In my previous blog post about the 24-7 Prayer Gathering 2022 I mentioned how helpful I’d found the talk by Tyler Staton.
Tyler is the lead pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, and national director of 24-7 Prayer USA. He’s written a couple of books, but the one I want to review and recommend here is called “Praying like Monks, Living like Fools…an invitation to the wonder and mystery of prayer”.
“Prayer is the source of Jesus’s most astonishing miracles and the subject of Jesus’ most audacious promises, and yet, most people – even most Bible-believing Christians – find prayer to be boring, obligatory, disappointing, confusing, or, most often, all of the above. Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools is your invitation to trade your conceptions and misconceptions about prayer for prayer in its purest form: a vital, sustaining, powerful connection with God that is more real and alive than you could have ever imagined.
From the resources page on the 24-7 Prayer web site.
You may be thinking, “Another book on prayer…do we really need it?” I guess every book on prayer encourages you to see a new angle on a familiar practice, and I found this one particularly helpful at this time and at this stage in my walk with Jesus.
I think this quote pretty much sums up the main themes of the book:
“What if at the centre of your every day, you placed communion with the God who personifies love. What if the waking thoughts of your day were spent dreaming with God – dreams as big as “kingdom come” and ordinary as “daily bread”? What if you slipped away at midday for a few minutes or a few seconds, because every other force is vying for your attention but only Jesus has your heart? What if you were to spend the commute home or the final moments before you fall asleep at night recounting the magnificent and miniscule ways you saw heaven pierce earth today? What if your day belonged to the God who loves you without needing to control you, the God whose chief concern is your deepest well-being, who is gently shaping you into the very best version of yourself and who breathes into your exhaustion with abundant life? What if fidelity to Jesus is everything, and the way you choose it is as simple as prayer?”
“Praying like Monks…”pages 199-200
The book is full of stories about his own and others experiences of a developing relationship with God through prayer…it is not a lot of theory or religious good ideas.
He begins by taking an honest look at the fears that cause us to struggle with prayer, then moves on to discuss reasons why actually praying might be the way to allay those fears, as we get to know and trust the God we pray to a bit better.
There are chapters on prayer posture, adoration, confession, intercession, and petition that come across as a breath of fresh air from familiar subjects. There are chapters on prayer as participation, praying for the lost, and silence and persistence. The final chapter, “Rebellious Fidelity – unceasing prayer” focuses on the practice of a 3-times-a-day prayer rhythm, which is really helpful in its simplicity (speaking as one for whom a Daily Office has been part of my prayer life for many years).
Each chapter ends with helpful and practical suggestions for how to get into the kind of prayer that the chapter has discussed.
The book ends with a vision and a dream, and with a look at what Jesus is doing now…praying to the Father for us.
“I have a dream for the church. We will become houses of prayer again. None of us want to spend the rest of our lives cloistered off in socially irrelevant, spiritually dry weekly meetings. What’s the alternative? The radical reprioritisation of prayer. And if the cost is foolishness, count me in.”
For some time, I have felt a very real connection with the 24-7 Prayer movement. I have used their resources to teach on prayer and to enrich my own prayer times. A church in Manchester where I served on the staff set up one of the early Boiler Rooms (new monastic prayer community), although, sadly, I don’t think it had a very long lifespan.
During the Covid lockdowns I often spent time worshipping online with Emmaus Road church in Guildford, where Pete Greig (founder of 24-7 Prayer) is one of the leaders and I also discovered “The Gathering” online.
“The Gathering” provides a once-a-year opportunity for members of the 24-7 Prayer movement from all over the world to gather together, and due to lockdown restrictions, it has been broadcast online for a few years. This year, as well as having a live Gathering in Belfast, 24-7 Prayer continued to live stream the gathering. For a variety of reasons, I often can’t watch live, so I am very grateful for the catch-up facility.
I found this year’s Gathering a time of both great encouragement and opportunity, so I decided to write a brief summary of ‘my Gathering 2022’…maybe it will whet your appetite, in which case the Main Session recordings are still available at Main Sessions – The Gathering Online (24-7prayer.com) (you may have to register to access the site.
