”

Psychologists need to define schizophrenia by lists of observable behaviors. And perhaps a psychological definition of love needs to be established the same way. But a biblical definition of love does not lend itself to such dissection, and for precisely that reason spiritual categories can never be subsumed under the psychological. Reduced to the simplest terms, psychology looks manward and spirituality looks Godward. Psychology is a good and valuable resource, but when it replaces our spirituality, we have confused our priorities.

One pastor has a sign on his desk that says simply, “Pray first.” Too often we ignore that sound advice and instead analyze first.

This method of dealing with other people also affects the way we deal with ourselves. Often we think more about how we stand with other men than with God. It’s something our success-oriented culture encourages. A study done not too long ago identified the eleven most common patterns of irrational thinking modern men and women exhibit. Perfectionistic self-love was at the core of most of them. For example, three of the patterns were:

• It is a dire necessity for me to be loved or approved by every significant person in my social sphere.

• I must be thoroughly competent, adequate, and achieving in all possible respects if I am to consider myself worthwhile.

• There is a perfect solution to human problems, and it is catastrophic if this correct solution is not found.3

Each of these problems looks for its solution in the self. At the heart is the idea that man should be able to do what only God is capable of doing. The problems we try to resolve in our modern minds are not those between God and man, but between man and man—how do I stack up against others? And if I stack up poorly, how can I improve myself to do better? Is it any wonder we have trouble loving God when we are so occupied with perfecting ourselves?

The essence of prayer is love. The biblical heroes of the faith realized that. They all begin their prayers with worship. Unfortunately, we have lost the priority of love in our prayers. Too often the prayers of modern men and women start with apology. We gratuitously pay God homage by apologizing for our imperfections, which will surely get better as soon as we get a chance to attend to the problem. “Just bear with me, God.”

The result is that, for many, the Bible has ceased to be a book of choice—love God or love him not. It has become a behavioral reference book. We search its pages for clues to the proper set of behaviors that will make us lovers of God. When we find them—and the models are there—we resolve to put them into practice thereby manufacturing the “love of God” that is the primary motivation to prayer. Unfortunately, we fall short of what love really is. We end up with a kindergartener’s copy of the Mona Lisa. And our motivation for prayer gets off on the wrong foot. In fact, it doesn’t even stand up at all.

Ennobling Prayer

What can we do about restoring love to its proper place in the life of prayer? The first thing, perhaps, is simply to realize that true prayer reflects love of God, not fear of our own mortality in the face of a wrathful deity. Thomas Aquinas noted long ago, “If prayer were a cringing, whining, coaxing of a whimsical God, it would debase a man; … it is, in fact, the ennobling thing that has so set apart the saints from the cowardly braggarts who deify themselves and the whining cowards who dehumanize themselves.”4 Love of God, reflected in our prayers, makes us fully human.

The paradox of loving God is this: If we forget about perfecting ourselves and love our Creator, we become perfect in God. If we do it the other way around, we not only fail at perfection, but we send God a counterfeit love that further estranges us from him.5

Thus, we need to establish what Judy Morford calls a “first love” relationship: “I like to use the phrase, ‘warp and woof’ to describe the Christian’s relationship to God—even though it is a cliché. The phrase comes from the weaving process, and describes the interchange of threads that make a fabric. It also applies to the Christian life. The threads must come together in a fundamental pattern, or they remain useless threads. To become cloth, they must be put together in a special way. Love of God is that fundamental pattern in the Christian’s life. Without that, the threads of our life remain isolated behaviors that have no meaning, and no amount of improving the threads will make it a piece of cloth.”

In teaching this to people at the church or to counselees, Morford uses the first chapter of 1 Thessalonians “where Paul presents a trilogy of things he’s thankful for in the young Christians: their labor of love, their work of faith, and their hope grounded in Christ. I think it’s clear that love is the basis of their work. Without it, their works are meaningless.

“My own prayer life has been through many changes over the years. As a young mother, I had a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a one-year-old, and I found the only time I could really pray was literally in the middle of the night. If I woke up then, I would pray. As the kids grew older, I began to get up at 4:30 in the morning to pray. I still don’t have ideal conditions for regular prayer. As a mother of three teenagers and working full time, I sometimes get too tired to pray. But most days I’m able to work in some time for quiet prayer.

“Because of my changing schedule over the years, I’ve asked myself, Just what does God expect of me in my prayer life? The answer I come up with is he wants a love relationship. He doesn’t want a hired servant; he wants a bride. A true love will always find a way. It may not always be the same way, or the prescribed way, but it will be a way that reflects love. That’s what God wants from me.”

Modeling Love to One Another

Besides recognizing that prayer is grounded on a love relationship with God, we must also look to the one element of society that can still model Christian love properly—the body of Christ, the church. Joseph Sittler has observed, “Love is the function of faith horizontally just as prayer is the function of faith vertically.”6 Perhaps we must concede that we will not find much Christian love modeled in our secular society. But the church is set up to do precisely that. Both the holy catholic church and the besteepled clapboard church on the corner are living witnesses to and training grounds for what loving one another really means.

What happens when members of the body of Christ model this love to one another, both in relationships and prayer? God’s will is experienced and enjoyed—and we rejoice in it together, no matter what the particular event is. It may be healing; it may be tragedy.

One pastor told two stories of love in action. One was of a young man in the congregation named Rick who had a motorcycle accident and was given almost no chance of living by the doctors attending him. If he did live, the doctors told his parents, he would be severely paralyzed. The church came out every night for a week to pray. Slowly the young man recovered and now, seven years later, is totally healed and active. The congregation rejoiced in answered prayer.

The other was a bittersweet experience. A twenty-nine-year-old mother of a two-year-old son died from cancer. “We prayed over Susan with the elders, anointing her with oil. The congregation prayed for her fervently, as we had for Rick five years earlier. But healing didn’t come. In that process of frequently lifting her up to God, I learned that even when God doesn’t give us what we want, he gives us the encouragement we need to go through the experience. We wanted her healed so badly, but we gave her up to God. And it became clear, even in the way she died, that God was at work.

“In both instances I saw a tremendous uniting of our body. In the first, a uniting of enthusiasm, excitement, and joy. In the second, a uniting in hurt and sorrow. A deep love for each other and God came out of both experiences, I think largely because we prayed desperately in both, but were willing to put our love for God and a desire for his will first.”

What the world needs desperately is Christian love. But the world cannot manufacture it. It must come from the Source, reflected through the lovers of the Source.

Francois Rochefoucauld, Sentences and Moral Maxims (New York: French and European Publications, 1976) Maxim 70.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Prayer,” GEO (February 1983): 81.

A. Ellis, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (New York: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1962).

Thomas Aquinas, My Way of Life (New York: Confronternity of the Precious Blood, 1952), 35.

See also Scott Peck’s excellent discussion of modern man’s weak attempts to love in The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 81-184.

Cited in Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology 2 (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978), 56.

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

God’s command and promise is our sole motive for prayer. Nothing could be commanded more precisely than what is stated in the Psalm, ‘Call upon me in the day of tribulation’ (50:15). Those who try to wriggle out of coming directly to God are not only rebellious and stubborn, but are also convicted of unbelief because they distrust the promises.John Calvin1

Prayer is the sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God through Christ in the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God hath promised, or according to the Word for the good of the church, with submission and faith to the will of God.
John Bunyan2

What drives us to prayer? One pastor said, “It’s a little bit like loving your wife: you love her for a variety of reasons, and different reasons predominate at different times. Sometimes you pray out of sheer desperation. Sometimes out of unhappiness with yourself. Sometimes because you love the Lord. Sometimes it’s a sense of feeling utterly overwhelmed—a feeling of inadequacy. A person will call on the phone and say, ‘My wife just kicked me out of the house. Can I come over and talk with you?’ So you’ll say, ‘Sure, come on over and we’ll talk.’ You hang up the phone, and say to yourself, What in the world do I say to this person? That’s when you pray.”

