Prayer, Movements and Belief - Part 1
Dave Fagg reflects on prayer & activism
The ‘emerging church’ and
‘radical discipleship’ movements have their roots in a profound dissatisfaction
with establishment Christianity. In rejecting the establishment church, both
traditions have tended to throw some babies out with the bathwater. One of
these babies is prayer. As one deeply committed to radical discipleship and
mission, I think it is imperative to examine what I perceive to be a lack of
prayer among us, and what the consequences for our movements will be.
Part 1 of this short
analysis will look at how our history has shaped our attitudes towards prayer
and briefly outline some reasons why we don't pray. Part 2 will suggest consequences
for our movements stemming from this lack of prayer and sketch the real issues
that lie behind prayer.
The
Establishment Church & Prayer
In the establishment
churches that nursed so many of us, prayer was a substitute for action. We
prayed with pietistic fervour, but left the legwork to missionaries and
activists. When we abandoned these churches, we rejected prayer and embraced
activism - working for justice, doing mission in schools, living in community,
planting churches. I occasionally prayed, but only when desperate. Prayer was
left behind as part of the Egypt from which we were rapidly making our exodus.
When our activism had
exhausted us, some of us (myself included) returned to prayer via the
contemplative disciplines found in monastic orders. Silence, lectio divina,
fasting, solitude and other practices became the tools by which we ‘sustained
the journey’. Prayer became the petrol to our still-speeding vehicle.
Despite our timid
appropriation of contemplative disciplines, prayer doesn’t get a big wrap in
emerging church or radical discipleship circles. Assuming that we have moved
beyond the mindless rejection of establishment church practices, why do we
treat prayer as little better than food to be scoffed down in order to get on
with the ‘real work’ of the reign of God?
Why
We Don't Pray
“Prayer is good, but it’s no substitute for action.”
We don't reckon prayer is real
work. We treat prayer as a back-up to the practical, effective, grass-roots,
strategic, sustainable, educational stuff that we’re doing. It’s definitely not
equal to ‘getting your hands dirty’. Think about how much effort we put into
‘building the kingdom’ compared to how little energy we give to prayer. This is
ironic because the tradition from which we borrow our contemplative disciplines
(monasticism) regards prayer as inseparable from work. Monks actually thought
it achieved things!
"It’s impossible to ask God to intervene in the
world - that would be arrogant”.
Because our
culture conditions us against claiming to know what is good for others, we
think that by asking God to intervene we are assuming that we know what God should do. This is a helpful corrective to
paternalism. However, our activism in the cause of justice and mission is
equally a way of claiming that we know
what is good for others. Would you plant a church if you didn’t believe the
reign of God required it? Would you buy fair-trade coffee if you thought God
was opposed to it? All our actions in
the cause of the kingdom implicitly assume that God agrees with us. However,
our reluctance to pray for these things is a sign that our actions lack
conviction - if we truly believed our activism was God’s work (and what other
work is worth doing?) then we would pray about it constantly.
“Perhaps prayer changes things, but I haven’t seen
any results.”
We don't believe
that God can, or wants to, intervene in the world at all. Ours is the
‘clockwork universe’, designed to work without involvement from God. The
terrifying consequence of this belief is that we are solely responsible for
building the kingdom of God. It is terrifying because we know, deep down and
usually unconsciously, that we are incapable of shouldering this
responsibility, let alone fulfilling it. Even if we do recognise this fundamental
vulnerability, we do not know it,
otherwise we would be screaming to God for help every day.
These reasons for not
praying are widespread and probably recognisable in our own lives. They
certainly are in mine! I believe these problems with prayer mask deeper issues
that our movements will need to deal with in order to sustain a truly biblical
witness. Part 2 of this article will look at what these issues are and how they
affect our movements.
Dave Fagg is the Seeds Bendigo - Long Gully convenor
First published online at phuture.org (now defunct), 2002