Back here I wondered if we ought to change the way we pray.
Instead of discussing our needs and then offering prayers at the end, perhaps we ought to invite God into our conversations and ‘pray as we go’, imagining him there as a partner in conversation rather than the silent and ignored person until we decide to ‘pray’. We talked about this on Sunday and agreed we will attempt to pray a bit differently and see what develops.
I don’t think anyone was freaked by the idea, but we have become so conditioned to one way of doing things that chances are we will struggle to do it a different way.
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For me prayer is about intentionality to include our heavenly Father in the conversation. There’s nothing worse than being in a conversation at a party and being ignored (maybe that just happens to me…) There is also something about not babbling on like pagans. Being intentional about including our heavenly Father in the conversation sounds like prayer to me !
Keep praying Hamo & Crew
Gav
that’s actually a very pentecostal/charismatic way to pray – conversing with God, allowing HIM to direct your requests and speaking through people. Some of my favorite prayer times have been like that in (balanced and not wacky) pentecostal prayer meetings.
I agree, I like that approach. I find, in my own prayer life that I have been greatly enriched by using fixed hour prayers from a book or website as a doorway or path and then to converse with God and then close the door with a “fixed” prayer.
It takes a while to get used too. But when we just pray things happen.
Now I find it strange that we need to discuss anything before prayer. I is sort of like saying everything over again.
After your last post on this, I suggested to my home group as we ended one night that we just acknowledge that Gad was with us and that as we share with each other we share with him. Then we had a time of sharing. It seemed to work well.
A good book for this topic is “The Practice of the Presence of God” by Brother Lawrence
Doing things a new way is always hard but can bring some much needed refreshment. I call this type of praying “conversational prayer.” Somewhat like you described, we communicate to the group that we are going to have prayer (making sure new people understand what we are doing so they don’t feel uncomfortable) we acknowledge God’s presence, followed by whatever the individuals want to share. When it appears everybody has shared to their hearts content, someone (usually designated before hand) will close. We sometimes close with a song. I have used this kind of conversational prayer with children, youth, young adults, and even older adults in nursing homes. Some people feel uncomfortable with it because it is very personal and casual.
I like this idea – we are working through this as well, last time we met, we prayed comming out of a time of worship, prayer that did not ‘teach and explain to the body’, but rather sentance type prayer praising God. The week before, Andrew lead and said, let’s pray for our unsaved children, spouses and friends – we did, it was great.
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