That kind of pressure can drive the Christian leader in one of two directions: toward spiritual arrogance or toward total dependence on God. When the pressure is handled with simplistic authoritarianism (“I’m the only one who can handle this situation”), the leader is susceptible to arrogance. The road to that extreme leads to burnout or becoming hardened by spiritual callousness.

The road to total dependence, however, is a difficult one. It is relatively easy to drop to one’s knees in emergency situations; it is much more difficult to depend on God when things are going well. The prayers of contrition uttered when things are going well, however, are the signs of true dependence on God. What are the forces that should drive us to our knees in the good times?

There are many good reasons to pray, but only one rises above the vicissitudes of life, above the vagaries of the emotional roller coaster we ride daily. That primary reason should head the list.

Obedience

God commands us to pray. Faithful followers obey that command. Unfortunately, obedience is not the most popular motivation today. It is certainly not an act that men and women in leadership positions are accustomed to performing. Obedience requires a loss of freedom. In human situations it means entrusting part of our will to someone else. In the divine situation it means entrusting our total will to God.

Leaders do not feel comfortable entrusting their wills to someone else. Ordinarily, leaders rise to their positions of responsibility because they make good decisions. Whether their skills are entrepreneurial or managerial, the levers of decision making feel good in their hands. A certain level of independence is required of those who shoulder the loneliness of leadership. Used to the freedom, leaders are usually reluctant obeyers.

This does not mean Christian leaders are bad Christians. On the contrary, they are often very effective because they choose to operate on the basis of another command of God, the Great Commandment, which says to love God totally and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Effective leaders do not submit to self-destructive employees, power-grabbing associates, or advisers of limited vision. Effective leaders do, however, constantly put the welfare of each of these groups above en their own welfare, and make decisions accordingly—not necessarily giving each group what it wants, but what it needs. That’s operating by the command of love.

If we could consistently operate on the basis of this commandment, both in relation to colleagues and to God, the problem with prayer would be solved. If our love for human beings were perfect, all our personnel decisions would be effective ones. If our love for God were perfect, we would desire constant communion with him. Prayer would be a way of life.

Unfortunately, few of us are able to claim perfect love. Clouds of one sort or another hide our vision of God far more days than we would like to admit. We want to do the best for those around us, but our pride and self-interest keep tripping us up. We can’t love perfectly because our love for ourselves keeps getting in the way. Thus we are thrown back to depend on the law of obedience. We do what God commands. Given our sinful human natures, it’s a more reliable guide.

The religions of the world have long recognized the need for the law of obedience to compensate for our inability to love perfectly. Judaism, for example, has a tradition regarding the many items of its law code. Rabbis call it the “fence around the law.”3 Only a small percentage of those laws are absolutely essential to avoid apostasy. The others are important, however, because they act as buffers to keep the faithful from breaking the core laws.

In truth, for the average religious person, these peripheral laws become as important as the core laws because they define a lifestyle that should become second nature. They live that way not out of following the law but because they love God. But, life being what it is, very few can live a faithful lifestyle out of love. So God commands it through the law.

Christianity has a similar tradition. We have our “negative” standards about what it means to be a Christian, such as the Ten Commandments. I grew up with an additional Baptist fence around the law: Thou shalt not smoke, drink, dance, play cards, watch television, or play baseball on Sunday. In truth, following these “laws” is not necessary to being a Christian. But I followed them and reflect on them with fondness. The content of those laws did not make me a better Christian; the act of obeying them probably did.

Depending upon our stage of Christian maturity, our obedience can be done out of varying degrees of love or be done strictly mechanically. Christian mystics, such as Theophan the Recluse, valued unquestioning obedience above any ascetic feat: “You have termed unwilling obedience ‘mechanical obedience.’ In actual fact, the only kind of obedience that effectively shapes our character is obedience performed against our own will and our own ideas. If you do something because that is the way your heart is inclined, where is the obedience? You are merely following your own will and tastes. If you recognize your motives, you make such self-willed action slightly better. But in true obedience you obey without seeing the reason for what you are told to do, and in spite of your own reluctance.”4

Although it does risk the danger of mechanical observance, obedience has advantages: It is simple, and there is less chance to subconsciously fail in obeying than in loving. It’s no secret that the minute we try to do something good out of our own efforts, it begins to be mixed with pride and selfishness. Obedience and submission to God minimize that pride, although we can never do away with it completely.

For this reason, obedience is the primary reason we should pray. God commands it, and a command from God implies a relationship with the commander. We obey because we are loyal to our leader, and we want to comply. We pray to obey.

Dissecting Obedience

Our minds being what they are, the simple command of obedience does not satisfy us intellectually. Although it is reason enough to force us on our knees, obedience can leave us cold when the everyday emotions of anger, frustration, depression, and desire seem to control our every move.

Obedience insures that we come to God in prayer, but it cannot prepare us emotionally to seek God. Each time we come we have different feelings about our purpose. We may come with a heart overwhelmed with God’s goodness. We may come angry that his faithful servants are being mistreated. We may come wishing to confess our sin. We may come with requests for ourselves or others. Each of these is a valid motivation for prayer. Each helps determine the content of a particular prayer. Each, if understood, can help us structure our prayer time more effectively.

There is another very practical reason for looking beyond obedience for more specific motivations. Understanding why we pray (or don’t pray) is the first step toward establishing the habit of prayer.5 Understanding motives is important, and we need to check those motives against what God expects of us in prayer. The techniques for developing consistent habits work if the will to use them is present. But the will to adopt them comes from understanding God’s context for prayer.

Richard “Doc” Kirk, youth pastor of River Road Baptist Church in Eugene, Oregon, found that his lifelong desire for understanding and wisdom has been the motive for his prayer life: “My biblical hero has always been Solomon. Ever since I was a teenager, I have asked God for wisdom because that was what Solomon had. I remember a particular incident that convinced me of the importance of understanding. A man came in my dad’s feed and grain store and asked me if I was a Christian. I said I thought so. He looked at me hard and began to explain what he meant when he said Christian, and I realized I didn’t understand. I had always prayed and gone to church because my parents taught me to do it. But it was only when I understood what it meant to have the Spirit of God living in me, giving me the power to live for him, that my prayer life became real. Since then, my prayer life has come alive. And since becoming a pastor I realize that understanding my prayer life is not only important to me but to the people I lead. If they can see me pray, and talk to me about prayer, then there’s a better chance it will become important in their lives, too.”

The fact that we even have to ask the question of what drives us to prayer is, perhaps, symptomatic of our times. In biblical times, extreme circumstances drove people to their knees more often than they do today, not because we have fewer extremes today, but because we are too arrogant (or ignorant) to recognize our helplessness in the face of them. King David took his burden of leadership responsibility seriously. But he recognized his inadequacy to deal with that responsibility alone. His psalms are the result of a leader’s breaking heart over his need for God’s guidance and power.

In our defense, we might say that David lived in a time when the mystery of supernatural help was more easily accepted. The dangers the people of that time faced were more physical; the threat of famine and war were constant, and appealing to God (or gods) was an accepted way of handling the problems.

Today, the threats we face are more psychological than physical. Hunger does not threaten us as much as faceless anxiety. To combat anxiety, we look for solutions in counselors’ offices rather than God’s grace. One Christian leader said, “The problem today is that we understand everything. The knowledge explosion makes prayer anticlimactic. Researchers say that every mystery science solves opens the door to exploring even more profound mysteries. But to the man on the street, the mysteries are all solved or soon will be. Solved mysteries destroy the soil in which prayer grows best. Prayer thrives on mystery. It works best when our knowledge of God is based solely on faith.”

To be sure, cultural conditions do not change the motivations to prayer. But conditions do change the form those motivations take. They also threaten us with disguising our impure motivations as pure. Indeed, it is easy to bring God requests we consider legitimate when they really are thinly disguised sin. The Scriptures teach that even prayer, the language of the Christian heart, can become misguided in subtle ways if not constantly checked against God’s commands.

