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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.

1. 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. ︎

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On Saturday night, a group of around 12 pray-ers from different churches gather online to hear from mission partner Alison Giblett in Ukraine and pray together for an hour. This isn’t a one-off. In fact, they have been meeting weekly for over two years.

Everyone joins from their own home and some of them have never even met in person, but being able to see each other on a screen is the next best thing to being together. Some say it feels like having a group of friends in their living room.

Getting started and growing

Their first meeting was held in spring 2022, after Russian forces entered Ukraine.

Though most missionaries and expats returned to their home countries for their own safety around this time, Alison felt called to stay, as Ukraine had been her home and community since God had called her to Kyiv in 2004.

Alison and about 40 others from her church, the Tabernacle of the Living God (TLG), travelled together from Kyiv and stayed in village locations, away from the attacks.

It was against this backdrop of crisis that Alison offered to host a Zoom meeting for some of her supporters from City Hope Church Bermondsey, to tell them more about what was going on and pray together for Ukraine.

Participants found the first meeting helpful and soon enough, it became a weekly event and was drawing supporters from several of Alison’s link churches as well as others who wanted to join in prayer.

The prayer group has followed Alison and her church community from their weeks on the road, through returning to Kyiv and figuring out how to do and be church in wartime.

The group has had the privilege of standing with Alison and her church in prayer as they have offered practical, spiritual and emotional support to people whose lives were and are torn apart by the war.

They have prayed for Alison and others as they have travelled to villages to help rebuild infrastructure and restore hope.

The prayer group allows these committed supporters to connect with a particular part of Christian ministry in Ukraine on a weekly basis.

“Hearing specific details about everyday life from people on the ground brings the reality so much closer,” shares John, a former missionary himself.

News from the ground

Every Saturday when they meet, Alison joins the call from Kyiv and shares updates from on the ground. She shares about the type of thing reported in the media – bombings or being under rocket attack – but also how they as a church have experienced God’s protection, love and care for them.

The faithful pray-ers get to hear about the church’s ministry, for instance last year when the church partnered with YWAM to build new homes for people who had lost everything, and ran children’s camps during the summer.

Sometimes the group welcomes a Ukrainian guest or two from TLG, including local partners Valery Alymov and Anya Manchuliak. Alison interprets back and forth between Ukrainian and English.

Valery, pastor of TLG and a former military serviceman, shares about his chaplaincy work with soldiers, many of whom are exhausted and desperate for the hope Jesus offers.

The chair of the meeting asks specific people to pray for specific things and the group works its way through the prayer requests.

Wider impact

At each meeting someone takes notes, which are later transcribed and circulated via email to other churches to enable others to pray too.

Many of those in the prayer group are also part of a larger group which is connected via the messaging app Signal. Here, notes from the Saturday meetings are shared with about 80 people, who also receive day-to-day updates, prayer requests and occasional photos.

Attending a prayer meeting every Saturday night – albeit in one’s own home – might seem like a big commitment. So what has kept the group continuing to meet for two years?

Some group members describe the gathering as the highlight of their week. Personal connection is a major factor – wanting to show support for Alison because they know her is a big part of what keeps people turning up week after week.

Alice and Keith, from a church supporting Alison, comment, “It is a huge privilege to be a part of this group of godly people.”

The war in Ukraine is such a challenging thing to pray for that it’s hard to know where to start. For this group, hearing from people on the ground gives them specific things to pray about, making it easier to engage with what’s going on and pray for the situation.

The group has meant a lot to Alison: “The fact that there are a group of people who care and understand at quite a detailed level has really helped me…. For me the prayer group has been a main form of support.”

And as war continues, so does this valuable support.

Pray together

We are so grateful for CMS supporters faithfully praying. Prayer is central to all we do. Find the latest prayer resources and sign up for weekly updates: at churchmissionsociety.org/pray

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We pray. It doesn’t matter how or when – there’s no set prayer book. But a life of pioneering mission is fueled by prayer. We draw on the riches of others to inspire our prayer – the world church, our own traditions, religious communities. And we write and create our own to express our particular longings. We depend on God. We grieve for what is broken. We hope for what can be.

