Our prayer should be as valuable and essential to us as breathing.
If memory serves me, this is the first and only book on corporate prayer that I have ever read. Yet most, if not all, only address the corporate nature of prayer to a degree. There are some great books out there (Paul Miller’s Praying Life, being one of the best). I’ve read plenty of books on individual prayer. This is a book about prayer that is intentionally about the corporate prayer life of local churches. His goal is to help us learn how to pray better and more as churches. John Onwuchekwa’s wonderful, little Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church, offers us a way forward, a way to bridge the gap between churches that pray and churches that don’t. There are only two types of churches: those that pray together and those that don’t. Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church. This would be the perfect book to use to help begin a weekly or monthly prayer meeting at your church. Onwuchekwa fills the book with concise and helpful illustrations to make his points. If we rely too much on God’s sovereignty, we could become apathetic, and if we rely too much on our own evangelistic efforts, we could become anxious, but through prayer our apathy turns into compassion, and our anxiety turns into boldness. 8) on the relation between God‘s sovereignty and our responsibility when it comes to evangelism. Just be faithful to pray together, more like a marathon than a sprint. “You need only two ingredients to start a successful prayer meeting: burdens, and brothers and sisters who are willing to pray.” (104). It was very refreshing to be reminded that the prayer meeting doesn’t need to be innovative, new or exciting.
The very beginning of the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father.”) tells us that we should reject an individualistic mindset and see prayer as a collective exercise. What distinguishes this book from others on prayer is that it focuses more on corporate prayer than individual prayer, including the way prayer is offered during Sunday morning worship as well as during the regular prayer meeting.
0 kommentar(er)
