A New (Old) Way to Pray

Tony Campolo is the author of over 30 books, including  Letters to a Young Evangelical  and  Choose Love, Not Power .

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Staying alive spiritually is not an easy thing.  Most Christians know that having a support group is essential to maintain the kind of accountability that will keep workers faithful to their calling and to the will of God in their lives.

What I find particularly helpful are ways of praying which have generally been ignored by those of us in the Evangelical tradition.  My co-author, Mary Darling, and I wrote a book entitled  The God of Intimacy and Action .  It is a book that really calls upon us to explore ways of praying that have come out of the Roman Catholic tradition.  During the Reformation, we Evangelicals set aside some doctrines that needed to be set aside, but we should have paid more attention to the spiritual disciplines that were developed by certain medieval saints such as St. Ignatius and St. Francis of Assisi.

You will benefit greatly if you follow some of the things that Mary Darling and I have said in our book, but let me summarize by saying that every Christian should spend time each day in what is called “centering prayer.”  We need to take time each day, particularly in the morning, to drive out of our consciousness all extraneous thoughts and focus on Jesus.  In the quietude and stillness of the morning hour, we need to empty ourselves of anything except the awareness of Christ, and allow Him to invade us and permeate our beings.  The presence of His Spirit in our lives will empower us to resist the wiles of the devil and to live out the will of God in more effective ways.  Centering prayer is a kind of praying where you do not ask God for anything, but simply surrender to the infilling of His Spirit.  I spend about a half hour each morning in centering prayer.

At the end of the day, it is good to practice the Prayer of Examen.  This has two parts.  First of all, consider all the things that you have done during the day that would honor and glorify God.  The Apostle Paul tells us to meditate upon those things which are good and profitable and of good report.  We must think about these things as Paul instructs us to do, and we must affirm the ways in which God has used us throughout the day, and thank Him for the good that He has done in our lives.  Too often, Christians beat up on themselves and fail to affirm the wondrous ways that God has used them to do His work in the world.

The second part of the Prayer of Examen is to review all those ways in which you have failed to be the person that God calls you to be, the ways in which your behavior, thinking, and attitudes failed to reflect His graciousness and love; confessing your sins and asking Jesus to reach out from the cross and connect with you across time and space and absorb into Himself all those dark things in your life that need to be cleansed.  As it says in 1 John, we not only need forgiveness, but we need to be cleansed, and in the evening you should take time to be cleansed of those things in your life that have transpired during the day that ought not to have been.  Affirming on the one hand, confessing on the other, will make you into the kind of Christian who will best serve Christ and the Kingdom.

Tony Campolo
Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Eastern University