An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
It’s not just another book on prayer – it’s one of the best books on prayer I have read. I’m Fred Zaspel, executive editor here at Books At a Glance, and I’m talking about the new book by John Onwuchekwa, Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church. It really is a great little book, and we’re talking to Pastor Onwuchekwa about it today.
John, welcome, and congratulations on your new book. Great to have you with us!
Onwuchekwa:
Hey, thanks Fred. Glad to be here, man.
Zaspel:
First, tell us just what you are after in this book. What are you hoping to accomplish?
Onwuchekwa:
In this book, my hope is really just to insert a puzzle piece that I feel like is missing when it comes to conversation and instructions on prayer. I’ve read a lot of stuff about my personal prayer life and all of that and I’ve been incredibly helped by it. I’ve read a lot of stuff on the nature of the church and how important it is in God’s plan for history. But what I haven’t read is where those two great truths intersect. And so, the goal of this book is really just trying to help cement in the minds of people the importance of praying together and how vital that is in the life of any church. So that was the goal – the church, how our praying together really shapes the churches that we are a part of.
Zaspel:
I’m glad you did, too. It’s not only a good book, I think it was quite a bit overdue. I’ve often wondered in dealing with a healthy church, how can we talk about the marks of a healthy church very long until we get to this matter of prayer and how the church prays together. So I’m glad you’ve done this.
Onwuchekwa:
Absolutely.
Zaspel:
You emphasize that prayer is breathing, and that this is the best metaphor for prayer. How so? Expand on that for us.
Onwuchekwa:
As I thought about this, I don’t know if the metaphor stands on all four legs, but I really do feel like this one is about as close as it gets, especially when you think about the concept of breathing. Breathing is not something that you have to be taught how to do per se. It’s something that comes instinctively, right? The absence of it shows that there’s something wrong, that there is a lack of life there. My daughter was born prematurely about a year and ½ ago and so for the first week of her life she couldn’t breathe on her own. She was on these tubes. Granted, she’s okay now, but it’s like she comes out, and we all know that for a baby to come out and not be able to breathe on their own, that unless they get that breath, they’re going to be zapped of the strength that they need to live and to grow. And I feel like the same is true for the Christian, that without prayer we are zapped and empty of the strength that we need to live. It is in the very act of this constant, regular, repeated, instinctive, exercise of praying that we are connected to God, our source of life, and we’re filled with the strength to live the way that he has called us to live.
Zaspel:
You challenge us to consider that the problem in our churches is not that there is no prayer but that there is too little prayer. I think that’s very obviously true – a brief prayer for the sick and for the offering and for God’s blessing on the sermon and that’s about it. First, why is that a problem? Perhaps you will want to give your summer of 2016 illustration here. But then further, what else should prayer be in our church gatherings? And when is it not too little?
Onwuchekwa:
I think that the point of too little prayer really hit me in the summer of 2016, like you said. It was this one week in July where Alton Sterling was killed by the police. Philando Castile was killed by the police in that same week. And then at the end of the week, five cops were shot and killed in Dallas. And what you saw across, not just Atlanta, the city that I’m in, but across the nation you saw people admitting our desperate need, our powerlessness to change things, and there were all these prayer services across the nation. Ethnic groups gathered and people just had these intense few days or few weeks of crying out to God because I think folks knew that they lacked control. There was nothing in their power to really change things. But then, after a few weeks, all those prayer meetings stopped. It just seemed like prayer kind of felt like a prescription to take care of an infection that nagged a little bit, and once the infection was gone and we really didn’t need to pray. It’s just that praying too little I think really cements in the life of the church that for our ordinary day-to-day lives, we don’t really need God’s help. We can do that stuff on our own. It’s really just the big crises that when they come, that’s when we pray and that’s when we need God’s help and then once those things are gone then we can go back to just life on our own. So that’s why I feel like too little prayer communicates that we have a control that we really don’t have, at all.
I think that when we gather as a church our prayer shouldn’t just be transitions, right? Prayer has to be more than just, let’s close our eyes, let’s bow our heads and pray, so that the choir, the praise team, or the host team, can get offstage and nobody sees how awkward the transition is. Prayer has to be its own thing so that we stop, and we pause, and even if we are praying for all the things that we already have and we take for granted, that the church sits there and they feel and they are reawakened to their desperate need for the Lord the same way that they are when we take each breath. We can breathe and take those breaths for granted and sometimes it takes somebody to just set us down and say, no, look, each breath that you take right now is a gift from the Lord, so just pause from all your anxious toil and worry, and be reminded that you are not the one that gives yourself breath, but you are enjoying each one. And it’s the same thing when we pray, to just force our church to just stop, and pause, and to be reminded that we need God.
