The phrase, 'thoughts and prayers,' has come under a lot of scrutiny in the past couple of years, and rightly so. When 'thoughts and prayers' are a substitute for real action, rather than the foundation of action, then those thoughts and prayers are rather hollow. From a Christian perspective, prayer is good regardless, but for 'thoughts and prayers' to be truly effective, we need to have a better understanding of how prayer is work.
Prayer is work for three reasons. The first is the most obvious: it takes time to pray. If those of us who are religious are honest, we'd have to admit that we don't pray nearly as much as we should. Distractions in life are too numerous to avoid, it would seem, so we fill our day with everything but prayer, except for maybe the few minutes after we wake and before we sleep. Finding and making the time to pray as much as we should is, then, work.
We may not want to consider prayer work. Yes, prayer is supposed to be a natural outpouring of our faith and love of God. Yet we must understand that we find our greatest joy, peace, consolation, etc. not from our faith generally but from spending time with our God. If we are not spending time with our God, then we need to make sure that we do, and that requires work. We have to work at making time to pray. And there should be no question that, if Christians (and Jews and Muslims) are responsible for anything it is to pray. Jesus said things like, "When you fast... when you pray," assuming that we would. Fasting, of course, is another form of prayer that is definitely work.
Fortunately, prayer is the easiest kind of work we can possibly do. If we ask, "when do I ever have the time to pray?", the answer is simple: you can pray with your family, you can pray while you eat, you can pray while you garden, you can pray while you do the dishes, while you cook, while you have sex, etc. If our greatest joy, peace, consolation, etc. come from spending time with our God, why not pray all the time? You don't always need to set aside time to go to a quiet place to pray. That is important, certainly, but your prayer can be the acknowledgement that you live before our God, that you are working before God, you are eating before God, and so on.
Having said that prayer is the easiest kind of work we can do, I must also say that it is among the hardest things we can do. That is because we are often confused as to what we should pray for or how we should pray. Again, simply recognizing that we are in the midst of God can be your prayer, but there are certainly times when we must put words and thought to our prayer. What should we ask for? What can we ask for? Should we even be asking for things? I'll answer some of these questions in my next post (I hope), but for now I'll say that prayer seems hard because, a) we think we need to be some type of expert, and b) we aren't sure where God is calling us to go. For the answer to a), I point you to my Holy Pastor Doing Stuff You Tube video on how to pray. Prayer doesn't need to be complicated. Just say what's on your mind. The answer to b), however, is that we need to learn how to listen. Prayer is work because listening is not our forte.
So the second reason prayer is work is that, in prayer, we can come to understand one another. We must listen in order to understand others, of course, and in that silent listening, we may learn how to see life from another person's shoes. In prayer we can ask, "what is so and so thinking? Why do they act that way?" If we are silent and listen, and truly open, God may show us.
Thirdly, and most importantly, prayer is work because we can come to an understanding of God. Again, if we listen in silence during our prayer, God's will for us will become known. Rather than fretting about the right thing to say and whether what we are praying for is in alignment with God's desires for us, why don't we just ask God, and then listen for the response, what God is doing with us and where God is calling us?
The latter two reasons, especially, are where we can put some meat on 'thoughts and prayers.' I would wager that most people who say, 'thoughts and prayers,' and nothing else, don't even make the time to truly pray. But if we do make the time to pray, then our thoughts and prayers cannot merely be, "God, comfort these people, show them your love, be good to them, etc. etc." That's a good prayer, and much needed after a tragedy when 'thoughts and prayers' is most heard, but it's also a relatively weak prayer. If our prayer is instead a prayer of understanding, of sitting in silence to listen to the rhythm of other people's hearts and the will of God, then we will be changed and then forced into action. If we come to understand the plight of our neighbors, we cannot sit back and do nothing; if we come to understand God's desires for us, then we cannot then sit back and do nothing. If prayer is taken seriously, then, it will lead to work, to action, in the name of God and our brothers and sisters. It cannot be otherwise. Those who express thoughts and prayers and then do nothing are clearly either not praying or not working at prayer. Like God, we cannot hear the cry of the needy in our prayers and then not seek to liberate them.
