A Praying Church, Part 1
March 9, 2023 | by: Dale Thiele | 0 Comments
Posted in: Pastoral Encouragement
In this series of articles, I seek to unpack the teaching of Paul Miller’s new book, A Praying Church, and apply the principles to our church. As we grow in our prayer habits, may we become people of hope in a discouraging world.
In my mind Paul E. Miller is the prayer guy. My first introduction to the author was through his earlier book, A Praying Life. That book is an excellent tool to encourage Christians in their practice of the spiritual discipline of prayer. So, I was naturally interested to read Miller’s latest book, A Praying Church. This book goes beyond the individual practice of prayer to encouraging and equipping Christians to pray together in their church communities. He writes, “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” (p. 7).
Miller opens his book by sharing about three of his prayer meetings, the first with his wife to start the day, the second with his special needs daughter, and third with his ministry staff of seeJesus. He describes these by saying, “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” (p. 5-6). He hopes to allure the reader into desiring that same experience by praying with others.
In chapter 2, Miller addresses the question, “Who killed the prayer meeting?” Citing a Barna study that found “94 percent of American adults who have prayed at least once in the last three months do so by themselves,” Miller laments, “The American church is functionally prayerless when it comes to corporate prayer” (p. 13-14). He traces one cause of death of the prayer meeting to the rise of secularism, springing from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Secularism “doesn’t just deny God’s existence but denies the existence of any spiritual world” (p. 15). Most people, including Christians, divide the world into the physical and spiritual realms. The physical realm is the hard reality, full of facts and truth. The spiritual realm focuses on feelings and “cannot be verified by sense experience” (p. 15). If we do not recognize the vital connection between the two realms, that they are both just as real and truthful as the other, an activity like prayer, associated with the spiritual realm, “becomes mere therapy” (p. 17).
On a more personal level, Miller admits that much prayerlessness springs from personal unbelief. “If you doubt something, you don’t think it works, so you don’t use it. No one here thought prayer works. Unbelief is as practical as faith” (p. 13). Miller’s parents visited L’Abri, a ministry of Francis and Edith Schaffer, in the late 1960s. He observed that “prayer operated at the center of L’Abri” (p. 18). Edith Schaffer connects prayerlessness with unbelief when she reflects: “To live without prayer being woven into every part of every day is stupid, foolish, senseless, or is an evidence that your belief in the existence of the Creator, who has said we are to call upon Him, is an unsure belief” (p. 19).
What keeps you from joining fellow believers in prayer times? Don’t know when? The times don’t fit into your schedule? It feels awkward to pray out loud with others? You question the value of praying with others? At some level, everything that would keep us from praying with other believers is an expression of unbelief. Do we really believe we need to pray with others and that such prayer times are valuable? Next week we will consider Miller’s answer to the question why pray together?
In the meantime, I agree with Miller’s simple invitation: “No matter what, you must begin to pray together – even if just with a good friend. Some things are understood only from the inside” (p. 8).