Zaspel:
I think your emphasis here is desperately needed, and if I could interject a brief personal comment … I’ve been at Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia, PA, now for eleven years. The founding pastor, Boyd Personett, is still with us also – I think in his 47th year as pastor – and he has set a wonderful model in this regard. In our Sunday morning services, he leads in the pastoral prayer which is usually ten to fifteen minutes. I’m sure that would shock many people, and I suppose many would think it must be boring. But I have to say that our people find it to be a genuine high point of the week, and I regularly hear the same from visitors who come in. He brings us corporately before the Lord and prays certainly with regard to our own congregation – our own needs and challenges, and so on. But it is recognized preeminently as a time of worship. He will offer praise to God for who he is and what he has done for us in Christ, he will acknowledge sin and make confession, he will address the needs of God’s people in our congregation and worldwide, he will pray for the advance of the gospel, he will pray for the suffering church, he will pray for our nation and our leaders, and he will pray for our own meeting. And when he is done, we all know we’ve been to church and have experienced what corporate worship should be. He has been a wonderful model for me in that regard, and our congregation has found this to be a wonderfully blessed part of his ministry that no one would want to see changed.
Onwuchekwa:
Yes, Fred, and I feel like when prayer, the communication to and with God, is incorporated as its own thing in the life of our church, it does just what you said. People get up and they feel the sense of “I’ve participated. I have communicated with God. I didn’t just come to spectate, I didn’t just come to hear a good word, I didn’t just come and praise and thank God for the things that he’s done; but I came, I heard from him, I responded to him, I talked to him, he talked back.” And you leave with a sense of wonder and amazement and really just a sense of having communed with God. I haven’t just heard from him, but I’ve heard from him, he’s heard from me. And there’s just a joy and a freedom and really a lightness of heart and soul.
Zaspel:
I’ve seen visitors come into our church and they’re so struck by it that they are reduced to tears. It is just exactly what you say. It’s not just listening to the pastor pray, there’s a sense in which he has brought all of us before the Lord. It’s a wonderful part of the corporate meeting.
Let’s talk about things more basic. Just what is prayer? You have a helpful discussion of that – can you summarize or highlight it for us?
Onwuchekwa:
Yes. I was really helped by Gary Millar’s book, Calling on the Name of the Lord, where he really helps to sum this up, that prayer, as you look at it throughout the Scriptures, is this response towards God. There are times where as we pray, that we think of prayer as initiatory work that we do, that we are initiating a conversation with God, but that’s not it at all. God is the divine initiator. God has already provided his promises to us and so as we pray what we’re doing is we are merely asking God to fulfill the promises that he is already made to us. I think prayer in that light really helps to take a lot of the trepidation out of it, because we are reminded that as I pray I’m not asking God to do something foreign to what he wants to do. I’m not trying to coerce him to do something that I have to convince him would be a good thing. I’m merely calling on him to fulfill the promises that he has already made. So, I can pray with an eagerness and a hopefulness and an expectation and, more importantly, a boldness, as I call on him to do the things that he has already said that he wants to do.
Zaspel:
How can we learn to pray? Your discussion here I thought was wonderful – maybe you can just give us a taste of what readers can find there.
Onwuchekwa:
In Jesus’s examples in the Lord’s prayer. I just feel like his words to us are so familiar, we know them, we can repeat them, but it’s easy for us to confuse awareness with comprehension. Just because we know it and are familiar, we really think that it’s sunk down into our bones. I just love how the Lord’s prayer is split into these two halves. The first half is all second person pronouns: our Father in heaven, we pray your name would be honored, your kingdom would come, your will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. Prayer doesn’t just start off with us longing for God’s things, but prayer starts off with us longing for God’s presence way before we long for his provision. We want it more, we know that it’ll shape all of that, so it just frees us up to remind us that at the end of the day we don’t start by asking God to come alongside and help us establish our own kingdom, we ask him to bring his, because we know that’s where joy and peace will come from. And then being confident that God will establish his kingdom, that kind of sets the lens through which we look at all of the rest of the things in this life. Praying for provision, gratitude, being filled with what God has already provided for us, praying for his grace, for forgiveness that we might experience and share and praying for protection. And as we pray for the things that Christ tells us to pray for we find that all of our burdens, which feel to be so many, all of them fit nice and neatly into all of those things that he has already told us to pray for. I think that one of the ways that we learn how to pray is we look at his model and example, but then we walk away and we are reminded that learning how to pray is not about comprehending propositions, it’s about practice. And so, we just start. And we pray, often.
