let that beautiful knowing
inform our days.11
– Mark Nepo
“The greatest change took place in our congregation when we started praying.” The man had been asked to share at a gathering about his church’s journey as a transforming congregation. “Oh, we’ve always said prayers as a church; but now we’re really praying. Our leaders gather once a week to pray for our ministry, to pray for people in the congregation, and to pray for each other. It’s helped us connect with each other and with God in new ways.”
“We all felt a little awkward at first,” another woman from the same congregation said. She turned to another woman sitting next to her in the circle. “I guess that sounds awful, doesn’t it? That praying was so awkward for church people? But it was. Then our pastor taught us several different ways we could pray at home. Last Lent, we each committed to thirty minutes of prayer every day. I couldn’t imagine what I would find to pray about for that amount of time, but I gave it a try. Sometimes I journaled. Sometimes I read something inspiring, or listened to music, or prayed while I walked, or just meditated in silence. The time was up before I knew it!”
“Learning to pray sure was the first step for our congregation.” A leader from another church spoke up. “I don’t think we could have taken all the other steps we’ve taken as a congregation if we hadn’t begun with prayer. Now the church feels … I guess I would say less religious and more spiritual.”
Another woman from the other side of the circle joined in. “I would say we’re calmer too. The little things don’t stir us up like they used to. It all started for our congregation when we installed a labyrinth in our church hall. People from the neighborhood started coming in to walk it during their lunch hour and we’ve used it for several prayer services.”
“On Wednesday nights, we have a worship service that’s just quiet music playing for a half hour. I come because it’s a place of rest and it makes a difference in the rest of my week,” a younger woman added. “Our church feels more peaceful than it did a few years ago. Even our business meetings seem to have a different tone. We’ve shifted from an organization which talks about God to a community which connects with God.”
Transforming congregations learn to rely, not on their own power, but on the power of the Spirit that runs like sap through the core of their being. Like a tree planted by water, those who pray send out roots by the stream of God’s life-giving love.
It shall not fear when heat comes,
and its leaves shall stay green;
In the year of drought it is not anxious,
and it does not cease to bear fruit. (Jeremiah 17:7-8)
Prayer provides transforming congregations with the resilience they need to thrive even in stressful times.
Coping with Anxiety
Change in the cultural landscape creates anxiety for North Americans. Grief due to a loss of status, members, and support causes anxiety in the church. Anxiety is the automatic reaction to a threat, real or imagined.12 Anxiety in the human body makes muscles tighten and jaws clench. It creates the feeling of being bound up and weighed down. Anxiety in the Body of Christ causes narrow-minded thinking, irritability, and hopelessness. Over time, it can become disorienting and debilitating.
In order to cope with anxiety, people living today often fall back on two coping strategies their cave-dwelling ancestors used when their stress level was raised by the threat of a large beast: fight or flight. When people are anxious, they may work harder, believing that success is all up to their own efforts, or they may give up, believing that they can do nothing to change the situation. On the one hand, they try to ease anxiety by controlling it; on the other, they try to flee anxiety by escaping it.13
Some people fight anxiety by trying to micro-manage those people, places, or things over which they believe they still have influence. They construct a sense of order amid chaos by reducing growing complexity into simplistic categories. To keep intact those categories, however, requires disregarding the growing diversity in the world by limiting their relationships to include only those who are like them. Eventually, they may begin making a habit of avoiding contact with people, events, or ideas that challenge their way of thinking and ignoring conflicting information by mentally categorizing it as unimportant.14
Control can also take the form of blame. Rather than engage in thoughtful reflection that leads to responsible action when anxiety appears, people divide themselves into political camps of like-minded people and alienate those who do not share their same beliefs. They view only the network that gives them the news with the slant that matches their own ideology. They read only read the books and visit only the websites that confirm beliefs they already hold. They look for scapegoats to impute—all for the sake of maintaining the illusion that they are in charge of what is happening.
Escape is the second way people try to ease anxiety. They flee to the private realm in order to isolate themselves from the distress of the public arena. Ironically, they insulate themselves from the unpleasantness of the changing world by becoming consumers of its products. They invest in a large number of diversions the technological industry makes available to them. Those who can afford to, come home to large houses surrounded by acreage in gated communities and hole up in front of big screen televisions in home theaters where movies and shows provide respite from the complications of daily life. They engross themselves in worlds created by video games. They lose themselves in applications available on their mobile phones. They immerse themselves in the traumas of celebrities or in the battles of their favorite sports teams, living vicariously through the triumphs and defeats of the stars.
Congregations often try to escape the discomfort of anxiety by attempting to make everyone in the church feel comfortable. To do so, they circulate surveys and then build their ministry around the personal preferences of the majority of their members, or make compromises to make the most people happy. They design worship with something for everyone and chase after those who leave the church, assuring them that the congregation will construct its ministry around their specific desires.
Congregations that try to appease everyone may feel harmonious, but their interactions often stay at a surface level. In order to avoid conflict, they often remain passive and avoid making decisions by continually dithering. In order to avoid taking responsibility, they often invest in an outside source of authority that will make decisions for them. They look to the expert who will provide a quick fix, or to the pastor who will save the church.
Other congregations escape anxiety by pretending everything is fine. They hunker down and ignore the changes that have taken place around them. Their participants busy themselves with their individual lives, their individual careers, their individual families and friends. They go to church to have their needs met by the minister who has been hired or appointed to do just that. As long as the clergyperson is doing the job, he or she is allowed to stay. If the pastor begins making them uncomfortable by calling the church to be something more, it is likely that pastor will be fired or reassigned.
Control and escape may provide respite from anxiety in the short-run, but as coping strategies, they do not make for healthy communities in the long-run. Over-functioning by taking responsibility for everything leads to exhaustion; under-functioning by bolting the door against distress leads to loneliness. Keeping harmony leads to superficiality; cutting oneself off from others leads to fragmentation. No matter how much power North Americans gain, how much they buy, how much happiness they pursue, they are left with the nagging truth that they cannot control everything nor can they escape every discomfort that life dishes out.
Prayer calls transforming congregations to solitude rather than escape, to letting-go rather than control. Through prayer, they find serenity, even amid the noise and chaos of change. Prayer connects them to the power and presence of the Spirit that resides within and among them.
Connecting to the Sacred Spirit
Because the Spirit is an invisible life-force, the Bible uses the language of poetry to describe its nature and activity. It depicts the Spirit as a bird that descends from out of the blue,15 as a fire that comes to rest upon individuals,