Prepositions and Prayer: The Syntax of Spiritual Communion

Prayer is a complicated and mysterious process. Without exaggeration, hundreds of books have been written about this topic.

People use language, both to pray, and to talk about prayer. To be sure, there is an aspect to prayer which exceeds language, as Paul writes: “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.”

Even so, language is central to prayer.

Consider the following examples:

We can pray for someone, we can pray with someone, and we can pray over someone.

We can pray against something and we can pray about something. We can pray concerning something, regarding something, or with regard to something.

We can pray on behalf of someone.

Some of these phrases may be purely synonymous: a distinction without a difference, then, would exist between some of these linguistic formulations.

The difference between some of these expressions may also be, e.g., the difference petitions and intercessions. Likewise, we can distinguish between praise, thanksgiving, and adoration.

Reflecting on the language we use to talk about prayer can lead us toward insights and toward an enriching diversity in our practices of prayer.

A Task Accomplished in a Variety of Settings: Discipleship

Any gathering of Christian leaders will manifest a variety of styles and structures. There is a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, competition between various congregational models, from the mega-church to the house-church, and everything in between.

God is certainly able and willing to work when “two or three are gathered in” His name (Matthew 18:20), or when “thousands of people had gathered together” (Luke 12:1).”

The rivalry between big groups and small groups is not a true dilemma or dichotomy, as Bob Roberts writes:

Global pastors don’t get into this argument. They see the value of both the small scale and the large scale. They believe in starting small, but they also realize the impact large services can have on a community. To them, it’s not one or the other; it’s both, and it starts and continues with cells. In Paul’s letter to the believers in Ephesus, we see his description of relationships in organic cells, as well as the local congregation in the city, and the broader, universal church (cells: Eph. 4:14-17; congregation: Eph. 4:7-13; universal church: Eph. 4:1-6).

Whether in a small home group of a dozen people, or in a mega-church of thousands, there are key roles to be filled. These are listed in the New Testament. Bob Roberts lists five of the: apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, and evangelists.

When apostles and prophets are the foundation of the church, the other roles Paul identified later in this letter — pastors, teachers, and evangelists — take their God-given places in the scheme of things. Their collective role is to deepen and extend the DNA of the church, not to establish it. All of these roles are necessary for cells to thrive.

The purpose of any church or congregation is to find its collective role as a group, and to find individual roles for its members.

If a congregation has been established initially and primarily as a large, Sunday morning gathering, then to impose upon that congregation a structure of small groups as its main identity will be a somewhat forced and affected measure.

A congregation that has a history of being identified mainly as the large Sunday morning experience cannot, and should not, suddenly attempt to act as if it were really a collection of small groups. The inauthenticity of such a move would be clear.

A congregation which identifies itself as a congregation should delight in that identity, and strive to live it out well.

If a network of small groups in fact began as small groups, and only later merged to form a congregation, then such a church should cheerfully identify as a collection of groups, and not attempt to see the large congregation as its main identity, as Bob Roberts writes:

In many churches in the West, socialization is the primary characteristic of small groups. Pastors sometimes say, “We’re not a church with small groups; we’re a church of small groups.” That’s the right language, but getting people to gather isn’t the full story. For one thing, many of these groups are birthed long after the church is established, so the DNA of the church is primarily about the worship hour and people volunteering to make it successful. And many of these groups are little more than gatherings of friends, with little, if any, vision for making a difference in the community. In some churches, programs are offered for target groups such as men, women, and singles, and the church also has a program for discipleship. That’s the wrong metric. God hasn’t commanded us to make target-group ministries; he has commanded us to make disciples.

In either type of church — and here the thoughts go beyond, and even contrary to, what Bob Roberts wrote — the goal is discipleship. A congregation which began, and identifies as, a network of small groups needn’t seek to build an identity as a large Sunday morning experience.

And a congregation which began as a large Sunday morning experience needn’t try to do the mental gymnastics to recast itself as a network of small groups.

Both forms can be God-pleasing, and both forms can be used by God to build His kingdom.

Discipleship can be carried out in a wide variety of settings.