One particularly interesting example was Jephthah, a great warrior of Gilead. As Jephthah prepared the army for one important battle, he prayed a vow that if victory was given to Israel, he would, upon returning home in peace, sacrifice as a burnt offering to the Lord the first thing coming out of his house to meet him.

God gave Jephthah’s army victory, but as he returned home, who should run out of his house to greet him? His daughter, his only child. When he saw her he tore his clothes in anguish.

Jephthah’s prayer vow is an example of conjuration, an attempt to make a pact with gods and divinities, sometimes devils and other evil spirits. Such prayers arise out of a mistaken impression of what God expects of petitions. God cannot be manipulated into giving gifts. Answers to prayer are grace gifts, not forced responses.

Today we can fall into the same trap. We may not attempt to manipulate God so overtly, perhaps only because we do not recognize God’s activitys widely as biblical characters did. But often our prayers for healing, to make this business deal successful, to improve our public speaking (all of which can be legitimate requests), are offered with a “deal” in mind: our faithfulness and service in return for God’s positive answer. We forget to seek God’s will in the matter.

Other prayers are nothing more than incantations, wishes sent to an unknown god or magic divinity. These prayers come from lack of maturity, from imperfect or nonexistent faith. These kinds of prayers can subtly sneak into our repertoire because of the culture in which we live. A prosperous culture, for example, can set living standards so high that we become consumed with goals of wealth and power. The American dream teaches that wealth is within the grasp of us all. Why should not God grant it to us? Thus it can falsely motivate our prayer under the guise of petition. To protect ourselves against impure motives, we need to understand pure ones.

Pure Motives

There are many good motivations to examine. Listen to the voices of Christian History for a sample:

Humility: “The best disposition for praying is that of being desolate, forsaken, stripped of everything” (Augustine).6

Fellowship: “How am I to meet God? The first thing to do is pray” (Calvin).7

Power: “Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks” (Phillips Brooks).8

Protection, needs, command: “There are three reasons one should pray: because there is a Devil, as a way of obtaining things, and because it’s part of the pattern God established for Christians” (R. A. Torrey).9

We could list many more. Motivations come out of the psychological, physiological, and sociological drives that define our humanity. They may change in intensity, scope, or focus as the conditions of our lives change. But more than anything else, they determine what we say to God and how intensely we say it.

Four motivations to prayer are widely considered fundamental to a good prayer life: Love for God, confession of sin, thanksgiving for blessings, and requests for favors. Each of these is a motivation being challenged by the modern mindset. Each, for one reason or another, is made difficult by the very fact of being a Christian leader. We will look at those challenges and difficulties in the next four chapters.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 866.

John Bunyan, Prayer (Swengel, Pennsylvania: Reiner Publications, n.d.), 1.

See George Foot Moore, Judaism 1 (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 259.

Igumen Valamo, The Art of Prayer (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 241.

James Mursell, How to Make and Break Habits (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953). The author says breaking bad habits means one needs to first understand oneself and the meaning of habits. Once those are understood then techniques to implement decisions are available.

Augustine, Confessions (New York: Macmillian, New York, 1961).

Quoted in Karl Barth, Prayer and Preaching (Naperville, Illinois: SCM Book Club, 1964).

Phillips Brooks, “Going Up to Jerusalem,” Selected Sermons (New York: Ayer, Salem, Inc., 1949).

R. A. Torrey, How to Pray (Springdale, Pennsylvania: Whitaker House Publishing Company, 1983), 6.

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

True prayer is not to be found in the words of the mouth, but in the thoughts of the heart.
Gregory the Great1

To generalize is to be an idiot.William Blake1

Four of us sat at breakfast not long ago. Two of my companions were pastors; the third was a new Christian trying to quit smoking. As he lit up his fourth post-breakfast cigarette, he commented: “Quitting smoking is as hard as trying to develop a prayer life. I’ve been trying to do that lately, too. Do you guys have any suggestions on how to establish a regular prayer life?”

Asking two pastors for spiritual counsel is like asking an insurance agent about pension plans. Paul took the lead:

“I’ve struggled for twenty years with a need for regularity and consistency in my prayer life. I longed for an intense, quality time with the Lord. The image that kept running through my mind was that of Adam meeting the Lord in the cool of the day.

“In an attempt to achieve that, I tried particularly hard to get up early in the morning for prayer. It didn’t work for me. About five years ago I finally said, ‘Lord, I can’t handle this problem. If you want me to pray regularly, show me how to do it.’

“About that time I started waking up at two or three in the morning. Without any reason I would suddenly be wide awake. At first I didn’t realize what was happening. I thought I might be ill. After three consecutive nights of this, I decided if I couldn’t go back to sleep, I’d try praying. It was some of the most meaningful prayer I had ever experienced. I felt God was there in the room with me. Now I wake up in the middle of almost every night and pray for thirty to ninety minutes. Then I fall back to sleep. That’s how the Lord answered my prayer about personal time with him.”

Gordon listened respectfully. Although he was as impressed with Paul’s discovery as we were, he had a different experience:

“I, too, struggled with personal prayer early in my ministry. My wife and I wanted desperately to serve God as best we could, and we did everything we could think of to make our first churches all they could be. We worked hard. But after several years I realized I was getting by on natural ability and sooner or later my lack of a quiet time with God would catch up with me—I’d find myself totally dry.

“But the Lord worked differently in my life than he did in Paul’s. I decided I’d try to get up at 5 a.m. and pray and do Bible study for one hour. I started setting my alarm clock ten minutes earlier and earlier each day until I was getting up at five. I soon found I thrived on the spiritual food I was getting in that hour of quiet. Once I got started, I felt like I had an appointment with God every morning, and I couldn’t wait to meet him. I have never quit the practice. It’s an invariable in my schedule now.”

Two radically different approaches to prayer. One gives it up to the unknown guidance of the Holy Spirit, the other to a disciplined, regimented approach utilizing the Spirit’s power. Yet both are committed men of God, if the many fruits of their respective ministries are any indication. Which style is right? Which is the model to follow?

Perhaps neither. Or maybe both. If talking to Christian leaders revealed one thing, it was there are many different ways to pray with effective spiritual power. One of the difficulties in talking about prayer practices is that there is no single correct way.

Leaders said they became comfortable with prayer only when they finally realized they were unique and had to do it in a way that fit them. One said: “I’ve come to a degree of peace about my prayer life and what God expects. I’m sure my prayer could be more effective, but I don’t feel guilty about it. When I see people who do, I get a little bit worried. It’s as if we’re not measuring up to the standard, but the standard we’re getting is not from God’s Word, but from the extraordinary examples of prayer. Let’s face it. The people who write books don’t have ordinary experiences, and yet they’re the ones who create the level of expectations.

“I remember trying to spend long periods of time in prayer at a former church. That church was started by a man renowned for the hours he spent on his knees. Having that kind of model around can really put a load of guilt on you. I remember worrying about the poverty of my own prayer life. I’d get into my office resolved to pray for hours. But it just wasn’t me, and I couldn’t do it.”

Prayer styles seem to fall into two main camps. On the one hand are the disciplined saints determined to build their faith through prayer no matter what the cost. On the other hand are the faithful who trust God will call them to their knees whenever he deems it necessary. Interestingly, these two ends of what really is a long spectrum of practice (no one is fully one or the other) correspond to two main philosophical theories of how virtues are developed.

Aristotle felt virtues were innate human possibilities that are only awaiting the development of the appropriate skills to be put into practice. Translation: When you develop the skills to pray, you will pray and your faith will grow.

Plato felt that people would naturally act virtuously if they fully understood what the virtue in question was. Lack of skill is not the problem, lack of understanding is. Translation: If you fully understand why it is important to pray, then you will naturally pray.

Of course, neither Aristotle nor Plato were talking about Christian faith and prayer.2 But their categories and arguments are remarkably similar to the question raised about whether faith or the practice of prayer comes first. In order to more fully examine the question, let’s look at an example of each prayer style. To explore the implications, we will look at a Christian leader who demonstrates each style. Naturally, we are using them only as illustrations and are not commenting on the motives that have driven them to use this style.

