Pray Without Ceasing
Photo by Elianna Gill on Unsplash
This is Church Anew’s second post about the Pray Without Ceasing initiative. If your congregation is also taking part and the Spirit is moving you to share your story, we welcome a message from you.
I walked into our monthly prayer team meeting in April of this year with a handful of copies of an invitation for our congregation to be one of the first communities to take part in a movement called Pray Without Ceasing. After one of our lay leaders guided us through a time of contemplative prayer, I began to read the invitation. A few sentences in, we got to this line:
“As people who follow Jesus, we pray.
Alone and together, we pray.
And, in times of great change, we pray.”
Six months to the day earlier, we ended our annual congregational meeting with a sending prayer and a member of the congregation stood up and shouted out, “Wait, one more thing…” This is nightmare fuel for pastors. I leaned hard on my skills to be a non-anxious presence, honed in CPE and through the years since, and walked the microphone over to our member, Charlotte. She surprised me and most in the room when she said: “I feel really called to help our congregation deepen our prayer life. I want the people of Christ Lutheran Church to be known as a people of prayer. Next Sunday, everyone is invited to meet with me 30 minutes before worship, and we will pray.”
Nearly a dozen of the hundred or so folks walked right over and told Charlotte that they felt similarly called and to count them in. Here many of us sat, six months later, reading this invitation and hearing someone from beyond our congregation – Rev. Ann Svennungsen and Jodi Harpstead – calling us to be a people of prayer.
“As people who follow Jesus, we pray.
Alone and together, we pray.
And, in times of great change, we pray.”
The Pray Without Ceasing invitation continued by sharing some of the story of prayer gatherings in the 1980s in East Germany that, in part, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. The gatherings, led by Lutheran pastor Christian Führer, encouraged people to seek justice and work for the common good. The secret police and East German leadership had planned for everything… except confronting the candles and prayers of the people.
As we read through the invitation together that April evening, I watched eyes light up, saw faces fill with discernment, and heard voices spark with excitement. As you might expect from a prayer team, we prayed about the invitation together, asking God to guide our discernment and help us follow the Holy Spirit’s lead. In the silence after we said, “Amen,” we took a collective breath, then members Lenora, Mike, and Charlotte started to say all at once: “I think we have to do this. This seems like the Holy Spirit calling us again to become people of prayer.”
Beginning in May, we launched a new weekly gathering Sunday evenings at 5pm, called Pray Without Ceasing. Led primarily by our prayer team, the gatherings range from more structured to more informal, with different types of prayer, prayer stations, music, and silence. We always have time to sit and pray with and for one another, to lift up all of our concerns before God and each other. Our core group is about 15, though we have had 25-30 people many weeks. Most are members of the congregation but also a handful from the larger Georgetown community.
We relentlessly seek to remember those who are too often forgotten or overlooked. We pray by name for members of our church, community, country. We ask God to act boldly for us and through us to put an end to the rampant injustice – the wars, the lack of due process, the way we treat immigrants and the unhoused as less than human. We repent. We lament.
We implore God to tear open the heavens and come down (Isaiah 64:1). We ask God to break open hard hearts, beginning with our own, so that we might have a clean heart and a renewed spirit aligned with God’s own heart (Psalm 51). We seek refuge in our Mighty Fortress of a God (Psalm 46) and in the tender compassion of Christ our mother hen (Luke 13:34). We want to pray like Jesus because we know it is a necessary ingredient for a life like Jesus.
Our world often undervalues prayer. We understandably get frustrated with those who use thoughts and prayers as an excuse to refrain from taking action or as a way to shut down a conversation. To be honest, I have often undervalued prayer. I have too often thought of Martin Luther’s apocryphal words about starting each day with two hours of prayer and on busy days beginning with three hours of prayer as laughable and unrealistic. After all, Brother Martin didn’t have his work emails on his alarm clock. But spending more time in prayer has renewed my spirit and broken my hardened heart. Praying together helps me see how God has already torn open the heavens through Christ’s death and resurrection, and is alive and actively working to bring hope where we thought it a lost cause and to topple all the would-be gods and emperors with a love stronger than any evil and a life stronger than death.
Just as the East Germans were surprised by the Spirit’s movement of people to pray, and just as I was surprised by the Spirit’s call through Charlotte for our congregation to pray, we continue to be surprised by the Spirit at work among us through our Pray Without Ceasing gathering and through the growing network of churches participating in this Spirit-led movement of prayer.
When I asked those who have been participating in our Pray Without Ceasing gatherings to share how it has impacted them, they all had answers. They said they feel closer to God and more confident to talk about their faith. Several mentioned being moved to take direct action to serve our neighbors, to walk in solidarity with immigrant neighbors, and to advocate for justice. Each one – even those who aren’t members of our church but gather with us to pray each Sunday – also mentioned how much closer they felt to their fellow people of faith and the ways that Paul’s imagery of the body of Christ has become enfleshed for them anew.
On July 4, horrific floods hit Kerr County, Texas, just a couple hours drive away from us. On July 5, the floods came to Liberty Hill and Georgetown. Our congregation and community was looking for ways to help, to decompress, and to grieve, and we knew we could start with prayer. On Sunday, July 6, and again the next Sunday, we gathered our community to pray, and we sent each other out to enact our prayers. Over the next week, prayers were embodied in hundreds of hours of volunteer clean up, dozens of care kits, and thousands of dollars filling the gaps for people who lost their homes. And those haven’t ceased either as we continue to walk alongside people for the long haul of recovery.
We continue to pray week after week, day after day. Alone and together, we pray. As followers of Jesus, we pray. In this season of immense change and fear, we pray. As we pray, we invite more congregation members, other communities of faith, friends, and neighbors to join us. We have made it our goal to talk about prayer and what a faithful prayer life looks like as followers of Jesus. I share this invitation with you in the hopes that you, too, will join us in becoming a people of prayer and a church that prays without ceasing.
Prayer inspires and creates comfort in a world of anxiety, community in a culture of isolation, an anchor in the storms of life, and a catalyst for change that seeks the abundant life of all. We gather weekly on Sundays at 5pm Central Time, but you can pray whenever and gather with others anytime. All are welcome and invited to bring your prayers and your need for prayer as together we Pray Without Ceasing.
