What would bring 1,200 city-toughened New Yorkers to a Brooklyn church on a Tuesday night? Surely not an old-fashioned prayer meeting.
But prayer, says Brooklyn Tabernacle pastor Jim Cymbala, has become a mainstay of the thriving, multiracial church. Every Tuesday night, when the agenda holds little but two hours of intercessory prayer, members pack the balcony and spill out into the foyer. The congregation—once tiny, depressed, and barely holding on—is convinced the explanation for its flourishing ministries is spiritual. The earliest Christian church, Cymbala argues, “was born not in a clever sermon, but in a prayer meeting.”
According to some observers, stories like Brooklyn Tabernacle’s may become commonplace in North America. North American Christians seem drawn to prayer and spirituality like no time in recent history. They are trading in their activism and pragmatism for a new-fashioned accent on the spiritual life. It may mean prayer rallies or silent retreats; it may find expression as charismatic tongue speaking or even New Age-flavored meditation. Whatever the form, signs of a new interest crop up in sector after sector:
• Denominational life. Southern Baptists have made prayer a top denominational goal for the decade. That is unprecedented, says Avery Willis of the Sunday School Board. In 1976, he explains, the denomination launched the Bold Mission Thrust, with the goal of getting the gospel to all people by the year 2000. “In the last few years we realized we just weren’t doing it. We realized prayer was the key.” Thus, this decade’s new emphasis: Bold Mission Prayer Thrust.
One outcome of the new emphasis is the Watchman National Prayer Alert, whereby 2,100 Southern Baptist churches have signed up to pray for an assigned hour every week of the year for the church’s revival and missionary enterprises. This means, says Henry Blackaby of the Home Mission Board’s Prayer and Spiritual Awakening office, that at any given hour of the year, Southern Baptists are “12 churches deep” in prayer for world evangelization. Because of such prayer emphasis in his and other denominations, Blackaby says, “I don’t know when there’s been such an explosive sense that God is about to do something.”
Meanwhile, the United Methodist Church just approved plans for an International Center for Christian Spirituality. Another Methodist-led venture is the Upper Room Academy for Spiritual Formation, which provides intensive training in the classics of Christian spirituality. Hundreds have completed the two-year program, with scaled down, five-day o academies drawing 2,500, says director Danny Morris.
• Parachurch ministry. Focus on the Family recently threw its weight behind the National Day of Prayer, now coordinated by Shirley Dobson. “It’s one day,” says the wife of Focus president James Dobson, “where we all come together and focus our prayers on the nation. People feel a desperation and are crying out to God as their only hope.” This past May’s Day of Prayer saw hundreds of thousands participating, a tripling of response from previous years.
Parachurch groups that cater to helping people pray are finding themselves running to keep up. David Bryant, founder of Concerts of Prayer (named after the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards’s transdenominational meetings), estimates his organization held over 40 citywide prayer rallies in 1992, more than double that of 1990. Some 42,000 attended, and Bryant guesses that local churches hold some 1,000 “concerts” each month.
Northwest Renewal Ministries, led by Joe Aldrich, president of Multnomah Bible College, and his associate Terry Dirks, has tapped into a thirst for prayer in a region known for its high proportion of unchurched citizens. Over the past several years, the group has sponsored over 100 four-day “Prayer Summits,” involving more than 3,000 pastors and church leaders from the Pacific Northwest. “We are seeing an amazing, divinely implanted hunger for God unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” says Dirks.
• Colleges and seminaries. For a dozen years now, Regent College in Vancouver has had a chair of spiritual theology. Azusa Pacific University in Southern California recently invited well-known spiritual-life writer Richard Foster to teach spirituality and launch an Institute on Spiritual Formation. One of his first proposals was to send every faculty member, student, and trustee on a retreat to study Catholic spirituality writer Henri Nouwen’s Out of Solitude.
Says Bethel College and Seminary president George Brushaber: “Every seminary has strengthened programs in spiritual formation. Students, in choosing seminaries, increasingly ask about it. And church pastoral search committees inquire about the spiritual experience of candidates like they never used to.”
• Publishing. Evangelical publishers expect prayer and spirituality books to take the place of the best-selling “Christian recovery books,” says Thomas Nelson editor Janet Thoma. “Astonishingly,” observes Newsweek, “the current edition of Books in Print lists nearly 2,000 titles on prayer, meditation, and techniques for spiritual growth—more than three times the number devoted to sexual intimacy and how to achieve it.” Unlike many publishers’ backlist books, Foster’s groundbreaking 1978 book on spiritual life, Celebration of Discipline, is picking up in sales. And Catholic publishers find centuries-old classics of spirituality suddenly popular again. Says Werner Mark Linz of Crossroad, a major Catholic publisher, “Books on prayer are our biggest sellers.”