Whichever type of structure happens to be the inherited shape for a group of believers, they need only ask how they can go about the business of discipleship within that structure.

Toward a Theology of Lent

Worship during Lent is often in danger of losing its identity, perhaps more so in the twenty-first century than in previous years. The music, liturgy, and sermons can drift away from the peculiar characteristics which distinguish Lent from other parts of the year.

This is true regardless of whether one holds to more traditional or less traditional worship styles, regardless of which modern songs or ancient hymns one prefers.

We can be thankful that many congregations properly express the characteristic aspects of Lent, and do so in a way that correctly expresses Lent’s essential and singular message.

Perhaps the most common risk is that Lent turns into a sort of slow-motion Good Friday.

The season - whether one calls it Passionszeit or Fastenzeit - should be kept distinct from Good Friday, yet exactly that distinction is the one most often blurred.

A concrete example of such confusion can be seen in the selection of Biblical texts for worship. It is not uncommon to experience Lenten worship services including the Words from the Cross and other Crucifixion passages. Yet such readings are more at home in Good Friday service than a Lenten service.

The pieces of music chosen likewise manifest a conflation of Lent and Good Friday: songs normally associated with latter appear during the former, e.g., O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden or O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.

On the other hand, Lent is sometimes diluted by the anticipation, and preemptive celebration, of the Resurrection. While a follower of Jesus always lives in the awareness of the Resurrection, Lent is not merely an anticipation of Easter.

If Good Friday seeps too much into the observation of Lent, not only does this detract from the unique character of Lent, but it also robs Holy Week of its specialness. If the congregation has been singing Go to Dark Gethsemane for forty days already, Good Friday may seem like merely an extension of Lent.

To properly formulate distinctively Lenten worship, an understanding of Lent must first be articulated. What is Lent? How is Lent different than Good Friday?

Lent is a time of reflection and self-examination. The sequence of Ash Wednesday, Lent, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter is a logical progression.

For many people, the primary significance of Lent is fasting. The physical act of fasting is related to a broader set of spiritual disciplines. Whether one refrains from food for a certain period of time, or engages in another spiritual discipline - e.g., works of charity, increased prayer, etc. - such actions can be good, but are not the primary meaning of Lent. Rather, they reflect Lent’s deeper purpose.

The familiar distinction between Law and Gospel may help to explain the distinction between Ash Wednesday, Lent, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. Ash Wednesday and Lent are Law: they are about us as we examine ourselves. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter are Gospel: they are about Jesus and what He did, i.e., die and come back to life.

To be sure, there is some overlap between Lent and Good Friday. The difference may be, in part, one of emphasis. Both present Christ’s suffering because of our sin. Lent may emphasize our sin; Good Friday may emphasize Christ’s suffering.

Identifying key themes in Lent, Ralph Spears writes:

The beginning of Lent starts with a Wednesday of ashes for repentance.

Repentance is conceptually connected to other themes and to spiritual disciplines, as Spears notes:

Since a least the Fourth Century, Lent or Lenz (Gr.), possibly relating to the lengthening days of Spring meant to Christians a period of fasting, penance, and inward looking, relating to the forty days of Christ in the wilderness (and Moses’ as well). Lately this has included for some a restricted diet and the replacing of meat with fish for a lighter body to properly contemplate Christ's suffering – the road less traveled. For this, the giving up of more worldly things and habits come to mind.

We tend to bypass or ignore the time without some liturgical or personal observation which takes us out of the everyday world into the mind of Christ.

Spears properly notes the Germanic etymology of the word ‘Lent’ and more importantly, its themes, and how those themes are reinforced by the liturgical calendar.

Lent emphasizes the repentance and painfully honest self-evaluation. Good Friday emphasizes the price of the failures which Lent uncovers. The points at which Lent and Good Friday overlap are mentioned by Scot Kinnam:

It was seen as a time of repentance and denial of self. All Christians were to examine their lives according to the Ten Commandments and other Christian ethical precepts and repent where necessary. They were to remember what it cost their Savior to save them.