The Disciplined Way

After teaching theology in a Christian college for several years, John Piper became pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a center-city church of three hundred fifty. The church has grown to a Sunday morning attendance of seven hundred thirty. Piper attributes the growth to an intensely God-centered worship service.

An intense person, Piper speaks with a wiry toughness that typifies his approach to ministry. He reads Jonathan Edwards with a passion, and, following Edwards’s claim to be a “Godbesotted man,” he has told his church his desire for them is to be a “God-besotted church.”

In his devotional time, John is a systematic pray-er. He gets up a half hour before his four children and his wife, Noel, and he uses that time to prepare himself before God for the stresses of early morning family life and for the family devotions after breakfast.

“I found I had to ‘get my own heart happy before God’ before I could effectively lead my family in devotions,” he says. “That phrase is from George Mueller who said he discovered early in his life that if he got up early and tried to read and pray, his mind would always wander. So instead he would just say, ‘Lord, open my eyes to seeonderful things out of your law,’ and then he began reading Scripture until he got his heart happy in the Lord. He wouldn’t see anyone until that happened.

“After leading the kids in a devotional after breakfast and getting them off to school, I read the newspaper and return to my study. I don’t go to the church until noon. In my study I have a prayer bench, and I kneel there and roll my concerns onto the Lord. That again is from George Mueller who had a mental image of one by one rolling all of his concerns onto the Lord each morning. Then later in the day when the world might be coming down around his head, he had the calmness of knowing that all his cares were in God’s hands. I mentally think through the day to come and roll each and every task onto God.

“I have already prayed for my family before and during breakfast; my next priority is my staff and key volunteers at church. Then I pray for the congregation. I systematically go through the church directory. Next I work on a prayer list of missions concerns, local concerns, and other individuals. Then I read the Bible. Recently, I have used McCheyne’s method of reading the Old Testament once each year and the New Testament twice. It’s basically about four chapters a day, and I proceed slowly because I mingle prayer with my reading. After that I’m ready for study, sermon preparation, and later the work at church.

“Noel and I end the day with evening prayer together and often read to each other aloud from a book for fifteen minutes. It’s amazing how much reading you can do that way. We’ve found we read fifteen to twenty books a year if we are consistent.”

Piper’s prayer life represents that of many pastors who structure their time carefully, using the discipline to ensure they get in the time needed. Most cautioned against confusing their method with the real heart of prayer. Piper cited Matthew 6 (praying in secret) as a warning against setting up anyone’s prayer practice as normative.

Those who use this kind of approach, though, can point to Hebrews 5 as ample justification for their disciplined time. The writer recommends the solid food of the gospel only for the mature “who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.” Salvation is not enough to develop this ability; one needs to seek maturity by honing the skills of discernment.

There are several different directions this approach to prayer practice can take us. On the one hand, it can feed into a strong mystical tradition. Mysticism stresses that spiritual maturity is attained in graduated stages. In this tradition, the discipline of spiritual habits is only the beginning stage that leads on to higher things. For example, St. John of the Ladder, a seventh-century mystic, identified four stages of spiritual development, comparing them to rungs of a ladder stretching upward to perfection. The first rung is to tame the passions, the second to pray with the lips, the third is to practice inner prayer, and the fourth is to rise seeing visions. The habit of prayer deals with the first two rungs, leading to the third, and perhaps, if you’re a mystic, the fourth.3

Or the disciplined approach can lead to a simplified way to promote evangelism. Blaise Pascal’s well-known “wager” is an example. The French philosopher said that in all matters of faith, including prayer, you cannot “prove” God is at work—but it is well worth the wager. You cannot prove prayer will be meaningful, but Pascal’s advice to believers is: The practice of the religious life will put your belief on a firmer psychological basis

Deed leads to thought: “For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind. As a result, demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us. How few things can be demonstrated. Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed.… When we believe only by the strength of our conviction and the automaton is inclined to believe the opposite, that is not enough. We must therefore make both parts of us believe: the mind by reasons, which need to be seen only once in a lifetime, and the automaton by habit, and not allowing it any inclination to the contrary.”4

The best argument for the disciplined approach to prayer is simply that, for whatever reason, it does lead to increased, deepened faith. Martin Luther frequently mentioned it. In his Treatise on Good Works, he talks about the value of habit to developing firmer faith. In his discussion of the second commandment, he notes a common complaint he heard from Christians: I don’t have much faith that my prayers will be heard—so I don’t pray.

Luther’s response? “That’s the very reason you should pray. God commands us to pray so that we can find out what we can and cannot do. Even if we begin with a very weak spark of faith, we must pray daily so the weak spark is fanned through regular exercise into a full flame of faith.”5

Luther goes on to say that weak faith is not a sign of weak Christians. Even the apostles, including Peter, prayed for increased faith. Indeed, prayer should be seen not as a good work, but as a means to increasing our faith. That can only be done through regular, habitual prayer.

And on the modern front we can only say that it works. Testimonies such as John Piper’s are common. So is the behavioral evidence of what prayer can do. L. D. Nelson and Russell Dynes reported in a research article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion that people who attended church frequently and performed other acts of devotion (such as prayer) had higher rates of helping behavior than those who didn’t.6 Apparently devotionalism has a positive influence on the way people live out their faith. As Aristotle said in his Ethics, “We become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.” Might we extrapolate and say we become men and women of prayer by praying, not by thinking about prayer and hoping it comes?

The Haphazardly Intent Way

Bud Palmberg is pastor of Mercer Island Covenant Church in Mercer Island, Washington, one of the wealthiest areas surrounding Seattle. A large man, he commands attention by his physical presence as much as through his insights. He speaks colorfully, Van Dyke beard bobbing with each freshly crafted metaphor. The span of his ministry is what impresses. He’s a small town Nebraska boy who still wears cowboy boots as he ministers to well-to-dos in Mercer Island, including business executives, Seattle Seahawks football players, and attorneys. But one night each week he cruises the streets of skid-row Seattle presenting the gospel to prostitutes and motorcycle gangs in a program called Operation Nightwatch he started with other Seattle pastors.

Palmberg describes his prayer as the “style of a driven pastor.” He prays on the run.

“Prayer is my primary back-up system. The longer I’m in ministry, the more I realize that prayer is like respiration. It’s my deep breaths between appointments, my sighs when I feel down, my gasps when I’m in trouble. I try to make prayer the backdrop to everything else I do.

“Why don’t I lock myself in my closet every morning? Because I can’t sit still that long. And I’ve found that you can pray while you’re walking. Or, if you live on an island like we do, while you’re sitting in your car waiting for traffic to clear on the bridge to the mainland. My walk with God is comfortable enough for me that I don’t feel the need for a formalized place or time or structure for my prayer. In the morning I hit the road running and I try to have an open channel to God all the time. I don’t want to have to dial God—I can just say, ‘Help me, God,’ or ‘Thank you, Lord,’ or ‘That’s fantastic,’ whenever something strikes me.

“As I pray in those short snatches throughout the day I always try and have a notebook near because as I pray I’m reminded of needs people have: ‘I haven’t seen him lately,’ or ‘She was considering surgery last week. I wonder how she’s doing?’ or ‘How’s that family coping?’ I also try to read in short snatches, and I’ve found the Psalms to be my greatest resource for prayer-oriented reading. The Psalms are the blueprints of prayer.

“My prayer style fits my conception of ministry. Frankly, I’m over my head most of the time. I’m treading water administratively. I have a congregation that can dance circles around me in organizational skills. There are saints in this church that dwarf me spiritually. The only thing I have going for me is I’m willing to take it all on and be responsible for it. That’s a real incentive for prayer.”

Palmberg believes the ministry is ideally suited for “informed” prayer. “Because of the nature of my job, I know more about people than anyone else. What a golden opportunity to pray specifically for needs. The first free minute I have after I leave someone, I pray a short prayer for them and their problems. That’s something I don’t know at five o’clock in the morning but I do right after I leave someone. I believe God honors specific prayers. That advantage of knowing a great deal has become a responsibility, an impetus to passionate praying for me.