When I reflected on the wonderful gift that pioneers bring I wrote that up as True North with nine facets. One of them is prayer and the words above are what I wrote at that time which I still like. I am not sure what constitutes prayer for you but for me it is a whole mix of things. I am a spontaneous rather than routine person so I like to mix things up. I like variety. Part of that mix is certainly using art, images, music and so on to reflect, as well as contemplative practices, written prayers, liturgy and having informal conversation with God, walking, silence, retreat.

Maybe it is the state of the world at the moment, maybe it is that I have become more aware of privilege and whiteness, maybe it’s the experience of how broken Britain seems, but I especially appreciate what I would call praying from the edges, or praying from below. I realise that the language of centre and edges is not straightforward: who gets to decide what is centre and what is edge? But hopefully it will do for now. It fits well with how we are trying to reflect on what we are about at CMS.

The best possible way to do that is to be with people when they pray and feel the longings of those prayers. There are plenty of communities in the UK to be with who are at the edge in that way. Reading the Magnificat with cleaners from Clean For Good has lingered in my imagination for a few months now since I was with them in December for evening prayer for example. Somehow the words carried a different meaning or resonance when prayed with them.

The best resource CMS have ever been involved in producing, or certainly the most popular and best known, is called The Christ We Share (sorry it’s no longer available). It’s a collection of 32 images of Christ which are representations from cultures all round the world. They include the classic American-looking Jesus from the 50s or Robert Powell from the series Jesus of Nazareth, which I remember being on television when I was a teenager. But those are alongside African, Asian, South American, First Nations representations. There is a set of notes which gives some context to each image. I have always loved it and used it with many groups. What it does is to help you see that your own image is a take from where you are standing, rather than the take. And you quickly realise that you are going to have a richer picture if you have those multiple representations, some of which are quite different and quite disrupting in their own way. It’s a kind of expanding of horizons, drawing the curtains back so you have a bigger view. I think this is all the more important or helpful if your own take has been at the centre of things. When that is the case as it has been for those of us who are white and Western being de-centred is a necessary practice. 

Probably the first window that opened that up to me was praying with women or through women’s eyes. I remember for example Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild’s Human Rites which was a huge collection and had prayers for example for the first menstruation of a girl. Another collection I loved and still turn to is The New Women Included which is a collection from the Community of St Hilda. This was founded in 1987 by women exasperated by the sexism in the church. One if the things they used to do before the ordination of women in the Church of England was to invite ordained women from other places in the world who could lead. This was in the wake of synod voting against this, so was highly subversive and got them thrown out of at least one venue by the then Bishop of London. I also love Janet Morley’s various collections of prayers which seem to combine that women’s perspective mixed with prayers from an experience of poverty. I recognise some of her writing in the Hilda collection actually. Tess Ward’s Celtic Wheel of the Year is another I have used quite a lot. You can pick these books up online secondhand very cheaply. 

I have enthused about Claudio Carvalhaes’ project Liturgies From Below before – that is the most amazing collection of prayers from various places round the world. They are full of thanks, rage, lament, longing, despair, defiance – quite extraordinary really. Reimagining worship has some in the resources section.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder I was amazed how little the prayers and liturgy of the Church of England had to say to that experience. This may just have been my own experience – and, yes, they always include psalms and intercessions – but I was looking for something much deeper, that connected with this terrible experience of oppression, racism, and violence, to grieve, to lament. In the end I had to look elsewhere and it was Gilles Peterson on his BBC Radio 6 Music show who voiced the grief, pain and anger through black protest, blues, reggae and soul music. It wasn’t where I expected to find the ability to pray or to find comfort but I was really grateful to him.

I recently was given Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley. She is North American and reading her prayers and participating in her exercises gives you a sense of what it is like to pray as a black woman in America. She is a very gifted writer.

When I visited Canada last year and indeed before and after I have been exploring, reading and discovering theology and contextual practice among First Nations people. One of the things I discovered in Harold Johnson’s The Power Of Story is that at the end of prayer many First Nations people will say ‘all my relations’. It’s sort of like an amen. I found that a beautiful practice and often end my prayer now with that reminder of gratefulness for my connectedness with the Creator, all people, all creatures, the earth itself. 

