Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Prayer
We were sitting in Betty's office debriefing after I led a meeting of the women's discipleship group that Betty, an associate pastor at our large Pentecostal church, had started years ago. Her staff responsibilities included disciple formation and pastoral care. Betty had over many months coaxed me into joining the group a couple of years before that, telling me it was a gathering "by invitation only, for special ladies," which sounded mysterious but I was pretty sure meant "for Christians who are slow learners."
When I finally went to the nameless group I realized with dawning joy that the dozen or so women were a ragtag group of disciples who wanted to learn to pray deeply and to hear God speaking to them through the Bible. Like me, some of them had experienced significant trauma in their lives, so they couldn't be satisfied with pat answers to tough questions such as "Why does a good God allow children to suffer abuse?" With great patience and wisdom, Betty taught and mentored all of us.
After a couple of years of attending this group, Betty asked me to take over leadership of the group. This was all part of her careful mentoring process to help me awaken to God's call. I felt overwhelmed by the task, but Betty was insistent that I should do it, so I agreed. Within a few months of taking over, the group's membership had expanded to several dozen women, most of whom were not from our church and many of whom were new to Christianity. I was doing my best to help them know what it meant to follow Jesus even though I was very much a beginner myself.
So it was that on this day Betty said to me, "When you guide new Christians in following Jesus, don't start with doctrine. If you do, you will ruin them. Instead, start with prayer. Teach them to gaze into the face of Jesus, who gazes back with infinite love." I looked at her and saw Jesus gazing at me with infinite love. I loved Betty, but inwardly I balked because I was certain that teaching doctrine was more important than "gazing" prayer, whatever that was. Betty went on to say that people who learn this way of praying develop the ability to tell the difference between doctrine that honors Jesus and doctrine that leads to legalism, quarrels, and strife.
It took another decade of living and some experiences of suffering before I truly understood the wisdom Betty offered me that day. "Gazing into the face of Jesus who gazes back with infinite love" is a contemplative practice that grounds us in a beloved relationship with God. We are already dearly loved by God. We can't diminish or lose God's love for us. It's this crucial awareness of being loved that increasingly enables us to let down our guard with God and to become like Adam and Eve before the fall, "naked and unashamed" before God. From an experience of vulnerability, trust, honesty, and safety, we are able to grow in holiness. We are able to let go of sinful, self-defeating, destructive thoughts and behaviors. We increasingly find ourselves demonstrating the same hospitable love toward others that God demonstrates toward us. We do indeed become able to determine whether a doctrine is consistent with the love of God revealed in Christ. We are enabled to live as Christ in the world.
The Christian faith is all about a relationship of love, trust, and vulnerability, on God's part and on ours. Prayer is the essence of that relationship. It is more than speaking and listening, more than liturgy or silence. Prayer is the very breath of God, breathing life into us, opening us to who God is, to who we are, and to this world that God loves. The breath of God brings life, healing, renewal, comfort, challenge, and direction. Just as breathing is necessary for life in our physical bodies, prayer is necessary for spiritual life.
There are many meaningful forms of prayer — including worship, intercession, thanksgiving, and lament — but fundamentally prayer is a practice of being present to God, who is always present to us. Or in Betty's words, it is gazing into the face of Jesus, who gazes back with infinite love.
Whatever forms we use, prayer is meant to open ourselves to God's love and presence, God's character, and God's activity in the world, which increasingly leads us to participate in God's life in the world. Because prayer connects us to who God is and what God is doing, all the ordinary means of grace, as John Wesley named them, are expressions of prayer, for all of them are intended to draw us close to God in loving relationship. As you read each chapter in this book, notice how each means of grace is a type of prayer, opening us to God.
Now that we understand prayer as being present to God who is present to us, let's turn our attention to ways of praying that are common within various streams of Methodism.
One of the common ways that Methodists pray is the use of a daily office, or set times of prayer every day, using a liturgical resource. The use of a daily office was central to John and Charles Wesley's Anglican spirituality. In fact, the Book of Common Prayer was John Wesley's favorite book, second only to the Bible.
The United Methodist Hymnal includes Orders of Daily Praise and Prayer, brief liturgies that can be used in the morning and evening, especially in a gathering. Since Methodism emerged from the Anglican Church, the form of the prayers is similar to prayers found in the Book of Common Prayer. Scripture readings in these daily liturgies are typically referenced to the Revised Common Lectionary, a system of reading the Bible that enables readers to work through most of the Bible over a three-year cycle, while paying attention to the seasons of the church year such as Lent and Advent.
