Book Review: A Praying Church (Paul E. Miller)
when people pray, together
I picked this book up mostly because I got suckered in by advertising. But, really, the best kind of advertising - I read an excerpt of it and decided I wanted to read it. The author's main contention is that there is a dearth of prayer, especially prayer in community, in the (modern, western, American) church, and that is a very serious flaw. For myself, when I compare my experiences in church over 20 years ago, when I first became a believer, and of churches since, and of the church in Mongolia, I do think this is true here as well. We are half-hearted, perfunctory, not quite convinced of either the efficacy or the importance of prayer, especially corporately. And while I feel like my own personal prayer life has taken some dramatic turns for the better over the past year, this book is not so much about the individual (though it is that), but what it means to be a praying community.
The book falls into 5 parts, and here I'll cover each in brief, with some personal highlights.
Part 1: Why Pray Together
Miller talks about why we don't pray together, and suggests that "secularism defines normal for us"; we are used to operating in a world that assumes that prayer doesn't do anything, even if we say that we do believe that. Prayer belongs to our world of 'feelings', and has little to do with our reality. We need to instead realise that prayer works on reality, but in an unseen way, without us being able to connect the dots. Miller outlines a view of prayer as:
prayer > Spirit > Jesus > wonder/power, that puts the Spirit of Jesus at the centre of what's going on in prayer, and what Jesus is doing through the church.
Part 2: What is the Church
This section spends a good deal of time in Ephesians. And he beings by talking about "the saints" - ordinary Christian believers who are just going about the work of being Christians in the world and extending the love of Jesus through their words and deeds. By highlighting the fact that the saints are the church, Miller makes the argument that our modern vision of church places the Sunday morning service at the centre, and then preaching, and thus the preacher. We thus centre teaching/knowledge/content/doctrine/the preacher, and we neglect the body/prayer/empowering-the-saints. Yes, he says, we certainly could over-emphasise things the other way, but very few of us do that in our contexts! By marginalising the saints (and prayer), and centring the preaching alone, the church becomes not just weak in prayer, but "prayer resistant".
One of the things I appreciated in this section was the point that much of Ephesians is itself Paul prayer for the Ephesian believers (45% of chs 1-3).
How do we value and feed the saints? Not by centring church, but by centring Jesus. The more we try to hype church by building up the idea of church itself, the more we miss out on feeding people what they really need - Jesus.
Part 3: How the Spirit reshapes a praying community
Here Miller takes us through a blueprint of how the Spirit works in response to prayer. His key points are:
Surprise
Imagination Explosion
Repentance
Dying and Rising
Hiddenness
Mystery
The least of these
In short, the Spirit answers prayers in mysterious ways, beyond our understanding, sideways, unexpectedly, often through our dying to ourselves, and through the weak and ignored and dishonoured of this world. We need to learn to recognise this.
This section particularly impressed upon me that prayer itself involves a long dying to self. That prayer is an act of dependence, and the more we are driven to a dependence of God, the more we will pray, and likewise the more we will (eventually) see God work in resurrection power.
I also appreciated a section here talking about praying at different 'levels' - Vision (why we do things, big picture), Strategy (how we do things, middle level), Tactics (what we do today, nitty-gritty), illustrated with clear examples.
Likewise, throughout this book you aren't just treated to amazing stories of answered prayer from Miller's own life, but shown his real flaws, weaknesses, failings, and the times he was just absolutely rock-bottom and desperate for God to work. Which flows into his theme of the way genuine authentic prayer makes us real with God and real with each other.
Part 4: The Art of Praying Together
This starts to get towards a practical end of things, though it's still not quite a nuts-and-bolts practicality. But here he talks through how to start building a praying Jesus-community (start by praying for prayer itself!), through practices of prayer meetings, prayer in church services, as well as more general thoughts and wisdom on prayer for others and their needs.
Another good feature of this book is that it's not written explicitly to pastors, but almost every chapter ends with "A word for pastors" about specific application for church leaders.
Part 5: Specialized Praying in Community
Three 'specialty' chapters round out the book. (1) Constancy in prayer, (2) Men and Discipleship, (3) Fasting.
Concluding thoughts:
I was greatly encouraged by this book. It does a very different kind of job to Keller's book, for instance, in that it's incredibly encouraging about what prayer can do and does do, but not in a facile way or endless anecdotes (though it does have good stories!), but really bringing us back to Scripture, showing us the kinds of ways that God works, and casting a real vision for what a whole community (and by this he doesn't just mean a church, but also a family, an organisation, even a friendship) that is a praying community can be. I'm encouraged to keep on the work of dying to myself and waiting upon the Lord.