A Praying Church (eBook)

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A Glimpse of a Praying Community

For most of us, prayer is solitary, which means that when it comes to corporate prayer, we aren’t exactly sure what it even feels and looks like. So I begin this book by letting you peek in on my three prayer meetings this morning. Before we lament the loss of praying together, we need to know what we’ve lost!

My first prayer time in the morning is with my wife, Jill. Beginning at 5:45, we take forty-five minutes together to read the Bible and pray together. Jill punctuates our time with fervent prayers for our family, friends, and world. It’s also interrupted by job duties for me: “Oh, Paul, would you move all the boxes off your office floor before you leave for work? The carpet cleaner is coming today.” (Technically this is a question, but relationally it’s an order!) Then back to more fervent prayer for our family, which is interrupted by Jill asking if she can call our handyman to hang pictures, since I’m so backed up with other projects. “Yes, that’s fine.” Then back to more prayer for our grandchildren.

Jill freely admits she has ADD. Recently, I suggested she hold off on the job ideas for me until we’d finished praying. In her defense, I’ve been painting the house, and we’ve redone the kitchen, so not only is she managing lots of loose ends, but I’m behind in my to-do list, and it’s just easier to tell me stuff as it comes to her mind.

This is my most disorganized prayer time of the day, and yet it is the most powerful. Jill usually leads. It took me about ten years to realize that if I wanted to pray with her, I couldn’t organize her. Not only that: she prays better than I do. By that I mean, her prayers are almost on the verge of lamenting—she talks to God like she’s talking to me when I’ve promised to paint a room and keep postponing it. She feels the growing evil of our day and prays passionately against it. She’s a fighter. Jesus’s repeated command to ask anything gives us freedom to ask for even seemingly impossible things. Because of the loss of our beloved daughter Ashley to cancer, we especially pray for people battling cancer. We do have one systematic stretch of ten to fifteen minutes when we pray for our more than twenty-five children, spouses, and grandchildren.

Next I pray with our adult daughter Kim, who is affected by disabilities. We pray together barely five minutes, but I love hearing her “voice.” Using her speech computer’s icon language, she thanks God for multiple things. This morning she thanked God for our Thanksgiving dinner four days ago. (Dinner with our extended family was canceled due to the pandemic, so we went to a restaurant similar to the one in Lady and the Tramp, which absolutely charmed her.) Usually she slips in a prayer for our very bad golden retriever, Tully, who’s always stealing her things. If I’m biking to work, she prays that I won’t crash. If I’m skiing at night, she prays I won’t hit a tree. She prays for her ninety-seven-year-old grandmother in London. I usually encourage her to pick one niece or nephew to pray for. She often picks one she feels is too noisy or bad. Kim looks at her nieces and nephews like wine—they get better with age. Kim struggles with anger—it’s a symptom of her disability—but we try not to let her “diagnosis” define her, so she prays regularly for God to help her with anger. Lately, we’ve been visualizing her day together and praying for the parts where she might be tempted to get angry. That has helped. And then, as often happens, I notice my struggle with impatience, so Kim and I close by praying for each other’s struggle with impatience.

My third prayer meeting is mid-morning with the ministry I direct, seeJesus. About thirty of us gather on Zoom for about an hour. We spend the first half hearing reports from around the world on our seminar and training ministry. It’s an open mic, so we also hear updates on personal and family needs.

As we pray together, it feels like we are weaving a tapestry: We begin by praying for Felicia, who, the day before Thanksgiving, lost her sister to COVID. Our prayers wander through Felicia’s life with her sister, enjoying the good things that God had done, and lamenting the hard things. Then we pray for Mafdi’s work in the Arab world. Someone circles back to praying for Felicia; then we pray for Mafdi’s online Arabic The Person of Jesus study. We pray for Miguel, our Spanish-speaking trainer in Chile, who has been sick. With only five minutes left, pray-ers pick up their pace slightly, a bit like the fourth quarter of an American football game. We don’t want to forget anything, so the conversation style of the prayer meeting disappears, and short, quick prayers emerge to cover what we’ve not yet covered. I close our prayer time by inviting the Spirit of Jesus into our work to shape and lead us.

Our prayer time is the high point of the day. You can tell because hardly anyone misses and people start gathering early. The feel of the prayer time is resurrection. We pray boldly and expectantly, not just because that’s what resurrection people do but because we’ve seen God work in so many amazing ways. Prayer fuels prayer.

The hopeful, resurrection feel of each of these three prayer meetings does not happen automatically. It has taken time to cultivate. With Jill, I’m attentive to her and her world. With Kim, I prompt her with ideas—her limit is about five promptings. Any more and she gets irritated because SpongeBob awaits! With seeJesus, I try to be attentive to each person in the prayer meeting and to his or her story. For example, I talked with Felicia ahead of time to hear more of the story of her sister, so in our “open-mic” time, I prompt Felicia with questions to plumb the depths of suffering that her family has been through, but also to highlight some amazing ways that God worked through Felicia in her sister’s life. Attentiveness to resurrection keeps us from getting stuck in sadness.

These three prayer meetings are completely ordinary. Jill’s language to God is no different from her language to me when I’ve forgotten to take out the trash. I say this because we tend to think of prayer as somehow a higher life, when it’s actually real life. Each of these three prayer times is strikingly different from the others, based on the focus and who is involved, but that’s true of all our conversations. We shape our dialogue based on who we are talking to.

Why Pray Together?

You likely agree that prayer is important, but let’s be realistic; not many of us have the luxury of praying for an hour and a half in the morning. Life comes at us too fast.

Actually, I slow down to pray with other believers because life is coming at me so fast. Instinctively, I respond to life’s speed with my own speed. That creates a ten-car pileup not only in my outward life but also in my soul. I can’t imagine leading my family or community without corporate prayer. I do these morning prayer times not from discipline but from learned desperation. I am constant in corporate prayer because the Jesus communities I’m in are constant in need. I have no interest in doing anything that hasn’t been prayed for and prayed over. What I pray over lasts, and what I don’t pray over doesn’t last. But there’s more: A Jesus community is characterized by wonder, and the conduit to that is prayer. I’ve seen what happens when the Spirit of Jesus inhabits a community—everything starts to sparkle.

Praying together is not a luxury, nor is it something just for “spiritual” Christians; it’s the very breath of the church. Most of us don’t have the faintest idea of what that means. That’s what I hope to show in this book: how integral prayer is to a Jesus community.

God has used my earlier book and seminar A Praying Life to help many individuals pray, but without a supportive, praying community, it’s easy to lose hope, to wear out in the work of prayer. Unless entire churches learn to pray together, individual prayer can lose steam. And that isn’t just in official prayer meetings but in our families and small groups too, and even in that random phone conversation. That’s the passion of this book—to foster praying communities.

Creating Praying Communities

Here’s an overview of what we’ll cover in the pages ahead:

• In part 1, we answer the question Why pray together? We’ll discover why prayer is critical to the church’s life. My template is Luke and Acts. I hope to capture your imagination with a new vision of how prayer ignites the Spirit of Jesus in his church.
• In part 2, we examine what the church is. This book isn’t just about praying together; it’s about how a Jesus community works. Using Ephesians, we’ll discover who runs the church (the Spirit of Jesus) and exactly what the church is made of (saints), which helps us see why prayer is fundamental to how we do church. If I can fill you with wonder, with a new, richer way of looking at the church, you’ll find your heart enlarged—and that will do its own work.
• In part 3, we explore the interface between...