On the Road to Emmaus

My apologies – I meant to say, “how to develop an easy, consistent, diverse, deep, rich in content, broadly-biblical, non-idiosyncratic, Christ-centered, historically-rooted, well-rounded, manageable and profoundly moving prayer life,” but thought that title was at the same time unwieldy and immediately open to the charge of being outside the realm of possibility for the majority of normal Christians. Furthermore, if I said all those objectives (minus the “profoundly moving” part – that’s a little more involved) were achievable in less than a week’s time, I would fear my credibility to be even more so depreciated. Thus, the title to this post should be “How to establish an easy, consistent, diverse, deep, rich in content, broadly-biblical,  non-idiosyncratic, Christ-centered, historically-rooted, well-rounded, manageable and profoundly moving prayer life in less than one week** (**although the deeply moving may take some more time),” but for now, we’ll settle with the title “as-is.”

I’ve been heavily involved in the Prayer Movement for about 10 years and have worked at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City full-time for over five years, where our central (though not only) focus as a ministry is spending lots of time in prayer (we host prayer meetings 24/7 with attendance that never drops below 100), and equipping others to do the same. Yet I find it remarkable (though not really — I’ll explain why shortly), how frequently I talk to people here who do not pray that much. Yes, they read Christian books. Yes, they open the Bible periodically. Yes, they sing songs, sometimes with exuberance. Yes, they listen to sermons. Yes, they exhort others with reference to the value of prayer. But actually pray?

The surprising frequency with which people actually do not pray at a ministry devoted to prayer is not a phenomenon unique to us by any stretch of the imagination. If you’ve ever attempted to have a prayer life, you know what I’m talking about. You get a certain level of determination to pray and so decide to set aside 15, 30 minutes, maybe even an hour or two each day to pray. The first two minutes go great. You announce your noble intentions to be dedicated to God, thank him for all his mercies and ask him to strengthen you in your daily tasks. Then about twenty minutes later you shake yourself into cognizance realizing that the previous segment of time had been spent either sleeping, day dreaming, planning the rest of your day, worrying about this or that situation, thinking about what you’ll say to that last person who bugged/hurt/angered you, dusting the underside of your desk, or some combination of these. Then you spend the next minute or two apologizing to God or being frustrated with yourself, only 25 minutes later to repeat the same process. Oh Sweet Hour of Prayer!! Sweet indeed! Well…God thought it was endearing, but to the pray-er it was infuriating, demoralizing or both. Oh, by the way, I read about this in book.

Would it be a shock if I told you that today this is rarely my experience (I say rarely, not never)? Not only is this rarely my experience, but this ceased being my regular experience shortly after learning a very simple lesson. This lamentable scenario plays itself out over and over again in the lives of sincere and eager-hearted Christians largely (not only) because they come into the time of prayer with a very significant yet unspoken assumption. Wouldn’t you love to know what that is?

Before I get to that, I want to outline the above criteria. In seeking to cultivate my own practice of prayer, I’ve sought to find a method of prayer by which all of these characteristics can be true. I am maintaining this interlude because I want to subsequently show how my simple lesson enabled me to achieve all of these objectives rather quickly.

easy – the execution of this method cannot be excruciatingly laborious and constantly require all my mental, affective and bodily reserves. This would be impossible to maintain.

consistent - It must be sustainable. I would have to be able to do this method day in and day out – on good days and bad. My central method of prayer should not require or expect me to be in top form all of the time.

deep – in the name of being “easy,” it cannot overlook significantly important issues, questions, concerns, etc.. It has to address and speak to me at the level of my deep heart. Accessibility cannot be a ruse for what is in actual fact, shallow.

rich in content – this also would be an attempt to avoid the shallow – but now in terms of theological depth. This is rooted in the conviction that ultimately, it is true content about God and His world that moves the heart. Emotional experiences without content are shallow at best and fake at worse.

diverse – it would need to draw in many different topics, ideas, themes, emotions, modalities, etc. It can’t be the same every day – because  1)  God is diverse  2) Scripture is diverse and 3) monotony is very challenging for me.

well-rounded – I want my prayer life not simply to be diverse, but to be intentionally diverse – over time being thorough in scope, reach and coverage – to provide for me a balanced spiritual diet on a regular basis.

broadly-biblical – biblical verses are important but not enough to make something “biblical.” A concept can employ many “verses” in its defense but in fact be “unbiblical” if it uses those verses in a way that is incompatible with or unfaithful to the larger narrative of Scripture.  I want my practice of prayer to draw from from the breadth of Scripture in a way that the overarching drama Scripture is telling gets formed into my life over time.

