Ordinary people have an exciting time, while odd people are always complaining of the dullness of life. This is why the new novel dies so quickly and the old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal, human boy. It is his adventures that are startling. They startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel, the hero is abnormal. The center is not central. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.
G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd Mead, 1908), 16.
Our experience of the world has two parts, the sacred and the mundane. The division between the two is not always clear, nor easily understood. But understanding the difference can help us reconcile the two.
The food-gathering method of the Trobriand Islanders illustrates our different approaches to the two realms. The Trobrianders live on atolls off the eastern coast of New Guinea in the southwest Pacific. Most of their food comes from fishing in the protected Trobriand lagoon. They use traditional fishing methods there, and an abundant catch, for which the Trobrianders are regularly thankful to their gods, is usually assured. On exceptional occasions, however, fishing on the open seas becomes necessary. The Trobrianders’ tiny boats don’t fare so well in the heavy waves. Danger can strike quickly from seas roiled by sudden storms. Because of the hazards, elaborate rituals and magic rites to appease angry gods are performed before the islanders venture forth.1
Our experience of prayer is similar in some ways to the Trobriander’s fishing preferences. Most of our prayer takes place in the lagoons of life. We live in the everyday. Our experiences of God usually come from familiar events: a child’s loving touch, a mate’s caress, the satisfaction of steady Christian growth. Most of our spiritual sustenance comes from this common, faithful source. Occasionally, circumstances or desire force us to leap into the supernatural realm, and God descends to meet us in a special way. It is a meeting laden with all the drama, derring-do, and indeed, danger of a Moses meeting God on Mount Sinai. “Who shall look on the face of God and live?” Thankfully, most of our prayer takes place in the lagoon; thankfully, we live most of our lives by the rules of the ordinary.
To say that we live and pray by the rules of the ordinary does not demean their value. God answers simple as well as elaborate prayers. Heartfelt requests, regularly voiced, reach God as quickly and easily as emergency calls breathed in the midst of flames. Ordinary prayers from ordinary people are answered with extraordinary power.
Further, there are distinct advantages to ordinary prayer. Since it is part of daily living, ordinary prayer follows the rules of the habitual. The same forces that shape our lives shape our prayers. If we are tired, prayer is difficult. If we are energized, prayer comes more easily. Daily events and our own psychological make-up affect our prayer life a great deal.
In one sense, this fact of the ordinary is a limitation. It makes the ideal prayer life—what Paul called ceaseless prayer—almost impossible. Few in history have attained the state of perfectly reconciling the natural and the supernatural. Christ did. Perhaps Enoch, who the Bible says was in constant touch with God. Genesis 5:21-24. His reward was to circumvent death. But few of us can realistically hope for that kind of prayer relationship. We live with the reality of our humanness.
Jim Davey, pastor of a Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Seattle, Washington, compared his prayer life to seeing Mount Rainier, which at times dominates the horizon of the Seattle area. “On a very few days out of the year, Mount Rainier is visible to us. On most days it isn’t. It’s shrouded by clouds, haze, and mist. My prayer life is like that. Several times each year I see and love God clearly, in an especially profound way. On most days, however, I pray out of desperation, need, or blind faith. Without a simple, mundane commitment to pray, I would skip it.”
Davey’s analogy rings true. Leaders who have coped have learned to look for God in the ordinary not the extraordinary. The deepest religious experiences don’t keep the appointments set for them by self-styled dispensers of satisfaction. God cannot be staged nor prayer scripted. Instead, God comes when we least expect him, when we so enthrall ourselves in the business of being Christian that our seeking self no longer blocks the way.