Lent searches the soul and finds the sin. Good Friday pays the price for that sin. Kinnam quotes Luther on the value of Lent:

At the time of the Reformation, some Christians wanted to eliminate Lent since Scripture didn’t command it. Luther, however, urged that it be kept, for he saw Lent as an opportunity for the strengthening of faith. “Lent, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week shall be retained, not to force anyone to fast, but to preserve the Passion history and the Gospels appointed for that season.”

Luther saw the flow of the liturgical calendar as manifesting a spiritual process. Kinnam continues:

Here Luther instructs that Lent should be preserved, in part, because it reminded Christians of the Passion (suffering and death) of Jesus and encouraged them to meditate upon it. However, no one should be forced to participate. It should be voluntary.

Lutherans retain Lent to this day, because we see it as a salutary outward discipline that gives Christians a wonderful opportunity for spiritual renewal. As Lent begins, we are invited to struggle against everything that leads us away from love of God and love of neighbor by exercising the discipline of Lent: repentance, fasting, prayer and works of love (almsgiving). These may become specific occasions and opportunities for spiritual renewal during this season of renewal as we come face to face with the sin that hinders our walk with Christ. Living out a discipline takes our Lord’s words about self-denial seriously (Matthew 16:24). In the Lenten discipline, we come face to face with the Gospel of Jesus Christ as we focus (or refocus) on His self-sacrificing passion, death and resurrection, which has brought us acceptance, forgiveness and redemption by God. Through that same discipline, we make a loving response to God who gives us the power to live anew.

Ash Wednesday and Lent form one half of a dialectic; Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter are the other half. The believer spirals through them in a Hegelian fashion. Even as we distinguish between them, they point to each other.

It is part of the yearly task of the liturgical calendar to separate the two halves of this dialectic, even as their inherent bond is revealed.

God’s Script: History Unfolds Like a Screenplay

Life is confusing. It’s part of the human experience not to understand entirely what’s happening to oneself, around oneself, or in oneself.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a character in the middle of a novel, film, or play. Neither at the beginning, nor at the end, you might be in the middle of unintelligible action, or in the middle of a long expanse of actionless waiting. You're not sure about the purpose of the action; you don’t know for what you’re waiting.

You can be frustrated or disappointed with what’s going on around you. You can be even more frustrated or disappointed with yourself.

Yet God remains the screenwriter. He knew and knows what you’ll do before you do it, and He’s already incorporated it into his script.

Yes, we’re frustrated with ourselves, but God has accounted for our shortcomings and integrated them into His plot, as Zach Zehnder writes:

God sent Jesus not because He expected perfection from us, but simply because He loves us. However, God sent Jesus knowing that even after His death and resurrection we would fail Him.

The life we live is one of surrender. We surrender to God. We surrender our ideas and ideals, our plans and projects, our vision of the way things ought to be. We want to be perfect - for both good reasons and bad reasons. But we must surrender that ambition.

God uses us to carry out His will and His plans. Ironically, He uses us best and most when we’re not trying to be perfect. What makes His followers effective and attractive is not their perfection. It is their peace.

We want to be perfect so that we can be more effective as God’s people. But His plan is to work in our imperfections. He uses flawed people as His instruments on earth.

Shortly before his death in 2013, Byron Porisch marked the following passage in a book co-written by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay:

God has always wanted a ­people that would be exclusive to him holy, set apart, distinct, and beautiful to the world he is trying to redeem.

It’s a bit counterintuitive to realize that what makes the church amazing is not that it’s filled with such perfect people, but rather that it manages to communicate God’s love best by communicating through broken people.

As we “boast” about our weakness, God’s powerful intervention becomes more clear to those watching us (II Corinthians 12:9).

It seems odd to say that it is our brokenness which makes us “holy, set apart, distinct, and beautiful.” Yet we see this in Scripture: people like Jeremiah and Jonah were both broken and yet powerful prophets.

Byron also marked this passage in the book:

Church is something everyone should be a part of, but it’s different than being a faith community. Church happens when a group of ­people decide to go on mission with God together.

The authors are making a distinction between “church” and “faith community.” You might make the same distinction with other words, but here’s what it boils down to this: On the one hand, there’s the gathering of believers, those who share a creed, who meet to encourage one another, to worship and pray, and to study Scripture together. On the other hand, there are task-oriented groups who meet to go into action.