“I know pastors I highly respect who practice very structured prayer. But whenever I try it I’ve felt terribly self-righteous. I already have enough trouble with that, so I gave up trying to structure my prayer life.”

You don’t have to talk very long to Palmberg to realize that his lack of structure doesn’t translate to a lack of prayer. Others in the church testify to the power of his public prayers and many can cite instances of private prayer sessions with their pastor that have led to serendipitous answers and spiritual growth. By all indicators, Palmberg’s prayer life doesn’t lack power, just structure.

Many pastors follow Palmberg’s style. They are generally too activist in personality to sit still for any length of time when there’s ministry to be done. Yet their personalities and strong faith drive them to prayer and the resulting power they need for ministry. The Bible is clear that this relationship between prayer and power is invariable. In Matthew 17 Jesus heals a mentally deranged boy whose sickness often made him fall in the fire or water. The boy’s father brought him to Jesus after first bringing him to the disciples. The disciples failed in their attempts to heal him.

After seeing the illness cured at Jesus’ command, the disciples asked him why they had failed. After all, they had been able to cure in other situations. Jesus lays the blame at the disciples’ feet. Because of their lack of faith, he says, they didn’t have the power to heal this particularly stubborn case. Faith is like the potential power represented in the water trapped behind a dam. In order to be made useful as electricity, it must be funneled into a conduit that will turn the generator’s blades. Prayer is like that conduit, turning the potential of faith given as grace into wonder-working power that can change the world.

Christian leaders like Bud Palmberg feel free to call on God through prayer whenever a task of ministry or personal living requires it. The faith is there—it only needs activating through prayer. More than that though, they have developed a prayer style that relies on the incidents and difficulties of life to call them to prayer. If life and our relationship to God is fully understood, prayer is a natural way of behaving.

Calvin credits faith with all answers to prayer and with driving us to our knees in prayer. After citing Romans 10:14—”How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in?”—he goes on to say that “faith gets whatever is granted to prayer.”7 For Calvin, faith, saving faith at least, is the necessary foundation for all prayer.

For the haphazardly intent, prayer is the overflowing of a heart longing for intimacy with a personal God. Paul Rees, traveling lecturer for World Vision International, talks about prayer as relationship, not discipline: “There is biblical justification for referring to prayer at times as real discipline. Paul speaks about Epaphras as one who labored in prayer. But prayer is a relationship so intimate and so dynamic that it should be easy to listen for God’s voice and to respond by articulating some confession or petition. This idea of prayer as a relationship has grown on me through the years, so that now for me prayer is the healthy expression of this intimacy with God.”

One of the values of stressing haphazardly intent prayer is the lessening of negative incentives. We don’t pray because we have to, but because we love God so much we feel we must. Henri Nouwen talked about the problem Christian leaders sometimes have in making time for prayer. Nouwen identified with that problem, but suggested something he had found helpful: “I can’t fight the demons of distraction directly. I can’t say No to television, or No to my overcrowded schedule unless there is something ten times more attractive pulling me away. The only thing I know of that is ten times more attractive than the lure of creaturely comforts is to be loved with God’s love, either directly or through one of his followers. If I can experience God’s love in my brokenness, I become free from the compulsions of doing anything—but then I want to do everything for him.”

Prayer is not drudgery that must be performed in order to satisfy some divine taskmaster snapping a whip over our cracking knees and furrowed brow. Instead, acceptance of God’s love leads to prayer.

Prayer and Faith Feed on Each Other

Both Piper and Palmberg are men of prayer. Recognizing the varieties of prayer does not mean we decide one style is better than another. We could line up witnesses to disciplined prayer, pair them with witnesses to the haphazardly intent approach, and come out just about even.

And it would be foolish to try to reconcile them in one theory of “true and valid prayer,” as if that were possible. Both styles are true and valid, although based perhaps on different premises. How the Holy Spirit works in lives is an intensely individual thing. Even distinguishing only two categories of prayer practice is overly simplistic.

Indeed, one of the attractions of studying prayer is the many different forms it can take in the lives of Christian leaders. Trying to define orthodox prayer practice too narrowly and uniformly can gloss over the remarkable ways God’s grace works in different lives.

It is also possible that one person can use several different styles. Cassian reports that in Egypt in the fourth century, the elders of the Christian church prescribed the prayer norm to be followed by the monks: “Twelve Psalms for an evening Office and the same number for a night Office. The presumption was that during the day each monk arranged in his own way for prayer and words of Scripture to accompany his manual work.”8 In effect this combines formal hours of prayer with personalized structure, whatever that may be.

In reality, we all need the fruits of both approaches. Some may need more of one than the other. But the truths of both must be recognized by all Christians. Andrew Murray in his classic book on prayer, With Christ in the School of Prayer, said that “faith needs a life of prayer for its full growth.”9 Perhaps that, after all, is the best statement of the relationship between the two. There is value in viewing the relationship between prayer and faith in both priority sequences: faith leads to prayer, and prayer increases faith. Both are indispensable. Some incipient faith must be present to stimulate the believer to want to pray, to take advantage of the power God offers through his Holy Spirit in order to allow us to pray. However, prayer increases faith, and anything we can do to foster the habit of prayer will be valuable.

The habit of prayer will lead to a oneness of spirit with God. Our motivations to prayer may not be pure as we begin. They may be naive, misguided, even cynical. But regular prayer and sincere effort to understand prayer will change that. As Sören Kierkegaard noted, “The immediate person thinks and imagines that when he prays, the important thing, the thing he must concentrate upon, is that God should hear what he is praying for. And yet, in the true, eternal sense, it is just the reverse. The true relation in prayer is not when God hears what is prayed for, but when the person praying continues to pray until he is the one who hears, who hears what God wills. The immediate person therefore uses many words, and therefore makes demands in his prayer. The true man of prayer only attends.”10

Developing a prayer style that fits your needs requires two things. First you must clearly see the purpose of prayer—why a Christian must pray. Primary motivation is essential. Second, you must solve the process to go through in order to make regular prayer a reality.

Gregory the Great, “Commentary on the Book of Job.” Quoted in an excellent overall introduction to the topology of prayer study, James Hasting’s classic survey work, The Christian Doctrine of Prayer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915).

See excellent discussions of Aristotle and Plato positions on the development of virtues in Amelie Rorty, “Plato and Aristotle on Belief, Habit, and Akrasia,” American Philosophical Quarterley 7, 1 (January 1970): 50-61; Cynthia Freeland, “Moral Virtues and Human Powers,” Review of Metaphysics 36 (September 1982): 3-22.

See John Climacus in J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Graeca, lxxxviii, 585-1248.

Blaise Pascal, Pensees (New York: Penguin Books, 1966) 149ff. See a good analysis of “The Wager” in an article by Robert Holyer, “Pascal on Belief and the Religious Life,” Scottish Journal of Theology 35 (1982): 431-445.

Martin Luther, Works of Martin Luther 1 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1980), 228.

L. D. Nelson, and Russell Dynes, “The Impact of Devotionalism and Attendance on Ordinary and Emergency Helping Behavior,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 15, 1 (1976): 47-59.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 864.

Cassian, “Institutes,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 11 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1978), 161-641.

Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1983), 63.

Soren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 97.

William Blake quoted from C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963), 55.

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

Ordinary people have an exciting time, while odd people are always complaining of the dullness of life. This is why the new novel dies so quickly and the old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal, human boy. It is his adventures that are startling. They startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel, the hero is abnormal. The center is not central. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.
G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd Mead, 1908), 16.

Our experience of the world has two parts, the sacred and the mundane. The division between the two is not always clear, nor easily understood. But understanding the difference can help us reconcile the two.

