Learning from others in community prayer

I went to a seminar today at Light & Life Ministries in Elgin.  The speaker was Phil Miglioratti (see my previous post) and the topic was primarily raising up more effective prayer in our churches.  The entire seminar was incredible - if you ever get a chance to attend one of Phil’s seminars, I highly recommend it.  But the point of this post is how uniquely he emphasized the importance of praying in community. 

Praying in community is important for many reasons, several of which I cover in the book.  But Phil emphasized one today that I hadn’t considered before, and that’s how we learn from each other when we pray together.  I’ve often said that prayer is more than we think it is because God himself is bigger than we can possibly imagine.  It follows naturally that none of us has all the answers on prayer and none of us prays in a way that completely captures all that prayer should be.  As we pray together, then, we have the opportunity to learn about prayer and learn about God from the ways in which others pray. 

This is not to say that everyone prays equally well in a group setting - we all know that’s not the case.  And it’s not to say that we should necessarily imitate anything we hear.  But praying in community does give us an opportunity to see and experience God in a different way - through the eyes of others - opening up the possibility that we can know God better by knowing a different side of him than we typically see when we pray.

This viewpoint can also help us from becoming judgmental about the way others pray.  Some pray liturgically, some conversationally, some charismatically.  It’s possible to acknowledge that each of these styles (and more) captures a part of what prayer is without insisting that any given style is “right” or is “more right” than the others.  Surely unity in prayer is accomplished more fully by appreciating diversity than by insisting on conformity - as long as our hearts are in tune with God.

This is not to say that all prayer styles are equally fit for community prayer.  As I stated in “Together in Prayer”, some prayer styles are best left either to the prayer closet or to groups whose composition is rather homogeneous in terms of prayer style.  But surely there must always be room to grow and to learn more of God by experiencing different types and styles of prayer, whether or not we choose to adopt them for ourselves.

For more about the National Pastors’ Prayer Network, see www.nppn.org.

This entry was posted on 2009 November 17 at 18:19 and is filed under Community Prayer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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