The Ways We Pray: what we are learning
Ian Adams reflects on a milestone in a CMS prayer project
Photo: The 50th Ways We Pray post from mission partner Alison Giblett in Ukraine
The Ways We Pray project seeks to share and exchange ideas and practices for prayerful presence between people, communities and churches across the globe who are seeking to live, to pray and to go with Jesus, with each other, to the edges.
by Ian Adams, Mission Spirituality Adviser
In God’s grace we have just published our 50th post, and we continue to invite more contributions. The invitation is to send in a photo depicting how we pray, with a few words of text, which can be shared in a harmonised format, initially in the growing Presence WhatsApp group, then more widely through CMS media, encouraging prayerful presence.
What are we learning through The Ways We Pray?
We love to pray alone. There’s something essential about the willingness to be in prayerful solitude, this practice of Jesus finding echo and response in us.
But we are also drawn to pray with others, and recognise the gift and power of communal prayer.
We are drawn into prayerful presence in recognisably religious places – churches, chapels and cathedrals. These much prayed-in places seem to re-arrange us, opening us up to the possibility of divine encounter.
It will come as no surprise that attentive reading of scripture continues to be a particularly important way into prayer.
Loving attention to the natural world – the great text of God’s creation – seems to be another vital entrance – a kind of narthex1 – into prayerful presence for many, settling our anxieties, and lifting us into praise and thanksgiving to the Creator God. Being close to, on, or even in open water seems to bring us into prayerful presence in a particularly profound way.
If beauty can inspire prayer so too, we are discovering, can the dust and disturbance – the broken things – that lie all around us. Through attention to that brokenness we are finding ourselves more readily praying from our own brokenness, and into that of our world.
Stillness, quiet and silence are experienced as vital elements in the journey into prayerful presence.
So too are physical movements and stances. Swimming, body prayer and the making, walking and praying of labyrinths are all experienced as practices of prayerful presence.
These are still early days for The Ways We Pray project – and we know that there will be much more to discover together on journey into prayerful presence.
Take part in The Ways We Pray
If you would like to participate in The Ways We Pray project please consider joining the Presence WhatsApp group.
And here are the instructions for sending in your photos and text:
- Send me a photo(s) that you have taken showing how/where you pray, plus (*for each photo) a line of text (max 10 words) + location + your name or that of your praying community
- I will add your words to your image, and a discreet CMS Presence logo. The font will be the same in each image.
- Initially I will share in the WhatsApp group – then it may be shared on the Presence page of the CMS website and on CMS social media
The photo needs to be yours, high quality (choose large or full size) jpeg format, square (I can do that if that’s difficult) and anyone identifiable in the pic would need to give approval for it to be shared. If your text could benefit from editing I will ask your permission.
Send your photo + max 10 words + your name (or praying community’s name) and location to: ian.adams@churchmissionsociety.org
- In the context of church buildings, the narthex is seen as the entrance, porch, vestibule or gathering place in and through which the people journey into the church proper. ↩︎