Leaders talked about finding God in three ordinary areas of life:
The Ordinaries of Culture
Dozens of currently published books show how modern society has given itself over to secularization and humanism. The arguments are similar, and a composite on prayer might read as follows: We live in a culture that discourages prayer. We are a mechanized, secularized society. We are surrounded by appliances that satisfy our every culinary need, home entertainment devices that stimulate our senses both good and bad, transportation possibilities that take the sting out of travel, and working tools that make labor a misnomer. This ease of satisfying want and whim is what makes prayer so difficult. Prayer, the essence of which is obedience and submission, runs counter to a culture where we are beholden to very few. Further, some cultures in history have revolved around the church and the monastery. Ours doesn’t. We live in a secular culture where man, not God, is the measure of all things. 1
This is a convincing argument—partly because it’s true. Even Christian leaders feel the effects of secularization and its discouraging effects on prayer. One pastor said: “I am currently serving my first call, and have been in the parish two years. I get the feeling others don’t think my personal devotional life is important. Perhaps they assume I have a strong spiritual inner life. But in my two years here, not one person has asked me about the health of my personal faith. I feel unsupported in this aspect of my life. It’s as if it didn’t matter to the job I do here.”
It would be easy to uncritically accept the common wisdom that our society is so secularized that prayer is almost impossible. However, if religious history has anything to teach us about cultural conditions conducive to prayer, we may be in a time of unparalleled opportunity.
Consider an example from the history of Islam. Researcher George Koovackal notes that Muhammad made prayer a central feature of Islam because it was particularly suited to the nomadic life. He recognized it would be very difficult to maintain orthodoxy among a people completely decentralized by their wandering existence. So he made the external forms of the faith of central importance. A Muslim can walk into an Islamic community in a totally different culture and immediately recognize Islamic faith by its five traditional pillars: prayer five times daily, profession of faith, almsgiving, pilgrimage, and fasting. Commitment to prayer and devotional practice become vitally important in an atmosphere of uncertainty and change. 2
We find ourselves in a similar atmosphere today. We are not dependent on wandering flocks, moveable tents, and watering holes. But our wealth, changing industries, and fragmented culture have made us technological nomads. Few of us live in one house for more than five years. Fewer still stay in one job that long. Spiritually, a bewildering variety of denominations and factions within denominations create an insecurity about the content of our faith. When we walk into a strange church, we don’t know what to expect. We thirst for some kind of quality control in our religious organizations. This need is especially compelling when we see the flourishing of cults and new religious movements that supply this kind of security.
Viewed this way, a culture that temporalizes organization, depersonalizes fraternity, and homogenizes individuality forces even religion to be distilled to its essence—for the Christian the man/God relationship. Our renewed interest in Christian spirituality is a sign that devotional practice can supply needed stability in the face of diversity. In some ways, secularization is presenting unique opportunities to the Christian’s prayer life.
Perhaps the Christian leader’s strategy in the face of secularization is to use it to advantage. The truth of prayer hasn’t changed. But the way we gain access to it needs modification. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in a delightful book, Sacrament of the Present Moment, said: “God still speaks today as he spoke to our forefathers in days gone by. The spiritual life then was a matter of immediate communication with God. It had not been reduced to a fine art nor was lofty and detailed guidance to it provided with a wealth of rules, instructions, and maxims. These may very well be necessary today. But it was not so in those early days, when people were more direct and unsophisticated.” 3
Are people less direct and more sophisticated today? The point is arguable. But times have changed. The pressures of an informational age are enormous. We have literally hundreds of things to do and thousands of suggestions on how to do them. We live in an age when ordinary habits have become essential. Al Ries and Jack Trout recently wrote a book called Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, in which they paint the following picture: Western man’s mind is like a sponge over-saturated with information. It is dripping full, and a lukewarm message or a message given only once will not penetrate that sponge—it will trickle off with the rest. Only that which is repeated or presented in such a way to make it stick will stay with us. 4
People who pray must learn regular patterns of behavior. Without habits, schedules squeeze and word blizzards obscure the best of intentions. In developing a habit of prayer, we can utilize the ordinaries of our secularized culture instead of fighting them. For example, we can use:
• the beauty of art. One pastor pointed to a painting on his study wall and said, “For some reason, when I look at that painting, I’m reminded of God and my need to pray. It triggers short ten-minute periods of prayer throughout my day.”
