Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.
Fyodor Dostoevski1
What frustrates Christian leaders about prayer? Perhaps it has something to do with the differences between leading and praying. When a random sample of people was asked what the term leadership brought to mind, they responded with words like authority, decisiveness, confidence, and power. The word prayer, on the other hand, evoked words such as humility, pleading, and powerlessness.
The difference illustrates a conflict Christian leaders face. As leaders, they preach, counsel, and organize with efficiency. Leaders must see that things get done. They plan, decide, act, and evaluate. In most people’s minds, leadership means the ability to solve problems.
This expectation extends beyond administrative duties. Sometimes it seems Christian leaders are expected to have answers to most of life’s problems. Even the leader’s personal spirituality is held up as a public example of a faith that works. The writer to the Hebrews called it a “faith we should imitate” (13:7).
Men and women of prayer, however, operate in a different sphere, where feelings of inadequacy and helplessness must predominate. Those feelings sometimes conflict with the tasks of ministry. Jeff Ginn, pastor of Noelridge Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, notes: “We all want our ministries to have results. We see our work schedule as a time for production. If I have to choose between my quiet time and a meeting with a young Christian, often I’ll choose the young Christian because that meeting will produce something tangible in my ministry.
“The results of prayer aren’t quite so tangible. The need for prayer pulls at me over the long haul, but it’s not an urgent pull. A fish on the line is an urgent pull. Getting the boat in the right place with the right fishing tackle all oiled and ready to go is a far less urgent task, yet it can make the difference in whether the fish is landed.”
Prayer does prepare us for the more tangible ministry tasks. It makes us better leaders. But the effects of prayer can’t be measured in terms of problems solved per square inch. For the administrator, decisiveness that averts a $5,000 mistake by the building contractor is laudatory. In the prayer closet, the same quick decision making may be counterproductive—it might lead to the oversight of an important spiritual subtlety only quietness and patience can discern. Or, willingness to take responsibility for a hair-splitting ethical decision concerning Mrs. Smith’s wayward son is a sign of strong leadership. Someone must do it. But in the prayer closet, that same willingness to make firm decisions in ambiguous circumstances may blunt a creative paradox God could use to teach spiritual truth. Administrative problems follow the rules of cause and effect; prayer operates by God’s unpublished rules.
When cause and effect meet divine guidance, they often clash. The result? The roles of confident decision maker and humble penitent do regular battle in the soul of the Christian leader, and an incomplete, guilt-ridden prayer life may plague the ministry.
“My spiritual pilgrimage is like the front and back yards of my life,” says C. D. Monismith, a pastor in Salem, Oregon. “The front yard is for public view—manicured, watered, weed free, and beautiful. The back yard is not so good. It’s utilitarian; it’s mowed but not manicured. Some weeds grow around the edges, and there are patches of brown. It could use watering. My front yard is like my corporate, public spiritual life. My back yard is like my personal prayer life. I’d like to know how other pastors manicure the back yard as well as the front.”
Monismith speaks for many of his peers. Most Christian leaders desire a stronger prayer life. In a survey of leadership readers (80 percent of whom are pastors or pastoral staff) done two years ago, 56 percent of the respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of time they spent in prayer. Yet when asked how much time they did spend in prayer, over 50 percent said they prayed more than twenty minutes a day, almost three times the seven daily minutes other surveys indicate is average for the general Christian population.
Further, Christian leaders like to read and learn about prayer. Articles on the subject published in Christian magazines get high readership. When asked, What is the single area of leadership you’d most like help with? Christian leaders most often responded, “My own spiritual walk with God.” 2 For this group of people, where prayer is concerned, more is better.
But “more” is not easy to come by. Our thirst for prayer is camouflaged by our hunger for less nutritious food. The attractions of a nonpraying life—busyness that fills up the hours, distractions that divert attention, temptations that distort priorities—block our efforts to increase praying time.