The food-gathering method of the Trobriand Islanders illustrates our different approaches to the two realms. The Trobrianders live on atolls off the eastern coast of New Guinea in the southwest Pacific. Most of their food comes from fishing in the protected Trobriand lagoon. They use traditional fishing methods there, and an abundant catch, for which the Trobrianders are regularly thankful to their gods, is usually assured. On exceptional occasions, however, fishing on the open seas becomes necessary. The Trobrianders’ tiny boats don’t fare so well in the heavy waves. Danger can strike quickly from seas roiled by sudden storms. Because of the hazards, elaborate rituals and magic rites to appease angry gods are performed before the islanders venture forth.1

Our experience of prayer is similar in some ways to the Trobriander’s fishing preferences. Most of our prayer takes place in the lagoons of life. We live in the everyday. Our experiences of God usually come from familiar events: a child’s loving touch, a mate’s caress, the satisfaction of steady Christian growth. Most of our spiritual sustenance comes from this common, faithful source. Occasionally, circumstances or desire force us to leap into the supernatural realm, and God descends to meet us in a special way. It is a meeting laden with all the drama, derring-do, and indeed, danger of a Moses meeting God on Mount Sinai. “Who shall look on the face of God and live?” Thankfully, most of our prayer takes place in the lagoon; thankfully, we live most of our lives by the rules of the ordinary.

To say that we live and pray by the rules of the ordinary does not demean their value. God answers simple as well as elaborate prayers. Heartfelt requests, regularly voiced, reach God as quickly and easily as emergency calls breathed in the midst of flames. Ordinary prayers from ordinary people are answered with extraordinary power.

Further, there are distinct advantages to ordinary prayer. Since it is part of daily living, ordinary prayer follows the rules of the habitual. The same forces that shape our lives shape our prayers. If we are tired, prayer is difficult. If we are energized, prayer comes more easily. Daily events and our own psychological make-up affect our prayer life a great deal.

In one sense, this fact of the ordinary is a limitation. It makes the ideal prayer life—what Paul called ceaseless prayer—almost impossible. Few in history have attained the state of perfectly reconciling the natural and the supernatural. Christ did. Perhaps Enoch, who the Bible says was in constant touch with God. Genesis 5:21-24. His reward was to circumvent death. But few of us can realistically hope for that kind of prayer relationship. We live with the reality of our humanness.

Jim Davey, pastor of a Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Seattle, Washington, compared his prayer life to seeing Mount Rainier, which at times dominates the horizon of the Seattle area. “On a very few days out of the year, Mount Rainier is visible to us. On most days it isn’t. It’s shrouded by clouds, haze, and mist. My prayer life is like that. Several times each year I see and love God clearly, in an especially profound way. On most days, however, I pray out of desperation, need, or blind faith. Without a simple, mundane commitment to pray, I would skip it.”

Davey’s analogy rings true. Leaders who have coped have learned to look for God in the ordinary not the extraordinary. The deepest religious experiences don’t keep the appointments set for them by self-styled dispensers of satisfaction. God cannot be staged nor prayer scripted. Instead, God comes when we least expect him, when we so enthrall ourselves in the business of being Christian that our seeking self no longer blocks the way.

Leaders talked about finding God in three ordinary areas of life:

The Ordinaries of Culture

Dozens of currently published books show how modern society has given itself over to secularization and humanism. The arguments are similar, and a composite on prayer might read as follows: We live in a culture that discourages prayer. We are a mechanized, secularized society. We are surrounded by appliances that satisfy our every culinary need, home entertainment devices that stimulate our senses both good and bad, transportation possibilities that take the sting out of travel, and working tools that make labor a misnomer. This ease of satisfying want and whim is what makes prayer so difficult. Prayer, the essence of which is obedience and submission, runs counter to a culture where we are beholden to very few. Further, some cultures in history have revolved around the church and the monastery. Ours doesn’t. We live in a secular culture where man, not God, is the measure of all things. 1

This is a convincing argument—partly because it’s true. Even Christian leaders feel the effects of secularization and its discouraging effects on prayer. One pastor said: “I am currently serving my first call, and have been in the parish two years. I get the feeling others don’t think my personal devotional life is important. Perhaps they assume I have a strong spiritual inner life. But in my two years here, not one person has asked me about the health of my personal faith. I feel unsupported in this aspect of my life. It’s as if it didn’t matter to the job I do here.”

It would be easy to uncritically accept the common wisdom that our society is so secularized that prayer is almost impossible. However, if religious history has anything to teach us about cultural conditions conducive to prayer, we may be in a time of unparalleled opportunity.

Consider an example from the history of Islam. Researcher George Koovackal notes that Muhammad made prayer a central feature of Islam because it was particularly suited to the nomadic life. He recognized it would be very difficult to maintain orthodoxy among a people completely decentralized by their wandering existence. So he made the external forms of the faith of central importance. A Muslim can walk into an Islamic community in a totally different culture and immediately recognize Islamic faith by its five traditional pillars: prayer five times daily, profession of faith, almsgiving, pilgrimage, and fasting. Commitment to prayer and devotional practice become vitally important in an atmosphere of uncertainty and change. 2

We find ourselves in a similar atmosphere today. We are not dependent on wandering flocks, moveable tents, and watering holes. But our wealth, changing industries, and fragmented culture have made us technological nomads. Few of us live in one house for more than five years. Fewer still stay in one job that long. Spiritually, a bewildering variety of denominations and factions within denominations create an insecurity about the content of our faith. When we walk into a strange church, we don’t know what to expect. We thirst for some kind of quality control in our religious organizations. This need is especially compelling when we see the flourishing of cults and new religious movements that supply this kind of security.

Viewed this way, a culture that temporalizes organization, depersonalizes fraternity, and homogenizes individuality forces even religion to be distilled to its essence—for the Christian the man/God relationship. Our renewed interest in Christian spirituality is a sign that devotional practice can supply needed stability in the face of diversity. In some ways, secularization is presenting unique opportunities to the Christian’s prayer life.

Perhaps the Christian leader’s strategy in the face of secularization is to use it to advantage. The truth of prayer hasn’t changed. But the way we gain access to it needs modification. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in a delightful book, Sacrament of the Present Moment, said: “God still speaks today as he spoke to our forefathers in days gone by. The spiritual life then was a matter of immediate communication with God. It had not been reduced to a fine art nor was lofty and detailed guidance to it provided with a wealth of rules, instructions, and maxims. These may very well be necessary today. But it was not so in those early days, when people were more direct and unsophisticated.” 3

Are people less direct and more sophisticated today? The point is arguable. But times have changed. The pressures of an informational age are enormous. We have literally hundreds of things to do and thousands of suggestions on how to do them. We live in an age when ordinary habits have become essential. Al Ries and Jack Trout recently wrote a book called Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, in which they paint the following picture: Western man’s mind is like a sponge over-saturated with information. It is dripping full, and a lukewarm message or a message given only once will not penetrate that sponge—it will trickle off with the rest. Only that which is repeated or presented in such a way to make it stick will stay with us. 4

People who pray must learn regular patterns of behavior. Without habits, schedules squeeze and word blizzards obscure the best of intentions. In developing a habit of prayer, we can utilize the ordinaries of our secularized culture instead of fighting them. For example, we can use:

• the beauty of art. One pastor pointed to a painting on his study wall and said, “For some reason, when I look at that painting, I’m reminded of God and my need to pray. It triggers short ten-minute periods of prayer throughout my day.”

• the intensely individualistic self-help techniques so popular now. Prayer lists, prayer partners, memory techniques all can be aided and refined by self-help hints.

• retreat centers and beautiful natural settings have never been more available. The ease with which we can travel to such mind-stretching locales make them real aids to prayer.

• the fitness craze. Many Christian leaders admit they pray when they jog, ride exercise bicycles, or hike in the woods.

By maintaining our spiritual center in God, cultural fad and fashion can aid prayer life without fear of compromising our spiritual needs and eccentricities. Even humanistic culture can become an ally.