Briefly, these were the things that stood out to me:
1. Testimonies from various leaders of 24-7 Prayer in a whole variety of countries…Czech Republic, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Lebanon, Sweden, Peru, Iran, Ibiza, Switzerland and Germany, and also from Josh Green, 24-7s Youth Director. I had no idea about what God is doing in these places…deeply encouraged and challenged to widen my prayers.
2. Many prophetic messages for us to take away and weigh up…some of them delivered as part of reports or talks or just stand-alone messages from God. A picture of a field covered with weary souls as far as the eye could see spoke volumes to me, and I’m certain to others who are or have been engaged in church leadership. Words about encountering God in new ways, learning from the failure of the power and the people we’ve relied on in the West and learning to listen Elijah-like for the quiet voice of those on the margins (1 Kings 19: 12), as well as our need to adopt a “heart set on pilgrimage” Psalm 84: 5).
3. A real variety of speakers:
Pete Greig, who spoke from Joshua 4: 19-24 about our ‘Gilgal moment’, a time of Commemoration, Consecration and Commission
Tim Mackie, of The Bible Project, a self-confessed Bible nerd, who took us on a journey through scripture to discover that Paradise is a person, an antidote to our Western naturalistic and materialistic mindset that blinds us to the spiritual reality that’s all around us and within us and sometimes gives us problems when we pray.
Tyler Staton, from Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, who talked about breakthroughs and boredom, about discovering fidelity and choosing Jesus and what this has to do with prayer. Just as love needs a container to keep it faithful over the long haul… marriage…so prayer needs a container, and Tyler suggested that a daily rhythm of prayer, morning, midday and evening is a tried and tested container for our prayers.
The 24-7 Prayer “Inner Room” app has been rewritten to include a simple rhythm of prayer Inner Room – 24-7 Prayer International . I think this was the session that made the most impression on me at this time…watch out for a future blog article inspired by this.
Hannah Heather, of 24-7 Prayer and Emmaus Road Church, spoke about the connection between faith and hope. Her starting point was Luke 18: 8…”will he find faith”. She pointed us to the make-up of one of the Hebrew words for faith (Emunah), where each character adds to the meaning of the whole word and the central character is the word for tent peg. Faith, she said, is about finding our tent peg and hammering it in so we can live faithfully under the tent of our convictions. We’re all holding on to something already to give meaning in life…we’d better be certain it’s Jesus (Hebrews 10:23)
The final speaker was Lungi Nyathi, a doctor and a board member of 24-7 Prayer International from South Africa. This was the session of The Gathering that I personally need time to digest. In it, God seemed to draw together the themes from the gathering as a whole and to carry them forward through the themes of prayer, mission and justice. Lungi took us on a journey to demonstrate how God is changing her outlook and understanding of prayer, mission and justice for today. She left us with the challenge to unashamedly take our place fully in the story of God, to allow God to stretch us as he has given us a role to play for the sake of this generation.
If any of this resonates with you, may I encourage you to watch the sessions and think about what God’s encouragement and opportunities may look like for you in your place at this time.
1 Kings 19:11-12 NRSV He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; [12] and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.
Author Ruth Haley Barton suggests that the wind, earthquake and fire can be seen as metaphors for the inner chaos that has broken the prophet Elijah and has sent him on a desparate quest to find God again. Speaking of her own “cave on the mountain” she says:
“Am I really worth anything if I’m not out there constantly proving myself? Who am I when I’m not busy doing things that tell the world who I am? Why is it so hard to stop the frantic pace of my life even when I know it’s hurting me and those I love? What do I do with this pain and sadness? What is true and real in my relationship with God and what is really illusion – things I would like to believe are true but really aren’t? Is God really enough to satisfy the loneliness, the emptiness, the longing of my soul?”
From “Invitation to Solitude and Silence” by Ruth Haley Barton, pages 79-80
I identify strongly with these words…I think many of us will! We are forced to face up to our hidden false patterns of thinking and being and doing, once the very absence of God has brought them to the surface. After the fire we wait for God to speak, and that waiting can be a terrible thing. As we wait in silence, a place of longing, expectancy and hope, then maybe, just maybe we are in a place where God can reach us, can speak to us and refocus our lives on our relationship with him. That’s when we remember who we really are…
Pilgrim Traveller 