Some authors have correspondingly changed their emphases. C. Peter Wagner, goateed Southern California guru of church growth, became known in the 1970s for trademark terms like “body evangelism” and “felt-need events.” But Wagner realized in the eighties that something was missing. Now Wagner says he has a new “assignment” from the Lord to articulate the connection between evangelism and prayer. Phrases like “strategic-level intercession” and “warfare prayer” have begun peppering his books and Fuller Seminary lectures.
ASSESSING A PHENOMENON
Why the turn to spirituality? Changes in culture partly explain it. Baby boomers, now reaching middle age, seem to be searching for a new level of meaning for their lives. Last year the increase in spiritual interest prompted a Newsweek cover story on “Talking to God.” “This week,” the writer declared, “if you believe at all in opinion surveys, more of us will pray than will go to work, or exercise, or have sexual relations.”
But like the consummate consumers they have always been, the boomers are shopping around. Some delve into shamanism or Zen meditation. Others talk of “creation spirituality” and even pray to a politically correct “goddess.”
Church historian Martin Marty notes this shift: In the 1960s, the University of Chicago professor concluded that the word spiritual had lost meaning and relevance for modern culture. The “old piety,” he wrote then, was passé. Now, Marty says, “spirituality is back, almost with a vengeance.… I find myself treating the concern for spirituality as an event of our era.” He adds, “Just try to book a retreat house for your congregation’s lay spirituality retreat—you’ve got to wait two years for an opening.”
Still, “cultural shifts” only begin to explain what is happening among Christians. The church seems to be experiencing what Foster calls a “quiet revolution.” Christians are less infatuated with programs and techniques, more drawn to spiritual answers. Among pastors, says Marshall Shelley of LEADERSHIP journal, “there’s less enthusiasm for church-growth methods and more search for depth.”
What should the church make of these signs of increasing spiritual hunger?
First is the recognition that not everyone means the same thing by spirituality. Some emphasize corporate prayer, while others accent solitary contemplation. Some see prayer as a shot in the arm for world evangelization, while others find spirituality a calming, even therapeutic enterprise. When framed by sound biblical faith, there is something healthy, if a bit bewildering, about such variety.
But some of what parades under the banner of spirituality is worrying. The critically acclaimed book Virgin Time chronicles one woman’s spiritual discoveries. She writes of her “instinct for wonder” and eloquently describes an impulse to pray, and yet, incredibly, leaves open the question as to whether God exists. Spirituality in this vein can be a catch-all for anything that makes us mist up or feel warm inside.
Even some forms of Christian meditation and “centering prayer” imply that the content of prayer is irrelevant. While wordless communion with God is sometimes appropriate, inattention to the God we address is not. Central to the spiritual life is the question of who God is. Yet the wider church evidences little consensus here. Since the coming of theological liberalism, says J. I. Packer, “praying to the largely impotent God of process theology is very different from praying to the sovereign God of historic Protestantism.”
Contemporary spirituality warrants other cautions, such as the emphasis sometimes given to experience. In the shadow of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the early-nineteenth-century philosopher, liberal spiritual-life writers sometimes define faith not by the doctrinal concerns of historic Christianity, but by what Schleiermacher called a “feeling of absolute dependence,” “Without omitting the experiential dimension,” says Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School, “experience has to be corrected—by Scripture, the church, tradition, and objective norms.”
A new spiritual thrust must also avoid privatism. Praying sometimes reinforces our self-absorption, rather than leads us out of it. Says William Pannell, dean of the chapel at Fuller Seminary and professor of practical theology, “The church must recapture some of the glory days of spirituality when those in the forefront of social transformation were those arguing most passionately for holiness and spiritual renewal. There’s no contradiction here.” For all the spiritual interest, Americans seem shy of institutional religion. Many see no need for community or accountability. In contrast, says Robert Mulholland, provost at Asbury Theological Seminary, wholesome spiritual formation is a “process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others.”
POOLING OUR PRAYERS
Recognizing the cautions, how should churches respond?
Acknowledge that we live in a time of spiritual ferment and use it as an opportunity for evangelism and disciple making. Evangelicals are sometimes tempted to dismiss the new hunger as mere fad. “But I think it is always a genuine hunger,” argues Marty. “It’s just that hungers can be satisfied with Twinkies or with broccoli.” When pollsters find that many Americans say religious institutions have lost the “spiritual” side of religion, Christians need to see opportunity. We may live in a post-Christian world in which the notion of absolute truth is scorned. But we also live in a postmodern world in which many barriers to belief have fallen. Says Leonard Sweet, president of United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio: “People today believe in miracles, in angels. We don’t have to argue the case for spiritual realities.… Our challenge is to help people believe the right thing.” We need to remember the difference between discernment and suspicion. The renewed interest in piety should send us back to our heritage’s feast of spiritual resources, not make us defensive.
