Tuesday Prayer: 40

This is my 40th 'Tuesday Prayer' post. There has been a bit of a hiatus, recently, and that has simply been because I haven't been reading as much about prayer as I'd like to, as much about prayer as I think I should be. This week, though, I had an exciting bit of post - a pre-publication copy of a book by my friend Nick Parish, titled 'Longing to Be Holy', which he offers as a guide to spiritual disciplines. As I read through it, I was struck by what he says about prayer, particularly one of his practical pointers;

“Pray with others. For starters, this is a great way to learn about prayer. I don't mean you'll learn a special tone of voice to use, and the right complex Christian words. I mean you'll learn prayer. You'll see how people are shaped by prayer, and how prayer works in people's lives”

I love this. It is so easy - and, perhaps, this medium of blogging and you reading this right now contributes to it - to see prayer as an individual activity, something we do alone, ideally in a closet. But that isn't true. I love the unfettered simplicty of Nick's challenge here.

Nick asks us to consider praying together, in groups, for the same things, at the same time, or over time. Its not rules - it is the radical idea of praying as a group, a community, a people. It is a way to learn prayer, and see how it works. My experience is that such an activity is valuable - prayer is a shared activity, made all the sweeter with the addition of brothers and sisters. But what do you think? I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments...

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Don't forget to check out the previous posts in the series, featuring quotes from Tom Wright, John Wimber, Richard Foster and Don Carson, the great J. C. Ryle and theologians Alister McGrath and James K. A. Smith. Since then, I've shared quotes from Justin Welby, E.M. Bounds, Vineyard Pastor Ken Wilson, C. S. Lewis,  Norwegian O'Hallesby, Paul Miller, John Piper. Recently, we've heard Matthew Henry, Charles Finney, Andrew Murray, Tim Chester, Vaughan Roberts, Oliver O'Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Bunyan. Then we got rather retro, with quotes from Church Fathers John Chrysostom and Tertullian, before returning to more recent thinkers with Rowan Williams, Mike Reeves and Peter Jackson and Chris Wright and Andrew Case, R. C. Sproul, and (representing a slight change of tack) the Westminster Confession. Recently we considered Karl Barth, and Donald Macleod, Mary Prokes,  J. C. Ryle (again!), Andrew Murray,  Martyn Lloyd Jones, Hudson Taylor, recently about Ffald-y-Brenin, and most recently some of my own words...