• the intensely individualistic self-help techniques so popular now. Prayer lists, prayer partners, memory techniques all can be aided and refined by self-help hints.
• retreat centers and beautiful natural settings have never been more available. The ease with which we can travel to such mind-stretching locales make them real aids to prayer.
• the fitness craze. Many Christian leaders admit they pray when they jog, ride exercise bicycles, or hike in the woods.
By maintaining our spiritual center in God, cultural fad and fashion can aid prayer life without fear of compromising our spiritual needs and eccentricities. Even humanistic culture can become an ally.
The Ordinaries of Our Minds
God created each person’s mind to be unique. But in spite of this uniqueness, behavior patterns are remarkably consistent from human being to human being. One of the common patterns is that persistent, consistent repetition of an act affects both the actor and those acted upon. In a familiar parable, Jesus showed how that principle extends to prayer:
A widow, he said, who had been wronged by another person, went to a judge for relief. The judge was an evil man. He would not give the woman relief on the merits of her case, just as he made few decisions on moral grounds. Yet the widow was persistent. Every day she came to the judge’s courtroom to plead her case. Finally, out of exasperation at her constant coming, the judge ruled in her favor. Jesus used the story (Luke 18) to illustrate the need for habitual prayer. Our relief before God will come not on the merits of our case (for who among us can say we deserve relief?) but only out of our constant requests for God’s grace.
Jesus isn’t arguing for mindless repetition of prayers. He’s asking for persistence. (Traditionally, theologians have called it importunity.) Put simply, developing a consistent prayer life requires the will to do it.
One way to buttress the will required is to develop a habit of praying. Not a habit that leads to mindless repetition, but a discipline that intensifies and deepens our prayer experience. Psychologist William James called habit “the enormous flywheel of society,” the element that holds everything together. 5 Habits make most things predictable and reliable. We can handle the exceptional and the creative only because we have the habitual as a backdrop.
It is a backdrop that can be learned. Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline, says that prayer is not an innate skill, but something we learn to do. “One of the liberating experiences of my life came when I understood that prayer involved a learning process. I was set free to question, to experiment, even to fail, for I knew I was learning.” 6 Foster illustrates with the example of a television set. If we turn on the television and it doesn’t work, we do not automatically assume TVs don’t exist. We fix it. So with prayer. If our prayers are not working properly, if we cannot get ourselves to pray regularly, we must do something to fix the problem, not dismiss prayer as an unreal, mystical, or impossible endeavor.
Ordinary habits and techniques are important in helping us take advantage of the mind’s receptivity to discipline. Much of the Christian leader’s behavior in the various ministry functions is determined by them. Take teaching for example. Psychologist Dan Landis made a study of classroom teachers to try to determine how much of their teaching behavior was determined by habit and how much was consciously thought-out behavior. Both verbal and nonverbal behaviors were measured. By observing and recording teaching styles in classroom settings, he discovered that more behavior was performed out of habit than volition. Teaching style quickly became second nature and freed teachers to focus on content and subtle points of pedagogy. 7
Similarly, the more of our praying we can make habitual, the more we can work on refining and improving it. If we can make the fact of our going to prayer so ordinary that we don’t have to use a great deal of energy to force ourselves to our knees each and every time, then we can focus on prayer requests and deepen the quality of our time with God.
The Ordinaries of Ministry
Is it possible to be a professional prayer leader and a devout person of prayer at the same time? Church leaders help parishioners enrich their prayer lives—does that stifle their own? Church leaders lead corporate prayer in public services—does that inhibit their own participation? Church leaders set up prayer chains, prayer vigils, and prayer meetings—does that make prayer a program instead of a worship experience for the leader?
