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Gordon MacDonald's new, all-too-true novel is about a group of Christians in their fifties and sixties who feel as if someone stole their church. The only real characters in the book Who Stole My Church? (Nelson, 2007) are Gordon and his wife, Gail, but you'll recognize others, once at the center of church life, whose influence is now replaced by younger folks'. In this excerpt, the pastor has gathered some of these older members for a weekly discussion.

I asked Clayton Reid privately if he would pray at the beginning of our next Discovery group meeting. At first he said he didn't do "out-loud praying." I asked if he would consider writing a prayer ahead of time and simply reading it for us. After a bit of hesitancy, Clayton said he'd give it a try. When Tuesday night came, I outlined my hopes for the evening, and then turned to Clayton.

He pulled an index card from his shirt pocket, said, "Shall we pray?" and began reading. Two or three around the table were startled when they realized he was reading from a card and "praying" with his eyes opened. Like me, they'd been raised to believe that prayer was supposed to be "from the heart" and that only "liberals" and Catholics read prayers and pray with open eyes.

His prayer: "Heavenly father, your Son, Jesus, once said, 'Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.' All of us are weary from a day of work. And some of us are burdened with great cares. So we come to you asking for Jesus' rest. We pray that you will guide our pastor and give him great wisdom in leading us. May we have open minds and hearts to learn from him. And I thank you for all my friends around this table. I pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen."

I thought Clayton's prayer was terrific. It was a tiny, tiny step out of the box—for Clayton and others. And I knew he was serious when he read that many of us are weary and burdened. Clayton lost his wife, Teresa, about a year ago. Cancer. I suspected that he was referring to himself when he spoke of those needing Jesus' kind of rest.

Clayton's prayer finished, I picked up on the subject of great changes in history that we had covered last week. I said I'd like to talk about the era of change we were living in. We talked about automobiles, mass communication, and the digital revolution.

"In the nineties, Peter Drucker wrote: 'Every few hundred years throughout western history, a sharp transformation has occurred. In a matter of a decade, society altogether rearranges itself—its worldview, its basic values, its society and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later, a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation, signaled by the introduction of the knowledge society.'

"Drucker probably had only limited knowledge about the Internet or what it would become when he wrote this," I said. "There's no way even he could have imagined how our lives would be changed since then."

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