Both are good. Both are necessary. Both are important. Halter and Smay point to a cycle of gathering and sending, sending and gathering - a sort of dialectic.

Jesus gathers broken, sinful, flawed people together as His church. He’s under no illusions about our continued imperfections. He gathers us, blesses us, and builds a community of mutual support among us. Then He gives us assignments. He sends us on missions.

When we come back from our missions, we are still broken people, and we gather to worship Him and receive from Him, and the cycle begins again.

Lifestyles in the Early Church: Domestic Arrangements Among Early Believers

The initial generation of Jesus followers remains a perennial object of study. The earliest believers, during the first century, scattered in towns and cities around Mediterranean world, left hints about their activities in the New Testament.

One question which is sometime posed is a question about how they lived, where they resided, and what their homes may have been like.

In Acts 2:46, the believers “went to” the temple, i.e., they lived elsewhere. They apparently had their own individual houses, inasmuch as they visited “each other’s homes.” Some translators offer that they “attended” the temple.

These earliest followers of Jesus would have been a subset of the large crowd worshiping at the temple. Temple worship included singing of Psalms, and there is a possibility - even a probability - that these first believers joined in with the larger crowd, singing the Psalms together.

If they slept and ate at their own homes, and did their daily work, either at home or at some workplace, the time for worship at the temple would be limited, especially in light of the fact that workdays were not limited eight hours and workweeks were not limited to five days.

The believers had a single purpose and went to the temple every day. They were joyful and humble as they ate at each other’s homes and shared their food.

In Acts 8:3, Saul is in the business of persecuting the earliest followers of Jesus. He is operating in Jerusalem, with sorties in the surrounding countryside of Judea and Samaria. In hunting and finding these believers, Saul goes “from house to house,” indicating many houses, one after another. This would, in turn, indicate that the believers did not live together in some communal arrangement:

He dragged men and women out of one home after another and threw them into prison.

After Saul had changed his name to Paul, he refers, in his letters, formulaically to various groups of early believers. He writes that they “meet” in a certain person’s house, not that they live there. The language is precise, e.g., in Romans 16:5:

Greet Prisca and Aquila, my coworkers in the service of Christ Jesus. They risked their lives to save me. I’m thankful to them and so are all the churches among the nations. Also greet the church that meets in their house. Greet my dear friend Epaenetus. He was the first person in the province of Asia to become a believer in Christ.

Notice that the house is described as being the property of Prisca and Aquila. It was a privately-owned residence, and the owners freely allowed the church’s members, who lived in their own various homes, to gather there.

Paul uses the formula again in I Corinthians 16:19, where Prisca and Aquila are listed separately, followed by “and,” indicating their independent agency. Prisca and Aquila sent greetings, and others also sent greetings.

The churches in the province of Asia greet you. Aquila and Prisca and the church that meets in their house send their warmest Christian greetings.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul uses the formula again:

Greet our brothers and sisters in Laodicea, especially Nympha and the church that meets in her house.

Paul also uses the formula in his salutation at the beginning of his letter to Philemon:

Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, To Philemon our beloved fellow worker and Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier, and the church that meets in your house.

In his rebuke to the Corinthians, Paul articulates, first, that the followers of Jesus “gather,” indicating that they each had their own variously-located homes. Second, he indicates that for ordinary meals, they should remain home and dine there; the gatherings were for celebrating the Lord’s Supper and other feasts and festivals.

When you gather in the same place, you can’t possibly be eating the Lord’s Supper. Each of you eats his own supper without waiting for each other. So one person goes hungry and another gets drunk. Don’t you have homes in which to eat and drink?

These texts, and others, constitute a lifestyle in which the first believers lived largely, if not exclusively, in ordinary homes, and met on various occasions for worship and fellowship.

This is in direct contradiction to those who argue that people who follow Jesus should or must engage in a communal lifestyle.

While the ethics of New Testament allow for the possibility that some might choose communal living arrangements, it is in no way set forth as a paradigm for believers. It is one option among many, and in the textual evidence, an option that was rarely if ever chosen.