Zaspel:
What help can you give us with regard to congregational prayer and prayer meetings? Few churches are satisfied on this score. How can we make these more profitable? And what kinds of things should we be praying for?
Onwuchekwa:
One of the things that we are starting to talk through as a church now is we’ve been as a church, we started our church four years ago, so at least once per month for the last four years we’ve gathered as a church to pray. And after four years we know it’s helpful. It can become a little bit routine. As we’re reading through the book of Acts, one thing that’s really blatantly clear, I mean, you get to Acts 4 and you find that the church has these situational, special, prayer meetings. They’ve got one that’s locked in stone, but then they have a, “hey, we need boldness right now. Let’s stop what we’re doing, and let’s pray.”
I think one of the ways that we can really foster this in the life of our church is for us to take note of the things that burden and weigh our congregations down, and situationally, and routinely, from time to time call on them to pray for those things. As we have these meetings, a few ways that I’ve found is to make this time a time that involves others. One of the great things that we get a chance to do is to constantly hear stories about ways that God is at work, ways that God has answered prayer, ways that God has made provision for us. And then, too, one of the things that we really try to do to encourage folks is when it comes to the prayer meeting, we want to be the most diligent historians. We want to chronicle everything that we are praying for so that as God answers those prayers we don’t forget about the faithfulness of the Lord. It’s easy for us to unburden ourselves to the Lord and for him to answer the prayers that we have and for our hearts to still be filled with grumbling and complaining. Not because he hasn’t provided for us, but just because we don’t acknowledge it. And that makes us quick to forget, so we try to be historians so that we can walk in and say these are the things that we prayed for, and this is the way that God has answered all of those prayers. He is faithful, let’s keep on.
Zaspel:
That’s wonderful.
Your subtitle is How Praying Together Shapes the Church. So, just in brief, how does or how ought our praying together shape the church?
Onwuchekwa:
I think what it does for the church is it shapes us and it keeps us from standing on our own two feet and being exhausted and it really puts us in a chair. I feel like the church can be filled with anxious toil. As you think about sin that takes place in the life of the church, as you think about the need for provision to do God’s work, as you think about the sick that are there in the life of the church, as you think about the anxiety that comes from loss, family and friends that we hope to see meet the Lord, there’s so much that can make us anxious and exhausted and tired. But what a praying church learns is they really learn how to lean. And they learn that their strength does not come by standing on their own two feet. Their strength comes from the Lord who stood on his own two feet and was snatched off of his feet and put on a cross and was put in a tomb and raised to pay for our sin and for the debt that we owed to God. And now the Lord Jesus is sitting at the right hand of the Father and he invites us to sit with him, to rest. So, a praying church is a church that is afflicted with the same struggles as any other Christian that lives in this fallen, broken world; but in the midst of that there’s a sense of peace and there’s a sense of rest. So that’s what I hope that this book will do – that it will provide a church with a sense of rest and peace in a world that is restless and full of toil and anxiety.
Zaspel:
I love it! Excellent.
Before we sign off, give us a brief overview of your book so everyone can know what to expect.
Onwuchekwa:
It just starts off like we talked about here with the problem of prayerlessness in the life of the church and then we just move into defining what prayer is, in hopes to fill those that pray with the boldness, the encouragement, that comes from the great gift that our God gave us. And then we look at the life of Christ, how he taught about prayer and how he modeled prayer in the garden. Then it moves from there just to what prayer looks like in the context of our church, the role that it plays when we gather, the role that it plays in how we care for the church, as well as the role that it plays in our corporate mission. Then at the end, I give five charges, temptations, that will come and try to undermine some of the best prayer that takes place in the life of the church, and I give five things from personal experience about ways that we can fight those temptations so as to persevere as a praying church.
Zaspel:
We’re talking with John Onwuchekwa, author of the new book, Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church. It’s an unusually profitable book and really a treat to read. Buy a box of them for your friends at church.
John, thanks so much for your good ministry and for talking to us today.
Onwuchekwa:
Hey, thanks Fred, I appreciate it.