One of the most surprising prayers I came across in the last few years goes something like this:

Jesus is my bulldozer Amen! Bulldoze my case O Lord! Amen! He’s my bulldozer, Amen! Bulldoze the lawyer O Lord! Amen! He’s my bulldozer! Amen! Bulldoze the judge O Lord! Amen! Jesus is my bulldozer!

It sounds slightly bonkers at first but when you realise it is a song sung by prisoners who experience a corrupt justice system it makes sense. If you google it you’ll find it out there with various versions. That is in the book Theology Brewed In An African Pot – a gem of a book which has prayers and liturgies at the end of each chapter. 

As for many others, Gaza and the West Bank has been on my mind and in my prayers longing for an end to the violence, brutality and genocide. Amos Trust’s collections Words of Hope and Seeds of Hope are really well put together and are a mix of quotes, prayers, poems arranged into themes like protest, home, hope. Both books then have some liturgies called words of hope that draw things together. The sources are many and varied but Amos Trust has stood in solidarity with Palestinians for many years so there are some prayers for peace and justice that connect well particularly with that context

I could go on.… but hopefully you get the idea. I should add that there is a kind of praying from the edges that frustrates me. An example for me was when I visited India and in the prayers and worship I felt on one occasion I could have been in a Church of England cathedral and on another I could have been at a Hillsongs Church. It’s understandable that with globalisation there are these circulations and exchanges but I find them to be of very little interest. It’s always good to seek out those prayers that have a soulful articulation that is connected to the soil of a place and draws on language, metaphors and imagery from there.

I am so grateful to alternative worship which in many ways opened up this vista to me, both becoming aware of different articulations that might draw on other cultures, but also encouraging that same adventure of the imagination to connect with the cultures we are in. I still long for more of that kind of practice. In my view the way the Church of England controls its liturgies creates a church where that can be pretty difficult to do, especially for example in relation to communion, and needs breaking open very differently. Leaders of worship should be freed up to improvise much more creatively. But a good start is praying from the edges and then perhaps move on to write your own in defiance of empire.

I would love to know what praying from the edges looks like for you. Are there prayers, liturgies, art, music or whatever you use? Do let me know.

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We live in a time of increasing divisions and polarities, fear and anger. 

So this Lent comes to us with a particularly weighty task: how to allow the examination of self that is encouraged by the season to re-shape us – that we might, in God’s grace and in small ways, participate in God’s healing of our world.

by Ian Adams, Mission Spirituality Lead

One of the markers of the Christian faith story has always been the call to share in suffering. We might wish it were otherwise, but it is at the centre of the practice of the faith. To hunger and thirst for righteousness in ourselves and in our world, is a call to suffer. And to allow the sufferings of our world, in God’s grace, to find in us some small measure of transformation.

As St Paul puts it…

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death…

Philippians 3.10 NRSV

How might we approach this calling?

Any attempt to share in Christ’s sufferings can only begin through a commitment each day to prayerful presence. We need to be prayerfully present to God, the source of our life. We need to be prayerfully present to those around us and to our wider contexts, in their joys and yes – in their sufferings.

Whenever I speak in person of this weighty call I naturally find myself beginning to open out my arms ever wider, and breathing deep. You might like to try this position in your prayers for the world this Lent.

In this stance we may discern the crucified Jesus, who allowed all the sin and pain of the world to come towards him, and to hold it there, refusing to pass it on to others, enabling it to be transformed within him.

As we seek, in God’s grace to share in that ongoing transformation now, may we have the courage to open ourselves up to the joys and sufferings of our world; and the wisdom to root ourselves ever more deeply in the loving presence of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

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For many years it’s been my practice to pray the Lord’s Prayer with open hands – something I learned from a joyful encounter with a Franciscan community.

by Ian Adams, Mission Spirituality Lead

The practice seems both helpful and natural, enabling me in some way to embody the words that are being said, encouraging me to become more prayerfully present.

