Towards a Spirituality for Evangelists

The bishop of Belley, Jean Pierre Camus, wanted to know if Francis de Dales was really as holy as he seemed to be. So he drilled a hole in the wall of his bedroom in the episcopal residence so that he could spy on Francis.

What did Camus discover? Only that Francis was the same in secret as he was in company. He saw the saint creep out of bed early and quietly in the mornings so as not to wake his servant. He saw him pray, write in his journal, read the office, answer some letters, then pray again. The beautiful manners, the unruffled compassion, the courtesy and humility were all on display through the peephole as they had been in the pulpit or at the dinner-table.

Francis de Sales lived a life of congruence: he was what he seemed to be. His life with God, his personal serenity, his love for others: they were all in beautiful harmony ….

A small group of students was talking in an English university’s senior common room. They had just graduated. One wanted to be a skilled surgeon, another a famous diplomat, another a representative sportsman, another the prime minister of Britain, and another a millionaire before he was forty. One chap was quietly listening to his griends’ dreams, and when asked his ambition he said, “Well, this may sound strange after all that, but the only thing I want to be is a saint”.

Spirituality is all about – it’s only about – becoming a saint.

WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?

The term “spirituality” originated in the 17th century and describes the actions of God’s spirit within us. Some Christians have called it “mystical theology” or “spiritual theology”. If systematic theology tries to discover objectively what God is like, and moral theology defines how God wants us to behave, spiritual theology is the exploration of our coming to “know God through love” and live obediently in the light of that knowledge. Spirituality seeks to bring head and heart together. (A spirituality of the head alone is too cerebral, and may produce a pharisee; a spirituality of the heart alone is too concerned with feelings and experiences).

The process of “knowing God through love” is called “spiritual formation”. It’s simply the process whereby the Spirit of God applies the Word of God to the mind and heart of the child of God so that his or her whole life is continually being formed into the likeness of Christ.

Professor James Stewart, a great Presbyterian, says the “big idea” for the New Testament Christians, particularly for Paul, was “union with Christ”. Not justification by faith, or conversion or going to heaven: these are means to the end of our being united to Christ.

How do we become more and more united with Him? The vehicle which takes us to that destination is called prayer.

HOW TO PRAY

Often in pastors’ conferences I will ask “Who here has ever been taught to pray?” The response around Australia, across the Christian denominations is about 1.5%. When you think about it, that’s pretty disappointing. The only item in John the Baptist’s curriculum for his disciples we know about was under the heading “How to Pray”. Tjhe key submission Jesus’ disciples made to Him was “Lord teach us to pray”. And He did: we have a lot of teaching about prayer in the Gospels, and some written prayers of Jesus which He must have allowed the disciples to overhear. Paul thought teaching his young churches how to pray was so important that he not only peppered his epistles with exhortations to pray without ceasing, pray always with thanksgiving, etc. but he actually tells them sometimes the very words he uses when he prays for them (e.g.Eph. 1:15ff, 3:14 ff.). Very few Bible and theological colleges have taught their students how to pray.

Now around the world evangelical Christians are “resisting the devil” and all this is changing. There are retreats for prayer and meditation, hundreds of books are being written about spiritual formation and spiritual direction, people are getting together in small groups for communal prayer, and more seminaries and colleges are teaching in this area.

Here, in summary-form, is what the great spiritual masters seem to be saying”

(1) Pray as you can, not as you can’t. There is no “instant” holiness. Prayer is hard work. It is the work of a lifetime – the longest journey is the journey inward – but we begin afresh every morning.

(2) Ask yourself “What is my desire?” What do you really want out of life, from your ministry? Success? For whose glory – yours or God’s? Prayer is, essentially, the soul’s sincere desire …. Why not – right now – take a piece of paper, and put a line down the middle. At the top of the left-hand column put the heading “What I need to be happy” and on the right “What would be nice, but not necessary, to be happy”. Go on, do it now, and then come back to reading this article!

(3) Prayer is a gift from God. It’s not a bag of spiritual techniques. Paul says God gives us the Holy Spirit to help us (Romans 8:26-7). “The Spirit prays in me, for me, through me, and with me” says a modern writer, Robert Faricy. Prayer is not just what I do, but what God wants to do through me.

(4) The main aim of prayer: to know God, through love. Knowing God – or anyone else – is much more than knowing about him. In her beautiful book Poustinia Catherine de Hueck Doherty talks about “folding the wings of the intellect and opening the door of the heart” in God’s presence. This is “affective knowledge”, a knowing that leads to loving and responds to our being loved.

(5) There are three kinds of prayer. Verbal prayer is prayer with words; meditative prayer uses thoughts and ideas; contemplative prayer is prayer of the imagination, “prayer of the loving gaze”. Bonhoeffer advocated half an hour’s silent meditation on scripture every morning: this is moe than “Bible study”: it’s the exercise of being “under the Word”. As their prayer deepends, many of the saints find themselves praying longer, but with fewer words.

