What the early church doesn't pray for
Crump, Prayer, and the Book of Acts
(The next in our series from Crump’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door)
Let me tell you, Crump has this way of showing you things that just blow up your pre-conceptions about prayer in the New Testament. And this next chapter, looking at petitionary prayer in the Acts of the Apostles, delivers in spades.
He begins with a bit of a soapbox preamble, arguing against the very common tendency to think there is some simplistic blueprint or feature to be found in Acts that will suddenly deliver a silver-bullet to solve all our current church problems. We certainly need to study Acts to see the early church in practice, but we should not idealize it nor naively think it's a panacea for our own problems.
That said, he goes on to consider three categories of prayer in Acts:
Those with explicit content
Those where the context implies the content
Those where clear content is difficult or impossible to infer
I'll skip the working, but he derives four points from Acts 4:
the church has adopted and appropriated Jesus' instruction to pray for the kingdom. In contrast, "personal, idiosyncratic concerns never appear on Luke's radar screen"; neither does deliverance from persecution
the centrality of a life reoriented by faith in Jesus' messiahship
unreserved submission to the Father's will
responsibility for their service, dependence for God's faithfulness.
In effect, we see the church in Acts living out in prayer the lessons of the gospels.
Some other points: Crump thinks that the reading of the Simon episode in Acts 8 is overrun by extra-biblical tradition, and that we should take Simon's conversion as genuine (8.13), and the offer of forgiveness as genuine (8.22, 24) and that the provisionality of Peter's response (perhaps...) is about Simon's desire for repentance, not God's for forgiveness. The open-ended nature of this narrative does not so much suggest that Simon didn't repent, so much as invite the reader to reflect on their own heart.
Acts 26.29 is the closest we get to a prayer for hearers to respond to the gospel. Crump suggests that the wording may be no more than an expression of wish. He notes, provocatively, that "there is no indication, here or anywhere else in the book of Acts, that effective proclamation is tied to , or dependent on, specific intercessory prayers for particular groups or individuals. If the early church did pray like this, there is no evidence of it here."
This is what I meant at the start. And Crump has already forewarned us - just because Acts doesn't say that early Christians explicitly prayer for other people to become believers, doesn't mean that we should or shouldn't. But we at least need to attend to the fact that Acts doesn't record them doing so.
Crump summarises three results from his study of prayer in Acts as follows:
Despite all its many and diverse problems, "the early church somehow manages to sustain a significant degree of unity through corporate prayer."
"The emerging church rapidly adopts both Christ's model and his teaching about personal prayer."
The complete absence of personal, idiosyncratic prayers, whether for individual needs or the salvation of specific friends and neighbors, looms like a large black hole in the middle of this Lukan constellation. Given the modern church's propensity to view petitionary prayer as the chief instrument of Christian wish fulfilment, the book of Acts provides a clarion call to a serious reorientation of priorities within (at least) the Western Church.
"prayer is the way for believers to find their lives realigned with God's redemptive plans"
Crump notes that it is not that prayer is the chief means which God uses to achieve his plans, nor that there is correlation between specific requests and answers. Rather, we see "the Father's willingness to act on behalf of and to reveal himself among those men and women who regularly pray".
Isn't this a startling set of conclusions? Reading Carson's study of Paul's prayers, of course, we are reminded that Paul never seems to pray for specific concrete needs. I think most writers would at least say, "look, this doesn't mean you can't or should never pray for specific life needs, or for individual people and their salvation, or x y z"; indeed, I don't intend to stop praying for those things. At the same time, the patterns of prayer in Scripture very much run against the grain of our overwhelming prayer habits. The church in Acts prays primarily for the fulfilment of God's redemptive-historical purposes (thy Kingdom come), and for boldness and endurance for their part (lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil). That, at they very least says something to us, and ought to lead us to reconsider the vast majority of our prayer practices.