I suggest that the idea of praying with open hands – metaphorically or literally – may be of help to us all as we seek to become people of prayerful presence.

I want to reflect briefly on Luke’s account of the disciples meeting the risen Jesus. And in Luke’s telling of this episode Jesus’ hands are a key element…

…Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.

Luke 24:36b–40 NRSV

Look at my hands Jesus says, opening them up to the disciples.

These are the scarred hands which, just a few days earlier, had been open on the cross, there holding and transforming for all time all the world’s sin and suffering, damage and loss.

These are the scarred hands which now gesture the disciples to go into the world to proclaim, to witness, filled with the Holy Spirit.

…and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

Luke 24: 46–49 NRSV

And these are the scarred hands which will bless the disciples as Jesus ascends, enabling those disciples to be people of joyful and prayerful presence.

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

Luke 24: 50–53 NRSV

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we might live with prayerful presence in an increasingly fractured, polarised world.

It’s impossible to truly fix things – although there’s a lot of good work that we can and must do. Friends, in God’s grace, keep on!

But it is possible to pray – to seek our own transformation in the presence of God, and to pray for the transformation of the world, step by step. This is the vital work that undergirds all that we hope to be in God.

And I suggest that praying – literally and/or metaphorically – with open hands, may be really helpful in this endeavour.

Open hands don’t seek to impose solutions, but open hands are ready to receive from God.

Open hands don’t negate the challenges of our time, but they do enable us to carry some of the pain and suffering around us. To share in some small ways, as St Paul suggested, in Christ’s sufferings.

Open hands don’t protect us from harm, but they do encourage and enable us to be prayerfully present, and there to find ourselves held and beloved.

So, an encouragement to us to pray today with open hands…

Risen Jesus
As you opened your hands for us and for the world
help us to live and to pray with open hands
ready to receive from you.
Give us strength, by your Spirit, we pray
to hold open hands for those around us;
give us strength to share in their sufferings and in yours;
and so to enable your healing love to flow
in us, around us and through us.
Amen

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Across the globe people connected with CMS are engaged in brilliant endeavours, seeking to participate in God’s redemptive work in all areas of human society and creation.

by Ian Adams

We all know that these callings are challenging, requiring us to be rooted deep in Jesus Christ, resilient in his strength, shaped by his love. Our prayer needs intention and devotion! We need to be practising prayerful presence.

You are invited to join in a conversation around nurturing practices of prayerful presence. This conversation is beginning in a WhatsApp group  – Presence. We hope in time that the conversation will evolve into a community of practice across the CMS movement.

#TheWaysWePray no.50

The Ways We Pray project (see below for more details) recently hit a milestone with the 50th image being shared. This beautiful picture was captured by mission partner Alison Giblett in Ukraine, all the more poignant for being taken in a country ravaged by war.

FIND OUT MORE

We are opening up this conversation with three questions, linked to CMS’s vision: with Jesus, with each other, to the edges.

1. What is your key personal prayer practice?
2. What is your community’s key practice of thanksgiving and praise?
3. What are you discovering about God’s presence at the edges?

You might be interested to know one key early learning emerging from the conversation – engagement in some form with the natural world as a way into prayerful presence seems to be vital to many…

FAQs

Q. Who is Presence for?

Presence is open to people across the CMS movement. Partners, staff, supporters, intercessors – you are all welcome. If you are new to CMS but interested in the possibility of prayerful presence to Christ we also invite you to get in touch.

Q. What’s given rise to it? Was there a gap noticed somewhere?

As we seek as a movement to go with Jesus, with each other, to the edges, it seems clear that we are particularly adept at action – the projects, ventures and partnerships in which we are involved. Our focus is strong there and will continue to be so as we seek to act in response to a Jesus who never gives up. We are good at doing!

It’s also clear that we are adept at intercessory prayer – praying specifically for our work. Prayerlines is just one obvious example of this long-term and continuous commitment. We are good at praying for what we do!

But we are perhaps not so adept at being prayerfully present to God who is, the tradition teaches us, always present to us – “Be still, and know…“, “I am with you always…” We are not so good at being with!

