It’s no secret thechurch in America is struggling. We’ve lost the cultural wars, and our kids are being seduced by the siren call of secularism. It’s rare to find a family where I live in the Northeast where all the grown children of Christian parents are believers. Having lost the cultural high ground, we no longer control the public narrative.
Last night one of my favorite British sitcoms, Doc Martin, mocked a missionary couple as judgmental, selfish, and greedy. That’s not just a lie, it’s a false narrative that is imprinting our youth.
It’s no different from the false narrative that the slaveowners spun of Paul and Silas in Philipi after Paul cast the demon out of their slave girl. Trapped by the false narrative of the slaveowners (“these Jews are troublemakers”), Paul and Silas ended up beaten and in prison with their legs in stocks (which functioned like torture extenders). There in prison they embraced a “fellowship of his sufferings” (Phil. 3:10) by instinctively forming a praying community.
With the cultural supports of Christendom gone, we often find ourselves in situations where we are powerless and suffering, like Paul and Silas. Only in our reenacted Gethsemanes does prayer become like breathing. That’s my hope and prayer: that as suffering increases, our churches would learn to be praying communities.
Unfortunately, praying Christians are rare. In our prayer seminar, we ask several confidential questions about a participant’s prayer life. After doing hundreds of seminars, we have found that about 85 percent of Christians in a typical church do not have much of a prayer life. So when someone says, “I’ll keep you in my prayers,” 85 percent of the time it is just words. There is no prayer life to keep these prayers in.
Even rarer is a praying church, where a whole community prays together. That’s the vision of this article: First, to understand the problem of prayerlessness, particularly in church leadership, then to discover the solution that centers on a new vision of the church, and finally to see what a praying church looks like. To do that, I need to go back fifty years.
After my father, Jack Miller, joined the faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1968, he visited Francis Schaeffer in L’Abri, Switzerland, where he encountered something he’d never seen before—a praying community. Prayer operated at the center of L’Abri’s life. That is, the life of the community orbited around the prayer meetings. Here are Edith Schaeffer’s reflections on what a praying community looks like:
Dad was an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a seminary professor, and a newly minted PhD, yet prayer operated at the periphery of his life. He was not alone. Multiple pastors have confided in me how difficult prayer is for them. After attending three prayer seminars, one of the leaders in my denomination (Presbyterian Church in America) confided in me how hard it was for him to be faithful in his prayer life. Recently at lunch, several Southern Baptist church planters said to me, “Planting a church killed my prayer life.”
For most pastors, prayer doesn’t function at the nitty-gritty level of life the way their calendars or phones do. Apart from public prayers during worship services, they pray at the beginning of meetings, but this prayer tends to be official and lack depth. For example, when I meet with pastors, I’ll share my particular sexual temptations, how I pray about them, and how God has helped me. Then I ask, “How do you pray about your sexual temptations?” Dead silence.
Then I’ll probe from another direction. Most pastors struggle at times with successful businesspeople in their church who bring a wealth of practical experience. The pastors, often with little practical business experience themselves, need their wisdom and help, but pastors will recoil from the way these men and women exercise power in the church. So I ask, “How are you praying about strong men and women in your congregation?” Again, dead silence. So, in two of the most challenging areas of their ministry— sex and power—many pastors are functionally on their own.
There are multiple roots to prayerlessness: unbelief (the functional atheism of our public culture gets in our blood), materialism (money does what prayer does but lets you remain in control), and cynicism (what good does prayer do?). But the problem isn’t merely “sin.” Prayerlessness is pervasive in the church, and the problem has deeper roots. Something is missing.
Attentiveness to the Spirit of Jesus is the missing key to the church’s prayerlessness. Pastors struggle with prayerlessness not primarily because of ego or self-will or even self-discipline. It is because of the way they view the church. They have the wrong blueprint.
In the absence of the Spirit, what quietly moves to the center of the church life is the managerial and, to a lesser extent, the therapeutic. The good manager sees the facts, the processes, and the people the church needs. None of this is inherently wrong, but it often misses the central fact in any church: the Spirit’s resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the ensuing life and power that come from their union. That blinding light shapes all other wisdom.
This gives rise to three questions, which we will answer in the following order: Why is the Spirit of Jesus so important? Why is prayer so central to the work of the Spirit? And what does this look like in a church?