Develop a systematic, biblical approach to spiritual life. Indeed, writes Regent College professor of spiritual theology James Houston, “We cannot separate prayer from theology, nor theology from prayer. If the triune God is personal and communicative in self-revelation … then prayer is not just one of the spiritual disciplines we adopt, as perhaps a substitute for jogging in the morning, but the heart of our faith.” Nurturing spiritual life means more than offering a Sunday-school class on prayer.
Learn about prayer and spiritual life from some new or forgotten teachers. “Some of the great, dynamic impetus for prayer movements in this country,” says Bryant, “will increasingly come out of the urban black churches.” Moreover, believers on other continents may have much to show us. Foster believes the churches he recently visited in Asia were three to five years ahead of the American scene in terms of taking prayer and spiritual formation seriously.
This also suggests drawing more deeply from the whole church’s wide and venerable traditions of spirituality. We may see more efforts like Foster’s Renovare group. This network, linked by regional conferences, small “spiritual formation” groups, a newsletter, and Foster’s books, draws on what Foster calls the “five great streams of Christian faith and witness”: contemplative (the prayer life of quiet reflection), holiness (the morally pure life), charismatic (the Spirit-gifted life), social justice (the compassionate life), and evangelical (the gospel-centered life).
Strive for unity on matters of prayer—what Jonathan Edwards called “explicit agreement and visible union of God’s people in extraordinary prayer.” Christians praying for revival at a prayer meeting may need to appreciate those who make an occasional retreat at a local monastery. People who read medieval mystic Julian of Norwich may receive needed balance from those who prefer prayer notebooks for unreached people groups. Without such openness, the prayer movement could divide, not unite.
Bryant uses this analogy: What is happening amid the varied approaches can be likened to “pools of renewal”: “The spiritual formation people who emphasize a more contemplative approach are digging deeper pools,” he says; “someone like me digs wider pools, and we’re all saying something is going on out there that we have never seen in our lifetimes. The Lord wants to get our ‘pools’ flowing together.”
BUT IS IT REVIVAL?
The ultimate significance of renewals and spiritual movements becomes clear only with a long view. Still, there is the question: What is God up to?
Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow warns against slipping into “notions about upswings and downswings, as if religious commitment were something like the Gross National Product, as if the sacred somehow slips away and then needs to be revived again.” If the trend’s intensity fizzles, if the fad followers get tired, the church’s work of nurturing disciples will still go on.
On the other hand, God’s work does seem to have “seasons.” In the Old Testament, revivals of law-keeping and worship under Josiah or Hezekiah, or the spiritual return of the people under Ezra and Nehemiah, suggest that spiritual commitment may wane and then wax. The New Testament account of the early church’s Pentecost shows God may choose to work more visibly in some eras than in others. Are we entering a new season of spiritual renewal?
While we cannot know the future, an increase in biblically sound prayer is reason to rejoice. We should be expectant. What we are witnessing in the church, says one evangelical publishing executive, may rival or surpass the charismatic renewal in its impact on the evangelical church.
Those who say the increase in spiritual fervor means we are on the threshold of a new Great Awakening may or may not be right. Time will tell. But those who have studied the church’s great “revivals” believe that wherever prayer increases, so does God’s observable response.
Of course, prayer and spiritual fervor do not put strings on a sovereign God. And the fruit of the increase in spiritual life may not always be visible. Indeed, says Mulholland, “we may well be entering a time of the sifting of the church.” Through it God may bring a faithful remnant into “deeper levels of discipleship that will enable them to endure” in a culture that becomes increasingly hostile to conservative Christians. Whatever the outcome, Scripture affirms that prayer will not escape God’s notice.
The “Great Awakening” of the early-to-mid-1700s may provide a provocative precedent. At one point, when an outburst of spiritual fervency seemed to wane, Jonathan Edwards urged those interested in piety to pray for a new “pouring out” of God’s Spirit. Encouraged by the lively prayer societies spreading across Scotland (and soon to spread in the American colonies), he wrote in 1748 that Christians should “pray to God in an extraordinary manner, that he would … pour out his Spirit, revive his work, and advance his spiritual kingdom.” Through such praying, “at length will gradually be introduced a revival of religion.”
Not long after Edwards’s prediction, the concerts of prayer seemed to go underground. In the short term, there was nothing terribly impressive to show for them, says J. I. Packer. But in the 1790s, suddenly arose William Carey’s missionary endeavors, the forming of the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, and then, later, the Methodist Missionary Society. Some call it the springtime of Protestant missions. “The question that hangs in the air,” says Packer, “is were the two related?” Was the flourishing missionary activity tied to prayers that began in the 1750s? Will today’s spiritual enthusiasm lead to some similarly profound awakening?
Timothy Jones is associate editor.