Q. Why might this be important? And how is this related to mission?

The work we do across the movement is demanding. Our own energy, skills and sense of calling are powerful, but to be sustained long term in this redemptive work we need to be rooted above all in the presence of Christ. We are seeking to live and share his presence.

Our own transformation – of course gradual, and always in the grace of God – is a vital element at the heart of the redemptive work. Such transformation only comes about through long-term commitment to presence to God.

There’s also a link between being present to God and being present to the people with whom we work. Loving God and loving neighbour are closely linked.

And a thought on the nature of mission at this time. There is so much that needs to be done to reshape society and world for good. It’s also apparent that people are increasingly sensing that they need (what we might call) practices of presence, engaging with the natural world, engaging with each other, and engaging with the possibility of God.

The Presence venture may be one way to help us to address these needs.

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Prayer and mission: entering into the ways of God

by Adrian Chatfield

The essential foundation of missionary spirituality is prayer and contemplation since Christian mission does not depend on human resources… Redemptoris Missio strongly emphasises the point: “The future of mission depends above all on contemplation. If a missionary is not a contemplative he cannot proclaim Christ in a credible manner.” [2]

Christian spirituality is a gift and a task. It requires communion with God (contemplation) as well as action in the world (praxis). When these two elements are separated, both the life and the mission of the church are deeply affected. Contemplation without action is an escape from concrete reality; action without contemplation is activism lacking a transcendent meaning. True spirituality requires a missionary contemplation and a contemplative mission. [3]

These two assertions, one Catholic, the other Protestant, serve as a useful starting point for an assessment of the relationship between prayer and the missio Dei. They share the insight that prayer in all its forms – including wordless ones – is the expression of a living relationship between God and God’s people: God with me, God with us. That relationship necessarily results in mission because God is a missionary God, but prayer is not primarily the instrument of mission. We pray because of who we are, not because of what prayer might accomplish. Indeed, as Jean Daniélou implies, “prayer [is] the mission of the church.” [4] That is what we are called into: our “primary purpose is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” [5]

Why pray

We pray, first of all, in acknowledgement of the sovereignty of God and our own creatureliness and dependence. “He who comes into the presence of God to pray must divest himself of all vainglorious thoughts, lay aside all idea of worth; in short, discard all self-confidence, humbly giving God the whole glory, lest by arrogating anything, however little, to himself, vain pride cause him to turn away his face.” [6] Calvin’s emphasis here is a salutary reminder that prayer does not in the first instance turn us outward, as crusaders called to demolish strongholds with the tools of prayer. It turns us inward, in the primary act of obedience, to a relationship restored by God in Christ. This is the true worship (weorðsciper) demanded of the disciple: ‘follow me’ means first of all, ‘return to me’. Prayer is a converting action.
Ian Randall has rightly drawn attention to the tension between divine initiative and human activity implicit in the conversionist language of much evangelical spirituality. [7] However, from the perspective of prayer, the ‘new birth’ demands both a recognition of the gracious, uninvited action of God and our reception of that grace, through faith. We pray because we have been ‘converted’ to Christ, and we pray that we may be daily and fully converted.

We pray, secondly, in order to remember these fundamental truths. Prayer is the central act of memory, and the rehearsal of the good news of Jesus Christ in the liturgies of the church builds on that premise. The quasi-sacramental nature of Deuteronomy 6:8-9 reinforces this outward expression of the inner truth: “Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” The prayer of remembrance is indeed both word and action. Conversely, the wicked in Psalm 34 will be eliminated from God’s memory [8] because they are no longer in active relationship with him.

If prayer is response to God’s grace and remembrance of a restored relationship, it also reshapes us. We are reformed by the truths which we have apprehended – through acts of confession and of thanksgiving.

It has become fashionable in recent times to criticise the language of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer for overplaying our failures and our shortcomings: ‘the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.’ Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing [9] is an extreme version of this liberalising tendency, with its sideways swipe at ‘original sin’, and reminds us how easy it is for the church to collude with postmodernity’s dislike of any admission of fault or failure. The classical Christian tradition of confessing one’s sins, whether in Catholic sacrament or Protestant solitude, reminds us that there is no reshaping without repenting. The struggle to be holy – sanctification – is predicated upon the honesty of our prayer, and those who would be transformers must themselves first be transformed.