Miller will outline the answer to those questions in part 2 of this article…
The post A Praying Church: Understanding the Problem of Prayerlessness in Church Leadership appeared first on Focus on the Family.
Continue reading...
Last night one of my favorite British sitcoms, Doc Martin, mocked a missionary couple as judgmental, selfish, and greedy. That’s not just a lie, it’s a false narrative that is imprinting our youth.
It’s no different from the false narrative that the slaveowners spun of Paul and Silas in Philipi after Paul cast the demon out of their slave girl. Trapped by the false narrative of the slaveowners (“these Jews are troublemakers”), Paul and Silas ended up beaten and in prison with their legs in stocks (which functioned like torture extenders). There in prison they embraced a “fellowship of his sufferings” (Phil. 3:10) by instinctively forming a praying community.
With the cultural supports of Christendom gone, we often find ourselves in situations where we are powerless and suffering, like Paul and Silas. Only in our reenacted Gethsemanes does prayer become like breathing. That’s my hope and prayer: that as suffering increases, our churches would learn to be praying communities.
Unfortunately, praying Christians are rare. In our prayer seminar, we ask several confidential questions about a participant’s prayer life. After doing hundreds of seminars, we have found that about 85 percent of Christians in a typical church do not have much of a prayer life. So when someone says, “I’ll keep you in my prayers,” 85 percent of the time it is just words. There is no prayer life to keep these prayers in.
Even rarer is a praying church, where a whole community prays together. That’s the vision of this article: First, to understand the problem of prayerlessness, particularly in church leadership, then to discover the solution that centers on a new vision of the church, and finally to see what a praying church looks like. To do that, I need to go back fifty years.
The problem of prayerlessness in leadership
After my father, Jack Miller, joined the faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1968, he visited Francis Schaeffer in L’Abri, Switzerland, where he encountered something he’d never seen before—a praying community. Prayer operated at the center of L’Abri’s life. That is, the life of the community orbited around the prayer meetings. Here are Edith Schaeffer’s reflections on what a praying community looks like:
Dad was an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a seminary professor, and a newly minted PhD, yet prayer operated at the periphery of his life. He was not alone. Multiple pastors have confided in me how difficult prayer is for them. After attending three prayer seminars, one of the leaders in my denomination (Presbyterian Church in America) confided in me how hard it was for him to be faithful in his prayer life. Recently at lunch, several Southern Baptist church planters said to me, “Planting a church killed my prayer life.”
For most pastors, prayer doesn’t function at the nitty-gritty level of life the way their calendars or phones do. Apart from public prayers during worship services, they pray at the beginning of meetings, but this prayer tends to be official and lack depth. For example, when I meet with pastors, I’ll share my particular sexual temptations, how I pray about them, and how God has helped me. Then I ask, “How do you pray about your sexual temptations?” Dead silence.
Then I’ll probe from another direction. Most pastors struggle at times with successful businesspeople in their church who bring a wealth of practical experience. The pastors, often with little practical business experience themselves, need their wisdom and help, but pastors will recoil from the way these men and women exercise power in the church. So I ask, “How are you praying about strong men and women in your congregation?” Again, dead silence. So, in two of the most challenging areas of their ministry— sex and power—many pastors are functionally on their own.
There are multiple roots to prayerlessness: unbelief (the functional atheism of our public culture gets in our blood), materialism (money does what prayer does but lets you remain in control), and cynicism (what good does prayer do?). But the problem isn’t merely “sin.” Prayerlessness is pervasive in the church, and the problem has deeper roots. Something is missing.
Defining the problem
Attentiveness to the Spirit of Jesus is the missing key to the church’s prayerlessness. Pastors struggle with prayerlessness not primarily because of ego or self-will or even self-discipline. It is because of the way they view the church. They have the wrong blueprint.
In the absence of the Spirit, what quietly moves to the center of the church life is the managerial and, to a lesser extent, the therapeutic. The good manager sees the facts, the processes, and the people the church needs. None of this is inherently wrong, but it often misses the central fact in any church: the Spirit’s resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the ensuing life and power that come from their union. That blinding light shapes all other wisdom.
This gives rise to three questions, which we will answer in the following order: Why is the Spirit of Jesus so important? Why is prayer so central to the work of the Spirit? And what does this look like in a church?
Miller will outline the answer to those questions in part 2 of this article…
The post A Praying Church: Understanding the Problem of Prayerlessness in Church Leadership appeared first on Focus on the Family.
Continue reading...