For persons who aren't from liturgical traditions, the use of a prayer book or liturgies can seem confining or impersonal. However, when used consistently and in an informed way, over time these structured prayers can help Christians attend to God more deeply as well as more broadly. Especially during times of stress or when it is difficult to pray, these liturgies help Christians join with others around the world who also pray this way. Some well-loved devotional books in the Wesleyan traditions that use a liturgical approach include This Day: A Wesleyan Way of Prayer (Abingdon, 2004), and the original A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants (The Upper Room, 1998) along with subsequent volumes. The Upper Room is a very popular and simple guide to daily prayer that is published quarterly and used by millions of people around the world.
The value of using orders for morning and evening prayer really came home to me many years ago while a colleague and I led a group of students on a pilgrimage to Iona, Scotland, and Northumberland, England. The goal of the pilgrimage was to become familiar with ancient and contemporary Celtic Christian spirituality and missional practice. While on Iona we attended morning and evening prayer at the Iona Abbey, where the liturgy was from the Iona Community. After several days one of the students exclaimed, "I just love going to morning and evening prayer. This is all new to me." When I asked what he especially liked he said, "For one thing there is no sermon." Of course, we all laughed since every student present had to take a preaching class, and most of them were headed for pastoral ministry! When I asked why the absence of a sermon felt life-giving, many students replied that because the worship was focused on prayer rather than the work of delivering or listening to a sermon, they were able to more quickly "descend from the mind into the heart" in their worship. The structure for the prayer guided them uniquely into deepened experiences of God's love for themselves and for the world. They also found the themes for each day helpful in focusing their prayers toward the needs of the whole world, rather than just their own locale.
Another source of prayer for which Methodists are well known is the hymnal. Charles Wesley penned more than nine thousand hymns during his lifetime, though only a small portion of them are still sung. Hymnody is one key to teaching theology to congregations, and has been since the beginning of Methodism. To put it simply, we sing what we believe, just as we pray what we believe. Many of the hymns in The United Methodist Hymnal are prayers set to music. For example, "Maker, in Whom We Live" by Charles Wesley is a song of love and commitment addressed directly to each member of the Trinity. Verse one sets the tone:
Maker, in whom we live, in whom we are and move, the glory, power, and praise receive for thy creating love.
Let all the angel throng give thanks to God on high, while earth repeats the joyful song and echoes to the sky.
While the use of a daily office, the Book of Common Prayer, and hymnody are core practices in Methodist spirituality, John Wesley also used extemporaneous prayer, or unscripted prayer. In a journal entry dated August 4, 1788, in which he defends his lifelong commitment to the Anglican church and its doctrine, Wesley states that despite never straying from Anglican doctrine he did at times transgress standard liturgical practices and use extemporaneous prayer — but only because the ministry context demanded it.
Extemporaneous prayer can be anxiety-provoking for persons formed in a strongly liturgical tradition. I've met many lifelong Methodists who felt unable to pray aloud unless reading a printed prayer from an official resource. The thought of praying the wrong words or making a grammatical error was paralyzing, thus they couldn't bring themselves to spontaneously offer a simple table grace, make a hospital visit to pray aloud for a sick friend, or offer a compassionate prayer for a friend going through a hard time. Their spiritual formation had led them to believe that prayer is mostly a formal speech that we make to God, who in his divine majesty requires correct grammar and theology and impressive delivery. Because of this unfortunate misconception, these dear Christians were missing out on the profound gift of simple prayer that arises from silence within and gives voice to what emerges. Extemporaneous prayer can be a prayer of worship, thanksgiving, petition, penitence, complaint, or all of the above and more. This kind of prayer is organic in that it is deeply contextualized to the situation and reflects the personality and spirituality of the persons praying. Within John Wesley's lifetime Methodists came to be known broadly as persons who used extemporaneous prayer along with formal, liturgical prayer.
When I taught evangelism to seminary students, a new friend, Sherry, offered to pray for me on a regular basis. Usually she prayed in silence interrupted only by occasional words. One day when she came to pray, I told her that several students wanted to learn how to live in intentional community and to practice hospitality and engage in the concerns of the neighborhood. The problem, I said, was that I didn't have funds for a house where the students could experience this kind of life as part of their education, yet I felt God calling me to find a house and guide these students. Sherry nodded her head and began to pray in silence as usual. After a while she quietly said, "The house is coming. I see it." Two weeks later a neighbor who knew nothing about my students or their vocations, and very little about me, called me out of the blue and offered a rental house at no cost other than utilities if I "had some students who would live there and take care of the place." The house was in the kind of neighborhood where the students hoped to live — multicultural, mixed income, and close to public transportation. Sherry's extemporaneous and intercessory prayer was the means through which grace flowed to supply a specific resource for a God-breathed ministry.