What can't happen is the creation of a division between 'thoughts and prayers' and action. Surely, as I've said, there are many who use 'thoughts and prayers' as an excuse for action. But good prayer, prayer that we work at, leads to holy action. Action without prayer or pre-prayer will be action that is either misguided or unsustainable. Think about it: if one day you woke up and said, "I want to run a bike shop," and then you started looking into what it would take to run a bike shop, would you have as much patience and determination to follow through as if you thought and prayed for weeks about what you want to do, what you are gifted by God to do, and then concluded that you want to run a bike shop? Obviously the sustainable action--the sustainable bike shop scenario--is the one that has worked at prayer before action is taken. Not only might you quickly lose interest in running a bike shop in the former, prayer-less scenario, but you might also make mistakes along the way. We must keep thinking and praying, then, but really work at it. Work at prayer so that we can, as a society, not remain stagnant and not remain far from God's intentions for us and instead take right, holy action.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Once we can understand prayer as work that we Christians should and must do, easy and hard work, then we can also put the role of our pastors into better perspective. This may seem like a radical shift in subject and I suppose it is to an extent. But if Christians are called to the work of prayer, then pastors are especially.
Unfortunately, the role of pastor has been tweaked in harmful ways in the past hundred-fifty-plus years. This is particularly true in Methodist churches. Back in the day, pastors were theological and spiritual and moral guides. Evangelicalism, despite its modern bent, combined the twin aims of revival and reform because, to John Wesley and Charles Finney and others, the role of pastors and of the church is to listen for God's nudging and then follow ardently. Strong abolitionist and feminist and nearly communist movements sprung out of the original evangelicalism. Pastors were the lead, the impetus for revival with the vision for reform, and the daily/weekly tasks of the church were delegated to the church proper. What happened was that churches became established, secure, stable, and wanted the pastor not to push them too far ("hey, we've done so much already") and instead to take care of them ("hey, wouldn't it be nice to get a visit from the pastor?"). Slowly but definitely surely, the theological and moral, prophetic and visionary leadership of pastors dwindled away. The spiritual comfort aspect of pastoral ministry took center stage. Nowadays, then, pastors spend most of their days and weeks writing and preaching sermons that don't tackle moral or so-called political issues at all, teaching bible studies, and visiting people to ask basic questions like, "How are you doing? Okay, let's pray." Meanwhile, people in the churches do very little of the work they used to, whether it be visiting, holding one another spiritually and morally accountable, preaching and exhorting, or leading community activism.
All of this is connected to churches having a hard time understanding that when a pastor is praying, she or he is working. It should be clear that churches' insistence that pastors settle down to care for the individual spiritual needs of the congregation has also led to a desire for tangible pastoral work on behalf of church members. You see, if a pastor is no longer a holy reformer of church and society, then a pastor no longer has need to pray, because prayer is the work a pastor does listening to the needs of the downtrodden and oppressed and to God's loving Spirit. The only prayer a pastor can do is with the church members for good health, promotions at work, or more members. But none of that is not the ultimate work of the church or of Christians generally. Churches and church members tend to want to know that their pastor is tangibly working for the time they expect. If a pastor is paid for forty hours, then the pastor must be able to account for how all forty hours were spent between worship and sermon preparation, Bible study, visitation, meetings, or the like.
Instead of our current model, however, we should return to the model of a pastor at prayer. It may seem like cheating, for instance, that I count about half the time I spend on my bike, Cato, as work for the church. But that is work for the church, because my role as pastor should be in hearing God's call, listening to how we are out of step with God's intentions for us and how we might get back into step with God's desired path for us. The church in this scenario is not a collection of people being cared for, but rather a family working towards God's kingdom. What does that kingdom look like compared to the world we live in? The answer must come in prayer. The pastor must be the leading figure in such prayer. We need to be grounded in the working of God.
Yes, we can say that a pastor should pray on his or her own time, but a pastor's 'own' time is when they need to pray for their personal life. A pastor must be personally renewed as well.
My hope is that in understanding the role of prayer in our Christian and church lives we will have a healthier relationship with God and also a more Christ-like impact on our world, as our churches once again claim the part of activism for the sake of transformation.
No comments:
Post a Comment