Christ-centered – prayer fundamentally not anxiously fixated on problems or issues, but confidently centered on the redemptive acts of God in Christ – incarnation, life and ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, outpouring of the Holy Spirit and second coming.

non-idiosyncratic – I refuse to center my prayer life around my small collection of favorite verses, passages, ideas, pet-doctrines, etc. Of course I can have and cherish those, but my spiritually would become narrow-minded and limited if it only bore the marks of my “uniqueness.” Furthermore it would stink of individualism and and a pride insisting only I know and have the best way.

historically-rooted – it seems that the best way to avoid idiosyncrasy would be to draw on the riches of Christian and Jewish history. This would give me a “rooted-ness” that avoids forming my devotional practice on the basis of the “spirit of the age” even if I think somehow it hasn’t affected our modern forms of Christianity (it has – it’s inescapable…

manageable – the method of prayer would need to incorporate all of the above in way that I am not trying to swallow the entire depth, content, diversity and history of Biblical and Apostolic Christianity all at once. It must be capable of consumption in digestible pieces.

profoundly moving – of course my method of prayer must lead me to encounter God on a somewhat regular basis. Now, I am not one for the “myth of constant communion” where one feels the presence of God without ceasing, either throughout all of life, or even throughout an entire prayer time. It would be best if we put that myth to rest because while it is inspiring to a few people, it is utterly demoralizing to the other 98% of normal believers who have actually tried prayer. Nevertheless, I make it my objective to deeply connect to God on the heart level every day. Ultimately, if I am unmoved by all my ideas – I don’t actually believe them. So my method of prayer must serve this function of bringing me into deeper affective awareness of God’s heart for me and deeper expression of my heart to God.

Well…now that I’ve laid out all my criteria for a method of prayer I have been seeking, prospects for such a method may seem quite dismal (especially considering EASY and MANAGEABLE are amongst the criteria). However, I am happy to say that I have found a method that incorporates all of these criteria. The best part is that I didn’t make it up at all – I found it fully functioning and happily satisfying all of my criteria without my ingenuity.

I’ll talk about this more in an upcoming post, but for now I want to get back to that important yet unspoken assumption that many, many contemporary believers bring with them into their times of prayer that often renders their “Sweet Hour of Prayer” as, well, woefully lackluster. Interestingly enough, it is not an assumption that most Christians throughout history have shared. This assumption is that when praying, the words I say, will for the most part (or entirely), be drawn from my own inner spontaneous creativity. In other words, when I pray, I just close my eyes, start talking and expect to keep going for an hour (or more!) with an unceasing flow of inspiration and corresponding cascade of eloquent and moving language. How often does this actually happen? Why do we insist on believing that it will happen anytime soon? Why do we narcissistically maintain our illusion of feigned spiritual prowess and neurotically refuse to believe that we are all in fact novices in the school of prayer?

The opposite approach would be to use pre-written prayers as an aid to your own prayer. This could range from have a pre-written framework from which to add extemporaneous interjections to simply repeating the words of a prayer written by someone else. This one simple switch of mindset (that I don’t have to pull all the words I pray out of nowhere every time I pray) is essentially the key which enabled me to fulfill all of the above criteria in my prayer life. Evidently, simply using pre-written prayers and structures of prayer by itself did not enable this, but it was the key that unlocked the door. I’ll explain more on how this worked for me in subsequent posts. Now, this may be a little anti-climactic if you were hoping for a really great secret. The incredible thing is that this is not a secret at all – the majority of prayer meetings and prayer movements throughout Church history have employed pre-written prayers and prayer (liturgical) frameworks as the bedrock upon which their prayer lives were based. It is almost too easy of a solution.