Many of these blocks are not unique to the Christian leader. Laziness, impatience, rebelliousness, and unconfessed sin plague everyone. Lifestyles that include jam-packed schedules, jangling telephones, raucous radios, and fast-paced television programs don’t offer quiet opportunities for reflection. Modern society is characterized by thinkers who put prayer in the same category as witch hazel and other old wives’ tales. Immanuel Kant called prayer “a superstitious vanity”; Sigmund Freud said it was a way of “shuffling off one’s human responsibilities”; Ludwig Feuerbach said it resulted in “religious alienation.” It’s no wonder prayer sometimes seems under attack. 3
Three Blocks to Prayer
In addition to the common pressures, Christian leaders face three that are unique to their vocation. One is the expectation placed on them by historical roles. Modern church leaders still labor under clerical traditions traced back to the fourth-century monastic movement when clerics began to be viewed as professionals separated from the laity. Monks established specific hours of prayer—seven or eight times a day set aside for on-the-knees devotion. Had this remained a monastic practice, all would have been fine. But soon it became generalized for all clergy, whether withdrawn from the world or not. The Emperor Justinian, sounding a little like a contemporary bishop, berated the overworked parish priests for “neglecting a task [prayer] to which you are obliged by profession.” The seven or eight times of daily prayer soon became seven or eight full hours of prayer a day—for monks especially, but sometimes for parish clergy too. 4
Thereafter in the history of the church, whenever clergy reform became necessary, it was accompanied by a call for increased participation in prayer. There was nothing wrong with that in itself. We need frequently to be called back to our knees to pray. Unfortunately, the form suggested was usually realistic only for the full-time religious. For example, the Council of Reform in 817 recommended full participation by all clerics in the seven Hours of the Office, which by that time usually included full recitation of all 150 Psalms three times a day in addition to other prayers.
Even though the pressure of this was mitigated somewhat by church leaders like Benedict, who recognized the spiritual significance of work as well as prayer, the trend it set for clergy expectations remained. The heritage today can be seen in the question often asked the pastor, “But what else do you have to do all day besides prayer and study?” Usually this criticism is unthinking rather than vindictive. Most laymen, if questioned, would recognize the heavy administrative responsibilities of modern church leadership. Most would agree this makes spiritual work difficult. But subconsciously, the expectations remain. And it loads our Christian leaders with intense guilt about their prayer life.
Guilt also comes from the expectations of church leaders themselves. Many assume leadership roles in answer to God’s call. Too often, though, the call is interpreted as a responsibility to personally fulfill the entire Great Commission. The faulty logic runs like this: “Saving the world required a perfect sacrifice: Christ. Since I’m not perfect, I must work even harder to save the world.”
One pastor said: “The greatest relief of my young ministry was when I finally realized God could get his work done without me. That freed me to do even more for the Kingdom without loading myself with guilt for what I couldn’t do.” One’s personal prayer life can suffer horribly from a self-induced messiah complex—or even an honest workaholic ethic fueled by popular maxims like “Wear out, don’t rust out for Christ.”
A third source of guilt is the natural bent of most church leaders toward rational methods of learning. Analytic thinking works for most areas of Bible study and theology. But the experience of prayer extends beyond the rational. Listen to people who want to talk about prayer. They start enthusiastically, but the words don’t last long. The enthusiasts soon discover prayer is too central, too much a part of the core to be reduced to a series of convincing syllogisms. So they end up talking around it. They talk about great answers to prayer and their troubles in being consistent in prayer. But the experience itself eludes attempts to verbalize.
Prayer is a very private experience. One pastor whom several people suggested as a model of powerful praying noted that studies of other people’s prayer lives run the risk of invasion of privacy: “There are areas of Christian experience, like marriage, that are almost too sacred for research. The ‘how-to-do-it’ books on prayer can show us the direction to the secret place and help us find time for the closed door, but who is the person who will attempt to define, delineate, and demonstrate what takes place there?”
For the rational, straight-thinking church leader, this can be a frustration. Why can’t prayer be attacked like any one of a dozen problems solved this past year? We repaved the parking lot, helped Al Aronson work through his depression, and I planned my speaking engagements for the next year and penciled in preparation time for them all. But prayer …
In spite of these apparent contradictions, leadership responsibility and prayer are not incompatible. Many Christian leaders have successfully wedded the two and enjoy the marriage. The offspring is a fruitful ministry.
But the marriage works only when leadership and prayer are seen as a private partnership instead of jealous brothers competing for God’s time. The conditions of the partnership are not difficult. In fact, they are really rather ordinary. The key is to match God’s terms with the ordinaries of life.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Garden City, New York: Literary Guild of America, 1949), Part II, Chapter 3.
Terry Muck, “Ten Questions About the Devotional Life,” Leadership, III,1 (Winter 1982): 30-39.
Quoted in Jacques Ellul, Prayer and the Modern Man (New York: Seabury Press, 1970), 114.
For a discussion of the history of Christian prayer see Joseph A. Jungmann, Christian Prayer Through the Centuries (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
