In Romans 12 (vv. 9-21), Paul unpacks a beautiful model for prayerful community among citizens of the Kingdom of God.
Life under the lordship of King Jesus demands that people pray for each other. I really can't say it any simpler than that -- and these words convict me as one who has often neglected this obligation.
Paul calls us to "[continue] steadfastly in prayer; distributing to the needs of the saints" (Rom. 12:12). We're also to "restore [a man overtaken] in a spirit of gentleness" and in the same breath, to "bear one another's burdens" (Gal. 6:2).
In these verses, Paul identifies prayer and action as necessarily concomitant. It is essential, he argues, that believers lift up each other's concerns to God and simultaneously strive to meet the needs of their brothers and sisters with the resources given to them.
I'm not proposing a congregational corollary to the gospel of self-help, such as "God helps communities who help each other." Rather, I suggest that God calls His people to support one another and to cry out to Him in times of need. For to pray for a need without intending to meet it is to pray with an indifferent spirit that supposes our actions are without consequence. And to meet a need without intending to pray for one another is to suppose that God does not intervene in human history. Both are dangerous canyons that lay to either side of the narrow path we're called to walk.
Indeed, life in authentic community is a concert of good works flowing from unwavering faith in our good King. Both are absolutely essential. We pretend that God's symphony is but a series of notes to be memorized when we set down our instruments. Yet Jesus teaches us to play beautiful music and gives us the power to do so.
Thoughts on missional life have consumed me over the past few months. With faith fresh and alive, I wondered what sort of fruit Jesus' teachings might bear if they infected my temporal life. I started a kingdom-driven business venture and have been working (too) hard to bless people by developing the talents that God has given me. But as business boomed, prayer became an obstacle to progress.
The situation, I'm sure, is familiar. We're part of a sin-struck world, a church, maybe an e-mail prayer chain, a small group, and a smaller circle of close friends. And everybody has a prayer request. Holding a list a mile long, we mechanically recite each item to God and check it off without further consideration, or worse yet, hopelessly neglect prayer entirely.
I'm a big fan of self-parody and mashups, so I decided to call myself out. How could I "improve" prayer, I thought? I decided that the best prayers are efficient prayers. My criteria:
- Pray for the most important people (defined by spiritual capital)
- Pray for the most important problems (defined by the matter's gravity and cost in prayer time)
- Keep prayers brief and to the point; no unnecessary emotional attachment.
- Create a standardized format for requesting prayer; no more accepting prayer requests by a mess of phone calls, letters, e-mails, IMs, text messages, and in-person requests.
- In fact, the ideal prayer request is one that is machine-readable...and perhaps...machine-prayable.
I ended up creating a mechanical "economy of prayer." My attempts to ration my concern for others resulted in something both awesome and terrible.
Check back Wednesday for some critical reflections on the careless and prayerless depravity of such a system.
