Prayer | Revolution in Jesusland

Just one little example of Christian house meetings August 26, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 6 comments

House gatherings are a major feature of today’s evangelical/born again culture. House meetings are such a broad and diverse phenomenon in the church that it’s impossible to generalize about them. There is also some controversy about house meetings, or “house church,” and how to do them (and whether to do them). Some point out that house meetings were the first kind of Christian church. Others say that Christian communities need the guidance of formal organization. Some (perhaps most) say both are necessary.

Here’s one little glimpse at how one group of young Christians gathers and thinks about its gatherings. This email came from a new friend in Kansas City this morning. He and an overlapping group also gather at his house after church on Sunday evenings for a meal, conversation and the occasional card game, guitar jam or review of the latest dense theological book that Tim is reading. Here they’re restarting another kind of gathering after a summer break:

Greetings and hello and hey,

This Thursday, after a nice long summer hiatus, our group will be starting up our weekly Conversations meeting again. We’ll meet at 7 at the Freak Show (Sam and Adam’s apartment (since it’s centrally located, and not to far from public transport)) at 7. Bring something to contribute to delicious sandwich making. After eating, we’ll take communion, sing a song or two, and then pray for about an hour. It’s pretty laid-back, eyes-open, conversation kind of praying. We follow a basic structure of praying from large-scale things down to small-scale things. Hope to see you there.

Peace to you,
Timothy.

PS. I’m culling from a pretty old list, and adding some new people, so please let me know if you don’t want to get any more emails on stuff like this.

By the way, you may have noticed that the posts on this blog are now rotating between three types:

posts that engage Christians,
posts that seek to explain aspects of born again Christian culture to people outside of that culture,
and posts that have something to say to both audiences.

I’m saying this because the Christian audience will find this post absurd because I’m reporting something that is so commonplace to them. Timothy, who wrote the email, for example says:

Heh. Always cracks me up to think of our group in these terms. Feel free to post the email if you think it illustrates. It’s just another email to me. Tell all you’d like about us. We’re just trying to live in the moment, and live where we are, so if it’s of interest, that’s fine.

Timothy: I assure you that this kind of thing is fascinating to many people who are outside of any born again Christian culture.

One thing that many (including myself) will want some more info on: What is prayer all about? What do you pray for? Who do you pray for? What do you think prayer accomplishes? Why pray for anything when you say you believe that God has his own plan that we can’t really understand? How do you feel when you’re praying—and after? What effect does prayer have on your group/community?

And here’s a silly but vexing question from me: Why close your eyes when you pray? Why is there this feeling in church that you’re being seditious if you open your eyes while praying? What does it mean in Timothy’s group’s case when he says, “open eyed prayer?”

Tags: house church, Prayer, small groups

Superstition vs. supernatural March 7, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 4 comments

Over the summer before I entered 7th grade, I made two new friends from the other side of town. I knew that the junior high school divided students into three “teams” who shared classes and the same lunch period. I was new in that town and really alone. It felt like a really big deal. And so, I — an avowed atheist at the time — prayed to God that the three of us would be put on the same team. Lo and behold, I saw my friends in home room on that first day of school.

Afterwards, I was ashamed — not for lapsing into the superstition of God-belief, but for insulting God, in case he did exist, with the suggestion that he was just sitting around waiting to intervene in junior high schoolers’ irrelevant problems. The idea that God was arbitrarily answering my silly prayers while whole Christian nations were dying of starvation just seemed preposterous, and selfish. But throughout my life, every time I’ve had any trouble, or had a friend or family member in trouble, I have prayed my head off — always feeling a bit embarrassed and confused about it in the morning.

I haven’t read anything on this, but I have a good deal of anecdotal evidence that a lot of American Christians who 10 or 20 years ago believed in a hands-off God have changed their minds. They now confidently pray for promotions, home buyers and even good airline seats (as endorsed in Joel Osteen’s latest book).

The Revolutionaries also pray, but less for rewards and more for guidance. “Should I take the promotion?” “Should we sell?” And they expect answers. While a few rare people do hear the audible voice God or some other unmistakable signal, almost everyone seems to be relying on gut feeling. In other words, the decision you feel good about, the one that feels right…you know, you “just know.”

If you’re a non-believer this process probably seems as silly as it did to me in 7th grade. But here’s the interesting thing I’ve come to understand about all this: The gut feelings that these Christians are experiencing are determined by their understanding of God as presented in the Bible, as interpreted by themselves and others in their church, Bible studies, etc…

And the God they’re learning about in those Bible studies is a God who wants nothing more than peace and harmony on earth, who wants us to be selfless and loving towards everyone in our lives, and who is “the God of the poor and oppressed.” In other words, you can hear the word of God in that gut feeling of yours, but only if it is consistent with your community’s interpretation of the Bible.

So even if you don’t believe in God or the power of prayer, you can understand this process that millions of Christians go through every day as a way that they get their minds set to be more disciplined in living a good life and to make sacrifices that benefit the whole world.

Nevertheless, there is still a lot of confusion among Christians in how to pray, what to expect from it, and how to “discern” what God is actually saying to you. The problem is that Christians are forced to wing it when it comes to discernment. The feeling I get as a new entrant to the culture is that I just have to pick it up from watching and listening to people around me. This is an exception — on nearly every other theological concept or problem you can find hundreds of recent books to help you out.

So here’s at least one new book on this topic: Guard Us, Guide Us, by best selling Theologian I. J. Packer. (Knowledgeable Christians, please help me out here if I’m totally wrong about this — what are some other books that deal with discernment?) Here’s a bit from the free downloadable chapter online:

First: We are to be guided by the commands of God. Fundamen-
tal to Christian faith is the recognition that commands from God
are a reality. Christianity views languages as such as a divine gift
to our race, given not only so that we might communicate with
each other and offer praises and prayers to our Maker, but also, and
indeed primarily, so that he might communicate with us, in both
the indicative and the imperative mood—in other words, so that
he might tell us both what we need to know and what we need to
do. He is essentially a God who commands his rational creatures.
Non-Christian faiths, and the wide range of unorthodox Protestant
opinions that we lump together under the name of liberalism, do
not usually acknowledge this; whatever they say about God paying
attention to our prayers, in which we tell him things, they assume
(most of the time, anyway) that God does not use language to tell
us things and give us marching orders. Wise souls are thought of
in these circles as speaking for God in what they say about him,
and in what they tell us to do to get close to him, but God is not
believed in any sense to speak for himself, and so beliefs about
the specifics of his will for us humans remain blurry. We, however,
affirm that God does address us all in the command mode, and we
see it as our main task in this book to show just how he does so.
As Christianity from the start has taught what is called a divine-
command ethic, so now we propose to teach, as one aspect of that
ethic, divine-command guidance. This is our agenda.