Experiences In Christian Living and Leadership

Making Space for Prayer

At this week's evening study, we discussed prayer.  We viewed a clip from the website, recycleyourfaith.com.  In the clip Tim talks about prayer and his changing understanding of prayer.  He poses a question based on a Kierkegaard quote that indicates prayer influences the one doing the praying more than it influences God.  That was an awesome starting point as the group discussed our understanding of prayer.

During the discussion we explored what it meant to hear God as part of prayer.  I began to ponder how we go about hearing God and where the voice of God can be found.  I feel that a struggle that I have in my prayer discipline is providing the space to hear God.  Tim talked about praying with his feet, moving about his neighborhood as he prayed.  I wonder how many times I fail to hear God's voice in the most unexpected places. 

Sharing with the group, I talked about how maybe the Lord's voice could be found while reading the newspaper, or in a conversation with someone, or in what I view in the world around me.  These are not my conventional understandings of how to hear the voice.  I have always thought that it required me to be silent and contemplative, two traits I am not extremely good at.

How do you make space to hear God in prayer?  What are your understandings of prayer?

Purpose vs. Custom

I have been spending time lately considering the Confirmation & Commissioning class that I am scheduled to teach this school year.  This has made me run into a question that I find myself debating over and over as I strive to lead a community of faith.  Are the activities and programs that we are doing under the banner of the church done because they have a purpose or are they done because it is our custom? 

I must confess that the first part of my struggle has been to properly form the question.  The word that has given me so much of a problem is the last word in the question.  I settled on the word custom but I must admit that I am not altogether happy with that word.  As I searched for the word to capture what I was truly wanting to communicate, I first placed the word tradition in the question but that generated some interpretations that I didn't like.  The reason is that I do not believe that tradition has to be negative in our faith.  Tradition gives us a historical foundation from which we can grow our faith.  The next word that I tried was practice. Again, I didn't like that word because I think that there is value in practicing our faith, by which I mean, living out and exploring what we believe.  I settled on custom because while there are still values associated with customs, the word conveyed more of a sense of doing things because that is what we have always done.  Again, I am not totally happy with it because I do not perceive customs as having to be a negative but right now it is the best word I can find.

So now that I have settled on the words to my question, maybe some explanation of what has led me to the question might be in order.  You see as I was pondering what to teach and how to teach it this round of confirmation/commissioning, I was forced to ask myself why I felt compelled to invite junior high-aged youth to participate in the class.  As I explored that, I came to discover that it was mainly because it was the custom in all the churches I have been a leader within to offer a class which was to be part of a step toward being a voting member within the congregation.  While it has been a long-standing rite among most churches, I was struggling with the value of the rite. 

Next, I asked myself, if I indeed could justify the continution of such a custom what would I teach.  This led me to consider the material that I presented and worked through with the class in the past.  Are those bits of knowledge shared because that is what I have shared in the past and thought important in the past, or are they shared because they have value to the spiritual growth of the youth?  Do I teach these items out of custom or is there something more to it?

So I decided that I needed to take some time to examine what the purpose of confirmation and commissioning is and what I need to be engaging the youth with to achieve that purpose.  You see, I have become convinced that the one question that is most important for church leadership to continually ask is "What's the purpose?"  While my current application of that question is in regards to confirmation and commissioning, it is a question that should be asked of all that we do under the banner of the church.

It is easy for church leadership to fall into an endless round of customs.  But what we should be truly be concerned with is the purpose behind those customs.  And what I am coming to find is that the practice of asking that question and frequently examining our customs and purposes, helps us to be more attentive to the Spirit and to make the adaptations that the Spirit desires for us.

What do you think?