I understand that there are significant objections to using pre-written prayers and I will address those in my next post. For now I simply want to lay out my initial criteria and show how they are impossible or exceedingly difficult to satisfy using the “pray only from my spontaneous internal creative resources” method.

easy – it is easy in the sense that you don’t have to plan or prepare. Try doing it for a while for extended periods of time and you will soon know it is not easy. It is really hard to come up with fresh language to pray for hours on end, day after day.

consistent - as C.S. Lewis has aptly noted, espousing this approach to prayer requires you to be on top form all the time. It commits the error of assuming that you can do all of the time what you can only do some of the time.

deep – as will be a common thread though many of these criteria – if prayer is only spontaneous, your prayer will essentially be drawn from what you already brought in with you. So…the depth of your prayer will correspond to the depth you already had – that’ll work for the veterans, but good luck for the neophytes!

rich in content – as with above, the content you already had and can spontaneously form into semi-coherent phrases will determine the content of your prayer. This does not bode well for those without 20 years of experience in prayer and the Word.

diverse – ironic as it seems, when prayer is only spontaneous, it often is lacking in diversity. This is because we tend to “spontaneously” gravitate to what is familiar and comfortable to us. Hence our “spontaneity” will only be what we already know and will be limited to our familiar (and predictable) ideas and patterns. Only by great effort does spontaneity actually sustain diversity (violating criteria #1 – EASY and #2 – CONSISTENT).

broadly-biblical – there is no way to ensure that an entirely spontaneous method of prayer will root you in a broad approach to Scripture. Rather the snippets of Scripture you have memorized will find expression in a spontaneously haphazard fashion.

Christ-centered – if the redemptive acts of God in Christ are central to everything you think about then this one will be easy. If you are like most of us and are attempting against many counter currents to form your life in a Christ-centered way, this one will be difficult on your own.

non-idiosyncratic – The very essence of spontaneity is that it is idiosyncratic. This is its main strength and weakness. Expressing yourself is valuable, but in exclusion is severely limited and bordering on narcissistic.

historically-rooted – once again, if you are already profoundly rooted in historic and apostolic Christianity, this one will be a snap (maybe). However, if you are still in the journey of prayer, considering yourself to not yet have arrived, there is no way this will happen on its own.

well-rounded – idiosyncratic prayer seems to necessarily lack being well-rounded.

manageable – perhaps it is manageable – however, I don’t consider the void of all the previous elements to be manageable. I find it depressing.

profoundly moving – I think we’ve already established that a solely spontaneous approach to prayer often yields mediocre results as described above. I find it odd that one of the central objections to using written forms in prayer is the accusation that they are dry and dull. This is a most ironic accusation, considering how awful the experience is of most Christians’ spontaneous attempts at prayer. In fact, it is such a ridiculous assertion that I will not even address it in my next post, in which I will deal with a more formidable objection to written prayers.

Well – I don’t want to end on a down note – so I’ll finish by saying that if you find yourself in the experience of prayer which spends exponentially more time staring at the wall and thinking about other things than actually praying, or perhaps you’ve had that experience and just gave up assuming that it wouldn’t work – there actually is another way – and it actually works – and it actually has been practiced by the majority of praying Christians throughout Church history, especially those who have dedicated their lives to prayer. If you are an expert in prayer, feel no need to continue listening to me. But if you have been longing for “help” in prayer (cf. Rom. 8:28) and have been asking God to “teach you how to pray,” there is help available. Much help. And it is remarkably more easy than you might think. More on this to come.

Related posts

• Why Use Written Prayers? (A series explaining the logic and reasons behind Christian liturgy and worship) (0)
• Opposition to Pre-Written Prayers Comes From the Spirit of the Age (Developing a Consistent Prayer Life Part 2) (3)
• My Personal Prayer Action Plan (Developing a Consistent Prayer Life Part 3) (0)
• How to Pray the Daily Office from the Book of Common Prayer (Part 7) – Making it Easy (in fact, brainless…) (1)
• How to Pray the Daily Office from the Book of Common Prayer (Part 6) – The Prayers (0)