Prayer - have we lost our way?

tangent · Joined: 28 May 2007 Posts: 31

I'm new here but I wonder if I could share with you some concerns I have of the way we pray. Basically, I believe that modern-day prayer has gone off the rails:

Jesus never intended us to pray in the way we do
Modern-day prayer groups are motivated by gossip

I find it curious that we spend a lot of time praying in groups whilst Jesus never did. We know that he took himself off to the hills and would sometimes spend many hours praying alone to the Father. Yet only once did he pray with his disciples, and then with a prayer that was brief and unsophisticated.

If Jesus spent a lot of time praying with his disciples, why are the gospels silent on the matter? Why did the gospel writers only record one elementary prayer, if I may call it that? Probably because he didn't pray with them. It seems highly likely that he didn't pray the sort of prayers we hear in church today, either the set prayers or the extemporary ones. Why is that? I believe it is because he never intended us to.

After Pentecost, the disciples were different. They prayed together every day in the temple. Naturally, they didn't all take to the hills, as Jesus did, and pray for hours on their own every day because they were afraid and needed to stick together as a group. But when they prayed together in the temple, did they pray to each other out loud, or silently to the Father? I think they would have followed our Lord's example and prayed silently, otherwise Jesus would have taught them to pray in a group and the gospel writers would have recorded more than just one of his prayers.

The second issue I have with today's prayer format is that it is a gossip pot. Christians meet together to pray earnestly but the prayer is also a means of conveying gossip. That's why we like doing it. We like to find out what problems Peter and Susan are having, what news there is of John's broken leg, and the delicious wranglings of the PCC meeting.

I won't have any of it. I don't believe Jesus prayed like that and I don't believe the early church did either.

My wife joined a prayer chain. It was a hilarious case of chinese whispers, except that we were fairly sure one person only joined to learn about the gossip and pass it on.

I went up for healing at the end of a church service one evening and asked for prayer. A friend of mine was suicidal, I hadn't heard from her and was very distressed. I gave them brief details, she was seriously ill, but they wanted to know more. They asked questions but I politely declined to answer. They were shocked, and after praying for me I was told I was inhibited. What is it about Christians that they want to spread everyone's personal details all round the church? Secular councillors would never do that. "I suppose everyone knows that Peter and Jane are having problems," the cell group leader told me one day. "No, I didn't," I thought to myself, "but you can be sure I won't let you pray for me."

In short, we have lost our way. We don't pray to the Father as Jesus intended. We pray in a group, we gossip and we love it.

How the Spirit must groan sometimes.

crystal · Joined: 04 Apr 2007 Posts: 308

Tangent i was interested in what you said as I have had some experience of what you are talking about. Now I am in a church where this is not the case, people say as much as they want to and if you do not want to give out personal information then you do not feel pressured to do so.
It does sound as if the prayer life in your church has got lost. It is not meant to be a gossip time and would have concerns about allowing people like you describe praying for me.
Keep praying for God to reveal His way to the church.

Eddie c · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 685 Location: Manchester

I need to pray about this topic
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VictoriaPlum · Joined: 16 Jan 2007 Posts: 718

I would not like the sort of set up you describe Tangent.
Still, we don't just pray as a group, we also pray privately and that isn't affected by gossip.

Moose · Joined: 28 May 2007 Posts: 72

Steve, have you tried taking this issue up with your vicar? Cos I agree that it doesn't seem right for prayer groups to be used, either deliberately or inadvertantly, as conduits for gossip.
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jtheb · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 1448 Location: second childhood

The problem you mention is a risk. But IME it is not common.

Our practice is to pray in prayer triplets. Anything we share is confidential which means that you have to know and trust your prayer partners,

If there are matters concerning third parties problems we share only the minimum necessary for sensible prayer.

Solitary prayer is ESSENTIAL IMHO for spiritual health.
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tangent · Joined: 28 May 2007 Posts: 31

However, as I said in the first part of my post, if Jesus never intended us to pray in groups, prayer gossip would never happen.

Moose · Joined: 28 May 2007 Posts: 72

I would say that just because Jesus did not intend it does not make it a bad thing in itself .. people do need some autonomy no? :) Frankly it strikes me that Jesus did not intend an awful lot of things that are routinely done in Christian life anyway but this not the thread for that ;). The problem I think is when it DOES become an opportunity for gossiping.
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bobbyc · Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1324

The situation you describe is a very poor example of church concern being shown through prayer, tangent, but I don't doubt it's an accurate description. Thankfully it would seem from the responses so far that your scenario is not repeated in every circumstance but that doesn't negate or absolve the fact that this sort of gossipy prayer exists at all. I'm not convinced you are right to claim that Jesus didn't teach corporate praying though. In Gethsemane he exhorted the apostles as a group to watch and pray. That there is no gospel record of him either advocating or discouraging group prayer is an argument from silence though and I tend to think they are not the strongest ones that can be mustered. Since Jesus was Jewish and went to synagogue and Temple one could fairly safely assume that he at least accepted Jewish/Hebrew prayer style although he did point out a few pertinent examples of what not to do (Pharisee and Publican).

Whilst pondering your dilemma though I wondered if there was/is a connection between how we pray and what we pray for. Some time back I underwent a course of hospital treatment whilst a friend had a knee operation about the same time. It seemed natural that we prayed for each other. However, whilst some would perhaps automatically pray that God would directly grant full healing/successful op etc the two of us both prayed along the lines of us being given the strength to cope with the outcome, that we'd be relaxed about the procedures, that the doctors' theoretical knowledge would be displayed in what they did to us. In other words we both felt that God's intervention would be seen through the skill of the surgeons remembering their training and so on. We did not pray that their hands would be guided by God and that no infection would set in or anything that might be described as 'dramatic'. I know that in my case people at my church were indeed praying along those 'dramatic' lines almost to the point of 'claiming' healing/a successful op from God himself as though his were the hands wielding the instruments.

My question therefore is, if one believes in dramatic (miraculous?) healing or restoration of health is it more likely that such a person would want to know the sort of personal details against which you (rightly in my view) recoiled?

jtheb · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 1448 Location: second childhood

Two or three points.

Gossip takes place without prayer meetings.

My belief is that most prayer meetins do not involve prayer.

The first century church certainly prayed together (e.g. prayer for Peter's release.)

I think many prayers for people do not involve any "special" details.
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Sisyphus · Posted: Tue Jun 05, 2007 8:59 pm Post subject: