My Personal Prayer Action Plan (Developing a Consistent Prayer Life Part 3)
This is the third part in a series on the practical side of prayer. Much can be said about the theoretical side of prayer – what is prayer exactly, what does it do, etc. Also, the subject of how God feels and responds to our prayers is a VASTLY significant subject. Many people have difficulty praying because they imagine God is scowling at them or shrugging in disinterest the entire time. This couldn’t be further from the truth of God’s actual emotions!
For as much as could be said concerning the theoretical and theological aspects of prayer – I have been discussing for two posts, what is in my opinion the primary practical hurdle in developing a consistent life of prayer. In the first post, I discussed the underlying assumption that many believers bring into the prayer time, which often ends up crippling them – that every word they say has to come out of the fresh creative spontaneity of their inner-most self expression. I then went on to describe the inherent limitations that an exclusive use of this type of prayer brings. In the second post, I attempted to show how this assumption in prayer is neither logical nor in accord with biblical or historical tradition. Instead, it comes from the Spirit of the Age, specifically Romanticism and Existentialism.
Today I want to simply describe how I personally implement the notions I’ve laid out in the previous two posts in my “Personal Prayer Action Plan.” As of late, I find myself frequently urging many people to develop a “Prayer Action Plan.” This simply means having a somewhat concrete idea about what you’re going to do in your prayer time before you get there. Making it up as you go occasionally works great, but is often disappointing. There is no use crippling 95% of your prayer times for the 5% when something incredible happens completely unplanned. I often tell people that I know exactly what I will be doing for my entire 4-6 hour prayer time each night. This is slightly misleading – I just have an easy enough system set up that it takes no thought to execute an extensive prayer action plan (I’ll explain this more later).
I recommend that a personal prayer action plan should have at least the following characteristics: (the three-point alliteration is purely accidental!!)
simple to execute – it cannot be laborious or painstaking. It cannot require a lot of careful thought simply to execute. I will never do it. I have to be able to do it easily.
substantial – Most of us will need more than “I will pray for Africa from 1-2 and pray-read the Bible from 2-3, etc.” Your plan generally will need more substance than that or it may frequently drift in aimless directions. An improvement on the former might be “I will pray [specific scripture verses] for [specific topics] for [specific countries] in Africa from 1-2 [which vary on different days of the week] and from 2-3 I will pray-read [a specific schedule of passages from] the Bible [using a specific method] from 2-3.
scaleable – since most of us pray for a set period of time, having a substantial plan runs into the difficulty of being too rigid. What happens if the amount of time you have to pray this day is either shorter or longer than usual? What if you get through your planned material, still have more time left over and don’t want to quit early? Or what if you get touched by the Lord at one point, and so one part of your plan took longer than usual? There has to be means by which even a structured prayer time can be shortened or lengthened with relative ease.
Now these three characteristics of a Prayer Action Plan are in addition to the eleven criteria for my prayer life I outlined previously (easy, consistent, diverse, deep, rich in content, broadly-biblical, non-idiosyncratic, Christ-centered, historically-rooted, manageable and profoundly moving). It might seem incredibly daunting to develop a Prayer Action Plan satisfying these criteria. I don’t imagine they would simply fall into place on their own accord. I mentioned that for me the “secret” was using written prayers. Of course, just any assortment written prayers would not suffice and certainly not ones that I primarily wrote myself.
What is surprising, is I found a Prayer Action Plan, meeting all my criteria, which for the most part was fully in place and operational apart from my ingenuity. Granted, I tweaked it and customized it, but the overall structure and much of the smaller details I took directly from a long standing tradition. This was not simply a collection of written prayers, but entire extended structures of prayer based on the orders used in monastic communities from the days of St. Benedict and earlier. This tradition is the daily prayer services from Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican tradition. These prayer services are collectively called the “Daily Office.” It is called the “Office” because the word derives from Latin officium, meaning “performance of a task” (which comes from opus “work” + facere “do”). The church understood daily prayer to be the central “work” of the believing community, so to speak, and so called them “Offices.”
Because I’ve found this way of praying so helpful and gloriously fulfilling everything I was looking for in prayer, I am going to take the next number of posts to explain in detail how to use the Book of Common Prayer to structure your prayer life. It may seem complicated and cumbersome at first, and that is because it is quite a complex system. However, once you start rolling, with a few practical tips, it is remarkably easy to use this incredibly rich model of prayer. The time it takes to learn to pray in this way is miniscule in comparison to the rewards it offers.
To summarize – this model essentially consists of:
-Praying the entire book of Psalms in sequence once or twice a month (or weekly for the really ambitious)
-A series of short passages from Scripture (10-20 verses) for prayer-reading arranged on a two year calendar so that a portion from the Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel are read every day and all of the NT and most of the OT is covered each year.
-A number of Canticles (songs in the Bible outside of the Psalms) which are used as prayer-responses to the readings
-A plethora of written prayers for a wide diversity of subjects
-All of this is structured around the Christian Year, which roots the spirituality in the unfolding narrative of salvation as manifested in God’s salvific acts in and through the Messiah (more on this shortly).
There are two general ways to pray the Daily Office - the standard, simple way – and one with a few means of adding a little more complexity that add a lot more diversity and depth. I’ll start by discussing the standard method. Its good to learn the Office and get used to it simply. Then in due time, I’ll discuss the “Office on Steroids,” so to speak.
To get started you will need to get a Book of Common Prayer. I use the 1979 edition and will base the subsequent comments on it.
The most basic form is a simple 5.5″ x 7.5″ hardcover which comes in red or black. You can get used copies for only a few dollars (click on links to go to Amazon.com).
There are numerous other editions in all shapes, colors and bindings (softcover, hardcover, leather). Just search on Amazon.
Alternately – you can download these files and print them double-sided along the short edge, staple them down the middle and fold, and you have your own booklets.
Daily Office from the BCP – the portions from the BCP that cover the main prayer services
Daily Office Lectionary – schedule of all of the Scripture readings for the two-year schedule
Schemes for Praying the Entire Psalter
If you are a local – just ask me, and I might have an extra on hand!
A Third option is several websites that take all the aspects of the Daily Office and put them together for you. Granted, this confines you to your computer to pray (unless you print it out daily), which I don’t personally prefer, but it does make it a lot easier at first. Some of them have options for smartphones, which make it readily portable.
Daily Office – this is the American Anglican version
Morning Prayer Evening Prayer – these are daily feeds from the British version (somewhat different than the American)
Universalis – Roman Catholic version (similar overall structure but with various nuances)
Starting with the next post, I will begin to explain practically how to use the BCP to establish an easy, consistent, diverse, deep, rich in content, broadly-biblical, non-idiosyncratic, Christ-centered, historically-rooted, manageable and profoundly moving** prayer life in almost no time at all (**although the deeply moving part may take a little more time).
Related posts
How to Pray the Daily Office from the Book of Common Prayer (Part 1) – Christian Year Overview »