While prayer is the first of the five means of grace, every means of grace is a form of prayer because each is a pathway for Christians to know and do God's will. In the next chapter we focus on Wesley's practice of "searching the Scriptures," a form of prayer in which God speaks to us through the Bible.
Reflection Questions for Chapter 1: Prayer
1. In this chapter you met Betty, an outstanding spiritual mentor. Who have been the spiritual mentors in your life? How did they mentor you? What is it from their mentoring that you would like to pass on to others?
2. When you consider your own belovedness to God, what do you remember? Regret? Hope?
3. This chapter focuses on the prayer of listening. How have you experienced listening prayer, if ever? If you have not had this experience, what has been your understanding of prayer until now?
4. What are the most common ways your congregation prays? How might your congregation learn new ways of praying?
5. In this chapter you met Sherry, an intercessor who prayed for Elaine. Who have been the intercessors in your life? If you have ever served as an intercessor for others, how did you experience that ministry of prayer?
CHAPTER 2
Searching the Scriptures
Searching the Scriptures
We rode along in the 1976 Ford pickup making small talk, eating wheat crackers, and trying not to cry. The daily trip was two hours to the hospital in Springfield, Missouri, where my father was critically ill. This day it was my turn to drive. Throughout my childhood, both parents were hostile toward the church, having had unpleasant encounters with religious folk. Nonetheless, in their late sixties Jesus won them over. They were both new Christians when I got the call that Dad was sick. Within hours I was on my way.
Mom needed help with Dad in the hospital, and there was work that had to be done around their small farm. As we talked about the challenges that would face them if Dad survived, we got onto the subject of God's help in times of need. I was driving, and Mom was in the passenger seat. Mom asked if there was a passage of scripture that could help. I was still a beginner myself, having just started leading "the group for special ladies." I pointed to the Bible in my tote bag. It was huge, a black, leather-bound Thompson Chain-Reference New International Version with an impressive zippered case. "You can look up words like comfort and help in the back," I said. "We'll find something." All of a sudden Mom looked at me, stricken, the Bible in one hand, her cigarette in the other. "Do you reckon God minds if I smoke while I read the Bible?" she asked. She was serious.
In John Wesley's terms, Mom wanted to "search the Scriptures," one of the means of grace. We hoped that God might provide guidance and comfort at a time of great uncertainty. In her simple question, Mom raised powerful theological issues: What are the conditions under which a person can "search the Scriptures" and encounter therein the living God? What might be obstacles to seeing and hearing God through scripture when we do read the Bible? How does one go about reading the Bible so that scriptures come to mind helpfully when we need them?
The term "searching the Scriptures" is old-fashioned, as if we are looking for buried treasure. Yet this is an accurate description for a truly Wesleyan way to read the Bible. In his preface to the Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, one of his most important texts, John Wesley describes his purpose in having done the background research and then having written the commentary notes. The Explanatory Notes are not written for intellectuals or professional scholars. Rather, they are written "for plain, unlettered men, who understand only their mother tongue, and yet reverence and love the word of God, and have a desire to save their souls." This comment, along with many other statements Wesley makes about the Bible, demonstrates that for Wesley, reading the Bible is for the explicit purpose of Christian transformation. We "search" the Scriptures, leaving no stone unturned, expecting to encounter the living God and discover life-changing guidance in its pages.
John Wesley was sometimes mocked for his deep love of Scripture. Some of his detractors called him a "Bible moth." He called himself a "man of one book," an interesting designation considering he read widely from many disciplines, including science and medicine. The most popular book in his lifetime that he wrote was Primitive Physic, a guide to holistic medicine. When he referenced himself as a man of one book, then, what he was referring to was the central role the Bible played in his thought and life. In reading through his journals, sermons, and other writing it is obvious that his very cadences of speech have been shaped by the Bible.
Even so, Wesley didn't understand the Bible to be infallible in the way some interpreters prefer today. The Anglican Articles of Faith and the Confession that guided Wesley's doctrine of Scripture never refer to the text of Scripture as "inspired," nor do they call the Bible "the Word of God." It's clear that Wesley believed the Bible was inspired by God, but Randy Maddox points out that "it is doubtful that he should be characterized as an inerrantist in the contemporary sense of the term." The Confession states that the Bible "reveals the word of God." Despite his deep love of Scripture, Wesley never preached a sermon focusing exclusively on the Bible, nor did he write a treatise about it. Scripture rather was the water in which he swam, as it permeated his thought, words, and actions.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Five Means of Grace"
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