The Ordinaries of Our Minds

God created each person’s mind to be unique. But in spite of this uniqueness, behavior patterns are remarkably consistent from human being to human being. One of the common patterns is that persistent, consistent repetition of an act affects both the actor and those acted upon. In a familiar parable, Jesus showed how that principle extends to prayer:

A widow, he said, who had been wronged by another person, went to a judge for relief. The judge was an evil man. He would not give the woman relief on the merits of her case, just as he made few decisions on moral grounds. Yet the widow was persistent. Every day she came to the judge’s courtroom to plead her case. Finally, out of exasperation at her constant coming, the judge ruled in her favor. Jesus used the story (Luke 18) to illustrate the need for habitual prayer. Our relief before God will come not on the merits of our case (for who among us can say we deserve relief?) but only out of our constant requests for God’s grace.

Jesus isn’t arguing for mindless repetition of prayers. He’s asking for persistence. (Traditionally, theologians have called it importunity.) Put simply, developing a consistent prayer life requires the will to do it.

One way to buttress the will required is to develop a habit of praying. Not a habit that leads to mindless repetition, but a discipline that intensifies and deepens our prayer experience. Psychologist William James called habit “the enormous flywheel of society,” the element that holds everything together. 5 Habits make most things predictable and reliable. We can handle the exceptional and the creative only because we have the habitual as a backdrop.

It is a backdrop that can be learned. Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline, says that prayer is not an innate skill, but something we learn to do. “One of the liberating experiences of my life came when I understood that prayer involved a learning process. I was set free to question, to experiment, even to fail, for I knew I was learning.” 6 Foster illustrates with the example of a television set. If we turn on the television and it doesn’t work, we do not automatically assume TVs don’t exist. We fix it. So with prayer. If our prayers are not working properly, if we cannot get ourselves to pray regularly, we must do something to fix the problem, not dismiss prayer as an unreal, mystical, or impossible endeavor.

Ordinary habits and techniques are important in helping us take advantage of the mind’s receptivity to discipline. Much of the Christian leader’s behavior in the various ministry functions is determined by them. Take teaching for example. Psychologist Dan Landis made a study of classroom teachers to try to determine how much of their teaching behavior was determined by habit and how much was consciously thought-out behavior. Both verbal and nonverbal behaviors were measured. By observing and recording teaching styles in classroom settings, he discovered that more behavior was performed out of habit than volition. Teaching style quickly became second nature and freed teachers to focus on content and subtle points of pedagogy. 7

Similarly, the more of our praying we can make habitual, the more we can work on refining and improving it. If we can make the fact of our going to prayer so ordinary that we don’t have to use a great deal of energy to force ourselves to our knees each and every time, then we can focus on prayer requests and deepen the quality of our time with God.

The Ordinaries of Ministry

Is it possible to be a professional prayer leader and a devout person of prayer at the same time? Church leaders help parishioners enrich their prayer lives—does that stifle their own? Church leaders lead corporate prayer in public services—does that inhibit their own participation? Church leaders set up prayer chains, prayer vigils, and prayer meetings—does that make prayer a program instead of a worship experience for the leader?

Some don’t think so. William Law, in A Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection, talks about the dangers of professional Christianity. Suppose, Law says, you were to call a man from a sumptuous feast. You tell him to go into the next room and be hungry for a half hour; then he can go back to feasting. He might obey you by going into the hunger room. He might even sit there licking his lips for a half hour. But the man is not really hungry. Why not? Because he has just come from a feast and his appetite is dull. 8

Do church leaders run the risk of dull appetites because of the continuous availability of spiritual food? Many leaders admit the problem. Yet several said the very opposite can happen. The tasks of ministry can feed the minister’s prayer life. They need not always be separated. Lynn Kent, pastor of the Greater Portland (Oregon) Bible Church, finds his prayer life tied closely to his preaching:

“I respond to God from the text I’m preaching on each week. I’ve heard pastors say they keep their prayer life separate from sermon preparation, but I combine the two. I want to preach the truth of each passage. To do so, I must discover the mind of God as much as I am able. Prayer helps me do that. The heart of my prayer life is responding to the Word.”

Prayer is a vital part of the Christian leader’s life. One way to look at that importance is the negative. Charles Finney once advised a young ministerial student: “If you lose your spirit of prayer, you will do nothing, or next to nothing, even if you have the intellectual endowment of an angel. If you lose your spirituality, you had better go about some other employment, for I cannot contemplate a more loathsome object than an earthly-minded minister.” 9

What Finney said is quite true. However, there is also a positive approach. The everyday occurrences of ministry are ideal opportunities for prayer and communion with God. No one is more ideally situated to cultivate the spiritual life than the Christian leader who approaches his or her charges with eyes open for God’s wonder-working grace.

When that expectancy of grace is present and when the physical fact of prayer is established, it sometimes surprises us how it comes alive when needed. God will work powerfully through the ordinary tasks of ministry, even in routine prayer. Jim Davey remembers a particularly striking instance:

“In a former pastorate in Burlington, Vermont, the six hundred church members were evenly divided about whether or not to relocate. For seven years we had struggled with the question. The issue was raised anew when six acres of prime property became available just down the street. I called a meeting of the board.

“We met on Saturday morning. Since we knew the real division on the board, fueled by seven years of controversy, we agreed to stay until we reached agreement. Then we prayed. We always started our meetings with prayer, but I’m not sure we thought the prayer was that important to what we were really going to do that morning. Each of us prayed aloud and asked God for guidance.

“As soon as we finished praying, the sixteen of us looked at one another and knew we should buy the land. By 11:30 the meeting was over. That may not sound like much. But if I could tell you the intensity of disagreement over this issue that had preceded that meeting, and the warmth of agreement that followed, you’d be as shocked as I was at what happened.

“What happened? While we prayed God gave us his mind. The prayer was a customary, perfunctory act perhaps. But through it God told us what to do.”

Spurred by bigger than life expectations, society has added the prefix “super” to words like star, hero, and market. Christians gullibly followed suit with superchurch, superpastor, and superspiritual. But the intent of highlighting high performance is rarely successful. Usually the result is a devaluing of the root word and a grimacing embarrassment over the supercompound.

Super-prayer? Ironically, prayer, like life itself, only becomes “super” when surrounded by humility, commonness, and the ordinary acceptance of a love beyond comprehension.

Federico D’Agostino, “Religion and Magic: Two Sides of a Basic Human Experience,” Social Compass 27, 2-3 (1980): 279-282.

An excellent discussion of the effects of technology on the prayer life of modern man is found in Jacques Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man (New York: Seabury Press, 1970), 21ff.

George Koovackal, “Worship in Islamic Tradition,” Journal of Dharma 3 (1978): 395-415.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Sacrament of the Present Moment (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982), 1.

Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (New York: Warner Books, 1981), 11.

William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1892), 143.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978), 33.

Dan Landis, Harry Triandis, and John Adamopoulos, “Habit and Behavioral Intentions as Predictors of Social Behavior,” Journal of Social Psychology 106 (1978): 227-237.

William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1966), 298.

Quoted in Louis Gifford Parkhurst, “Charles Grandison Finney Preached for a Verdict,” Fundamentalist Journal (June 1984): 41.

Pastors

Leadership BooksMay 19, 2004

Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.
Fyodor Dostoevski1

What frustrates Christian leaders about prayer? Perhaps it has something to do with the differences between leading and praying. When a random sample of people was asked what the term leadership brought to mind, they responded with words like authority, decisiveness, confidence, and power. The word prayer, on the other hand, evoked words such as humility, pleading, and powerlessness.

The difference illustrates a conflict Christian leaders face. As leaders, they preach, counsel, and organize with efficiency. Leaders must see that things get done. They plan, decide, act, and evaluate. In most people’s minds, leadership means the ability to solve problems.

This expectation extends beyond administrative duties. Sometimes it seems Christian leaders are expected to have answers to most of life’s problems. Even the leader’s personal spirituality is held up as a public example of a faith that works. The writer to the Hebrews called it a “faith we should imitate” (13:7).