(6) Find a quiet, regular place and time each day for prayer. If possible, guarantee that you will be unhurried and uninterrupted. Turn a corner of your house into a chapel. My own practice is to sit at a table in the corner of our bedroom: that table is used for nothing else than prayer and spiritual reading. It’s away from the phone. I use the daily office from the 1978 Australian Prayer Book. A small candle, a picture of the cross, and a “praying hands” wood-carving all help the process of “centring down”.

(7) Learn to “pray the gospels”.Project yourself into the action. Mark Link, in his books You and Breakaway suggests you imagine you are one of the soldiers at Calvary: what do you see/hear/feel/smell, etc.? If you’re male, be Peter at the feeding of the five thousand; if femalelive inside the skin of the woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment. You’ll learn all sorts of things about yourself, if you take the time….!

(8) Pray with Nature. Nature is the garment of God, said William Carey. We can tough God there if we’re sensitive. We Westerners have done a pretty thorough job of “subduing the earth” but we’re not much good at replenishing it. We need to learn to submit to nature as well as subduing. God was so excited about his handiwork He took time off to celebrate the wonder of it all. Get away from crowds and noise and technology regularly and listen to the music of nature. It’s great therapy. (Reminds me of an experiment with biofeedback machines on praying people in California: for most of them prayer was more stressful than when not praying!)

(9) Ask: What kind of God do I pray to? Prayer is friendship with God, “keeping company with God” as Clement of Alexandria put it. What kind of God do you believe in? Where did you get that idea of God? Is your God like Jesus, or like the pharisees? The great pray-ers believed three things about God: he is good, he is the supreme gift-giver, and he is great.

(10) Change your view of time. In our culture we talk of “Managing” time, “getting more done in less time”. We have done to time what we have done to nature – attempted to dominate it rather than submit to it. Sheila Cassidy in her book Prayer for Pilgrims says the only way to learn to pray “timelessly” is to “waste time with God”. With a close friend, we may have no conscious agenda: we just love being in that one’s company. Time flies. So it is with God. It’s not like an interview, with a list of things to talk about. It’s more like a couple of lovers, talking together without a thought of what has to be done next. You’re a happy pray-er if you can waste time with God like that.

(11) Pray with others. Prayer in a group, according to the teaching of Jesus and the practice of the early Christians, is much more than the sum of individual prayers. The great evangelical revivals happened when people prayed together fervently. For those whose ministry could cause them to be “loners” this sort of spiritual accountability is important. But group prayer will only be effective where there is a strong sense of community (that’s why so many of the old “mid-weak prayer meetings” in our churches were dead).

(12) Find a spiritual director. He or she is “Paul” to your “Timothy” – your father/mother in God. A spiritual director walks with you in your prayer and in the events of your life, helping you to discover which “rumours” are of God and which are not. The best spiritual directors are highly skilled at “noticing”, listening, attending to the key interior movements in a person’s prayer. And when the “dark night of the soul” comes – as it does to most of us – the “soul friend” discerns the spirits operating there, whether from God or the enemy.

…

So many of us are burdened with an addiction to productivity, to growth, to success. We must always be “useful” rather than merely “decorative”. Hence the high incidence of stress and burnout amongst us. A balanced Christian will regard “being” and “becoming” as more important than merely “doing”. The quality of our relatiionships – with God, with others, with self – is a higher priority than achieving other ministry goals.

Research tells us that pastors and evangelists in our Western churches do not cope easily with either success or failure. Our cult of “numerolatry” leads to ungodly ambition; or else our self-esteem is too closely integrated with the effectiveness of our ministry, and when it fails we “go under”.

Another sort of truncated spirituality has to do with our evangelistic style. Evangelists are called to be heralds of God, to declare his glory among the nations and call persons to repentance and faith in Christ. The temptations for all prophets and evangelists is to have just one or two strings to our harp. We do not easily affirm diversity in Christ’s church. We may be tempted to live in “simplicity this side of complexity” rather than move to “simplicity the other side of complexity”. (The temptation for ivory-tower theologians is different: to wallow in complexity the other side of simplicity!)

Finally, because of true spirituality governs all we do, think, and say we will remember the words of Isaiah about a commitment to justice and helping the poor if we want our prayers answered (Isaiah 1:10-20).

Further reading: Richard Foster, The Celebration of Discipline (Hodder).

P.S. Back to the divided page exercise: a true “saint” only needs one word for the left-hand column: God, or Jesus. He is their “absolute absolute”. All else are “relative absolutes”. (Those who have God and everything else have no more than those who have God only. And those who have everything else and not God have nothing).

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