Some don’t think so. William Law, in A Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection, talks about the dangers of professional Christianity. Suppose, Law says, you were to call a man from a sumptuous feast. You tell him to go into the next room and be hungry for a half hour; then he can go back to feasting. He might obey you by going into the hunger room. He might even sit there licking his lips for a half hour. But the man is not really hungry. Why not? Because he has just come from a feast and his appetite is dull. 8
Do church leaders run the risk of dull appetites because of the continuous availability of spiritual food? Many leaders admit the problem. Yet several said the very opposite can happen. The tasks of ministry can feed the minister’s prayer life. They need not always be separated. Lynn Kent, pastor of the Greater Portland (Oregon) Bible Church, finds his prayer life tied closely to his preaching:
“I respond to God from the text I’m preaching on each week. I’ve heard pastors say they keep their prayer life separate from sermon preparation, but I combine the two. I want to preach the truth of each passage. To do so, I must discover the mind of God as much as I am able. Prayer helps me do that. The heart of my prayer life is responding to the Word.”
Prayer is a vital part of the Christian leader’s life. One way to look at that importance is the negative. Charles Finney once advised a young ministerial student: “If you lose your spirit of prayer, you will do nothing, or next to nothing, even if you have the intellectual endowment of an angel. If you lose your spirituality, you had better go about some other employment, for I cannot contemplate a more loathsome object than an earthly-minded minister.” 9
What Finney said is quite true. However, there is also a positive approach. The everyday occurrences of ministry are ideal opportunities for prayer and communion with God. No one is more ideally situated to cultivate the spiritual life than the Christian leader who approaches his or her charges with eyes open for God’s wonder-working grace.
When that expectancy of grace is present and when the physical fact of prayer is established, it sometimes surprises us how it comes alive when needed. God will work powerfully through the ordinary tasks of ministry, even in routine prayer. Jim Davey remembers a particularly striking instance:
“In a former pastorate in Burlington, Vermont, the six hundred church members were evenly divided about whether or not to relocate. For seven years we had struggled with the question. The issue was raised anew when six acres of prime property became available just down the street. I called a meeting of the board.
“We met on Saturday morning. Since we knew the real division on the board, fueled by seven years of controversy, we agreed to stay until we reached agreement. Then we prayed. We always started our meetings with prayer, but I’m not sure we thought the prayer was that important to what we were really going to do that morning. Each of us prayed aloud and asked God for guidance.
“As soon as we finished praying, the sixteen of us looked at one another and knew we should buy the land. By 11:30 the meeting was over. That may not sound like much. But if I could tell you the intensity of disagreement over this issue that had preceded that meeting, and the warmth of agreement that followed, you’d be as shocked as I was at what happened.
“What happened? While we prayed God gave us his mind. The prayer was a customary, perfunctory act perhaps. But through it God told us what to do.”
Spurred by bigger than life expectations, society has added the prefix “super” to words like star, hero, and market. Christians gullibly followed suit with superchurch, superpastor, and superspiritual. But the intent of highlighting high performance is rarely successful. Usually the result is a devaluing of the root word and a grimacing embarrassment over the supercompound.
Super-prayer? Ironically, prayer, like life itself, only becomes “super” when surrounded by humility, commonness, and the ordinary acceptance of a love beyond comprehension.
Federico D’Agostino, “Religion and Magic: Two Sides of a Basic Human Experience,” Social Compass 27, 2-3 (1980): 279-282.
An excellent discussion of the effects of technology on the prayer life of modern man is found in Jacques Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man (New York: Seabury Press, 1970), 21ff.
George Koovackal, “Worship in Islamic Tradition,” Journal of Dharma 3 (1978): 395-415.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Sacrament of the Present Moment (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982), 1.
Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (New York: Warner Books, 1981), 11.
William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1892), 143.
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978), 33.
Dan Landis, Harry Triandis, and John Adamopoulos, “Habit and Behavioral Intentions as Predictors of Social Behavior,” Journal of Social Psychology 106 (1978): 227-237.
William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1966), 298.
Quoted in Louis Gifford Parkhurst, “Charles Grandison Finney Preached for a Verdict,” Fundamentalist Journal (June 1984): 41.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
