A Brief Book Summary from Books At a Glance
by Steve West
Table of Contents
Part 1: Why Pray Together?
1 A Glimpse of a Praying Community
2 Who Killed the Prayer Meeting?
3 The Missing Spirit of Jesus
4 A Short History of the Praying Church
Part 2: What is the Church?
5 Saints in Motion
6 Feeding the Saints
7 Are Saints Real?
8 Saints Unleashed
9 The Parable of the Missing CEO
Part 3: How the Spirit Reshapes a Praying Community
10 How the Spirit Works
11 The Spirit’s Path
12 Management by Prayer
13 Becoming a Praying Leader
14 Praying Big
15 The Prayer Triangle
16 Avoiding the Pitfalls of Prayer
Part 4: The Art of Praying Together
17 Beginning Low and Slow
18 Forming a Divine Community
19 Restoring Prayer to Sunday Morning
20 On a Resurrection Hunt
21 Becoming Real in Prayer
22 The Prayer Menu
Part 5: Specialized Praying in Community
23 Constant in Prayer
24 A Band of Brothers
25 Turbocharging Our Prayers
Summary
Part 1: Why Pray Together?
Many people pray in solitude, so learning to pray with others can feel unfamiliar and intimidating. Yet praying with spouses, children, friends, and ministry teams can be the highlight of our day. The more we pray, the more we’re fueled to pray. Given the speed of life, we need to intentionally slow down in prayer. Without community support and prayer, many find that their individual prayer lives suffer. This book is for the whole church: the whole church is to pray. “When praying together becomes perfectly normal, frequent, and filled with love, the Spirit will have given us a praying church.”
In some nations, churches find their strongest and most vibrant meeting is for their time of corporate prayer. In many Western churches, prayer is merely window dressing, and nobody takes gathering for prayer seriously. Functionally, the American church is prayerless corporately. Prayer meetings used to be an integral part of church life, but secularism has killed our urgency to pray. Prayer has been twisted to focus on our own feelings, and often God feels distant. Many pastors barely pray, and one of the reasons churches don’t pray is that pastors are consumed with ministry and teaching and don’t lead by example in prayer. We need to ask and answer the question as to why we should pray together. When we see the answer, it will transform how we see the working of the church.
The church cannot be organized and run like a secular business. It is only by the Spirit of Jesus that our churches can be effective. When we are excited about Christ, God does great things in our midst. It is through prayer that we access the Spirit of Jesus, and it is through him that we are given spiritual power. Since prayer sparks the Spirit’s activity, it must be at the heart of all we do. Jesus and the Spirit are one, and the church is Christ’s body. It is through the body of Christ (i.e., the church) that the Spirit acts in the world. Jesus lived by the power of the Spirit, and in our union with him we can only live by the Spirit as well. Prayer is not one more church ministry; it is the heart of all our ministries, since we access the power of our resources in Christ by the Spirit. As followers of Jesus, we need the Spirit of Jesus to run our churches and our lives. When churches pray, it ignites the power of the Spirit. We want the entire church to be in step with the Spirit. Pastors, we need to step aside and let Christ by the Spirit be the leader of the church. We need to be praying pastors who seek to lead a praying church.
Prayer is essential—never optional—for the people of God. All across the canon we see that God’s people were marked by prayer, both individually and corporately. Jesus taught his disciples to pray together. In order to pray, we need transformation on the inside. It is in the Book of Acts that we see how Jesus gets inside of his people by the Spirit. All through history the church prayed: our generation in the West is the first generation that has lost the vision of the church as a place of prayer. Most pastors have received excellent training in the Word, but almost no training in prayer. . . .
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