Men and women of prayer, however, operate in a different sphere, where feelings of inadequacy and helplessness must predominate. Those feelings sometimes conflict with the tasks of ministry. Jeff Ginn, pastor of Noelridge Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, notes: “We all want our ministries to have results. We see our work schedule as a time for production. If I have to choose between my quiet time and a meeting with a young Christian, often I’ll choose the young Christian because that meeting will produce something tangible in my ministry.

“The results of prayer aren’t quite so tangible. The need for prayer pulls at me over the long haul, but it’s not an urgent pull. A fish on the line is an urgent pull. Getting the boat in the right place with the right fishing tackle all oiled and ready to go is a far less urgent task, yet it can make the difference in whether the fish is landed.”

Prayer does prepare us for the more tangible ministry tasks. It makes us better leaders. But the effects of prayer can’t be measured in terms of problems solved per square inch. For the administrator, decisiveness that averts a $5,000 mistake by the building contractor is laudatory. In the prayer closet, the same quick decision making may be counterproductive—it might lead to the oversight of an important spiritual subtlety only quietness and patience can discern. Or, willingness to take responsibility for a hair-splitting ethical decision concerning Mrs. Smith’s wayward son is a sign of strong leadership. Someone must do it. But in the prayer closet, that same willingness to make firm decisions in ambiguous circumstances may blunt a creative paradox God could use to teach spiritual truth. Administrative problems follow the rules of cause and effect; prayer operates by God’s unpublished rules.

When cause and effect meet divine guidance, they often clash. The result? The roles of confident decision maker and humble penitent do regular battle in the soul of the Christian leader, and an incomplete, guilt-ridden prayer life may plague the ministry.

“My spiritual pilgrimage is like the front and back yards of my life,” says C. D. Monismith, a pastor in Salem, Oregon. “The front yard is for public view—manicured, watered, weed free, and beautiful. The back yard is not so good. It’s utilitarian; it’s mowed but not manicured. Some weeds grow around the edges, and there are patches of brown. It could use watering. My front yard is like my corporate, public spiritual life. My back yard is like my personal prayer life. I’d like to know how other pastors manicure the back yard as well as the front.”

Monismith speaks for many of his peers. Most Christian leaders desire a stronger prayer life. In a survey of leadership readers (80 percent of whom are pastors or pastoral staff) done two years ago, 56 percent of the respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of time they spent in prayer. Yet when asked how much time they did spend in prayer, over 50 percent said they prayed more than twenty minutes a day, almost three times the seven daily minutes other surveys indicate is average for the general Christian population.

Further, Christian leaders like to read and learn about prayer. Articles on the subject published in Christian magazines get high readership. When asked, What is the single area of leadership you’d most like help with? Christian leaders most often responded, “My own spiritual walk with God.” 2 For this group of people, where prayer is concerned, more is better.

But “more” is not easy to come by. Our thirst for prayer is camouflaged by our hunger for less nutritious food. The attractions of a nonpraying life—busyness that fills up the hours, distractions that divert attention, temptations that distort priorities—block our efforts to increase praying time.

Many of these blocks are not unique to the Christian leader. Laziness, impatience, rebelliousness, and unconfessed sin plague everyone. Lifestyles that include jam-packed schedules, jangling telephones, raucous radios, and fast-paced television programs don’t offer quiet opportunities for reflection. Modern society is characterized by thinkers who put prayer in the same category as witch hazel and other old wives’ tales. Immanuel Kant called prayer “a superstitious vanity”; Sigmund Freud said it was a way of “shuffling off one’s human responsibilities”; Ludwig Feuerbach said it resulted in “religious alienation.” It’s no wonder prayer sometimes seems under attack. 3

Three Blocks to Prayer

In addition to the common pressures, Christian leaders face three that are unique to their vocation. One is the expectation placed on them by historical roles. Modern church leaders still labor under clerical traditions traced back to the fourth-century monastic movement when clerics began to be viewed as professionals separated from the laity. Monks established specific hours of prayer—seven or eight times a day set aside for on-the-knees devotion. Had this remained a monastic practice, all would have been fine. But soon it became generalized for all clergy, whether withdrawn from the world or not. The Emperor Justinian, sounding a little like a contemporary bishop, berated the overworked parish priests for “neglecting a task [prayer] to which you are obliged by profession.” The seven or eight times of daily prayer soon became seven or eight full hours of prayer a day—for monks especially, but sometimes for parish clergy too. 4

Thereafter in the history of the church, whenever clergy reform became necessary, it was accompanied by a call for increased participation in prayer. There was nothing wrong with that in itself. We need frequently to be called back to our knees to pray. Unfortunately, the form suggested was usually realistic only for the full-time religious. For example, the Council of Reform in 817 recommended full participation by all clerics in the seven Hours of the Office, which by that time usually included full recitation of all 150 Psalms three times a day in addition to other prayers.

Even though the pressure of this was mitigated somewhat by church leaders like Benedict, who recognized the spiritual significance of work as well as prayer, the trend it set for clergy expectations remained. The heritage today can be seen in the question often asked the pastor, “But what else do you have to do all day besides prayer and study?” Usually this criticism is unthinking rather than vindictive. Most laymen, if questioned, would recognize the heavy administrative responsibilities of modern church leadership. Most would agree this makes spiritual work difficult. But subconsciously, the expectations remain. And it loads our Christian leaders with intense guilt about their prayer life.

Guilt also comes from the expectations of church leaders themselves. Many assume leadership roles in answer to God’s call. Too often, though, the call is interpreted as a responsibility to personally fulfill the entire Great Commission. The faulty logic runs like this: “Saving the world required a perfect sacrifice: Christ. Since I’m not perfect, I must work even harder to save the world.”

One pastor said: “The greatest relief of my young ministry was when I finally realized God could get his work done without me. That freed me to do even more for the Kingdom without loading myself with guilt for what I couldn’t do.” One’s personal prayer life can suffer horribly from a self-induced messiah complex—or even an honest workaholic ethic fueled by popular maxims like “Wear out, don’t rust out for Christ.”

A third source of guilt is the natural bent of most church leaders toward rational methods of learning. Analytic thinking works for most areas of Bible study and theology. But the experience of prayer extends beyond the rational. Listen to people who want to talk about prayer. They start enthusiastically, but the words don’t last long. The enthusiasts soon discover prayer is too central, too much a part of the core to be reduced to a series of convincing syllogisms. So they end up talking around it. They talk about great answers to prayer and their troubles in being consistent in prayer. But the experience itself eludes attempts to verbalize.

Prayer is a very private experience. One pastor whom several people suggested as a model of powerful praying noted that studies of other people’s prayer lives run the risk of invasion of privacy: “There are areas of Christian experience, like marriage, that are almost too sacred for research. The ‘how-to-do-it’ books on prayer can show us the direction to the secret place and help us find time for the closed door, but who is the person who will attempt to define, delineate, and demonstrate what takes place there?”

For the rational, straight-thinking church leader, this can be a frustration. Why can’t prayer be attacked like any one of a dozen problems solved this past year? We repaved the parking lot, helped Al Aronson work through his depression, and I planned my speaking engagements for the next year and penciled in preparation time for them all. But prayer …

In spite of these apparent contradictions, leadership responsibility and prayer are not incompatible. Many Christian leaders have successfully wedded the two and enjoy the marriage. The offspring is a fruitful ministry.

But the marriage works only when leadership and prayer are seen as a private partnership instead of jealous brothers competing for God’s time. The conditions of the partnership are not difficult. In fact, they are really rather ordinary. The key is to match God’s terms with the ordinaries of life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Garden City, New York: Literary Guild of America, 1949), Part II, Chapter 3.

Terry Muck, “Ten Questions About the Devotional Life,” Leadership, III,1 (Winter 1982): 30-39.

Quoted in Jacques Ellul, Prayer and the Modern Man (New York: Seabury Press, 1970), 114.

For a discussion of the history of Christian prayer see Joseph A. Jungmann, Christian Prayer Through the Centuries (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).