Beware The Prayer Simplifiers
Church leaders can't diminish the complexities of prayer; they can only be companions to those engaged in its difficulty.
Eugene H. Peterson
October 1, 1981
When pastors leave the pulpit on Sunday, we don't, overnight, turn into humanists on Monday. Our Sunday prayers and preaching don't recede into serving as only a vague and wispy background for the "real" work of helping people. Nor do we, during the week, collar all the people we meet and lead them to the altar to "get right with God." There are some, of course, who do go to one of these extremes; who apart from their pulpits, having left all biblical ballast behind, plunge with great good will into the sea of human need; or who apart from their pulpits are incapacitated for any work at all except that of repeating snatches of their Sunday sermon to whomever they might meet. Biblical pastoral work, though, is not permitted to disfigure ministry with such extremes. Pastoral work refuses to specialize in earthly or heavenly, human or divine. The pastor is given a catholic cosmos to work in, not a sectarian back-forty. But how do we build a smooth, coherent bridge from Sunday at eleven o'clock to Wednesday at five o'clock? The great pivot on which all pastoral work turns is the act of salvation. We walk into the pulpit each week and proclaim the act of salvation. When we walk out of it, though, Our job isn't over. We are now assigned the task of developing everyday relationships in such a way that salvation characterizes all the details of ordinary life; so that what is believed in the heart is expressed in the bedroom and kitchen, in the board room and factory, and on the sidewalk and highway. In addition to inviting persons to receive salvation, we train them in mature discipleship, so that what is believed gets worked out in daily life. In the long centuries of pastoral practice, the work of providing direction in prayer has ...
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