Similarly but less contentiously, those who remember what God has done for them in Christ respond to grace with gratitude, which results in generosity. Paul’s impassioned plea for the collection for the saints in Jerusalem in 2 Cor. 8 is the classic example of this. Thankful prayer bears fruit in changed lives.

The ecclesial character of prayer

Whether we pray as individuals or congregationally, we pray ecclesially. Karl Barth says that “[o]ne cannot ask whether it is the Christians who pray, or the church. There is no alternative, for when the Christians pray, it is the church; and when the church prays, it is the Christians.” [10] Jean Daniélou comments

That we do not say “My Father” is of fundamental importance. There is nothing individualistic about the Our Father: it is a prayer in which we embrace all other people, a prayer that is at the same time an expression of love. We go to the Father only with our sisters and brothers. [11]

Behind the claim that prayer is primarily ecclesial lies a set of theological premises. The Holy Trinity is a unity of persons with a single will, in perfect harmony and in constant communication. Because of this, the creation of humankind in God’s image and likeness bears a deep Trinitarian imprint: the same harmony, will and communicating relatedness in creaturely form. The fact that we have fallen from the divine intention does not invalidate this truth; what makes us human is our interdependence and mutuality. All sin makes us less than human; our redemption in Christ restores our essential relationship with the Father and our potential relationships with other human beings. This is why the metaphor of reconciliation in 2 Cor. 5 is fundamental for understanding not just what we might become in Christ but also what it means to be human at all.

That is why God calls people together: not simply because we are stronger or better or more loving or more useful, but because the gathered people express a fundamental truth about the created order and its restoration through God’s redemptive action. The people of God in the Old Testament – Israel – and the new and enlarged Israel of the New Testament are called together as a sign of the imago Dei, expressed interiorly as worship to God and exteriorly in the missio Dei.

The ecclesial character of prayer has over the centuries been worked out in both monastic and mystical theologies. Both these streams have much to teach the contemporary church about its vocation to enter into the ways of God, and it is to elements of these two streams that we now turn.

Ancient disciplines and monastic traditions

This is not the place to sketch a history of the monastic movement, but it is worth reminding ourselves that its growth coincided with the acceptance and adoption of Christianity as the imperial faith: Christendom. White martyrdom [12] replaced red martyrdom, as the faithful saw a rise in conventional faith and reacted adversely to it.

That said, I will now highlight key themes in Christian monasticism as they help to elucidate the missional character of the prayer of the church.

The eremitic tradition, the radical withdrawal from society which we associate with Anthony of Egypt, bears witness to the fact that there is an inherent conflict between a life lived towards the world, and a life lived towards God. Whether we understand Anthony’s demons as internal or external, spiritual or psychological, we recognise that there is a stark choice to be made between worship of the true God, and the many idolatries offered by the world. Today we pose the choice in terms of counter-cultural faithfulness to the gospel. The eremitic tradition reminds us that we withdraw to pray because it is only in that withdrawal that we bear witness to absolute and uncompromising surrender to a God who brooks no rivals. This surrender the Radical Reformers of the 16th century called Gelassenheit. [13]

The Desert Mother Amma Sarah said it more simply: “For 13 years she waged warfare against the demon of fornication. She never prayed that the warfare should cease, but she said, “O God, give me strength.” Although Sarah may have been a deeply passionate woman, keenly aware of her sexuality, fornication principally meant anything that possessed her heart and separated her from God. A part of our being belongs only to God and can only be satisfied by God. Replacing God with anyone or anything is idolatry.” [14] To pray is to turn away from idols to the pursuit of the living God.

Paralleling the rise of eremitic Christianity was the coenobitic [15] tradition, often linked with Anthony’s near contemporary Pachomius. If the former privileged the single-minded pursuit of God to the exclusion of all rivals, the latter gave the early church an architecture for the praying community. The Rule of St Benedict [16] sketched this out as demanding stability, obedience and conversio or conversatio morum. To this we can add the disciplines of the daily office, [17] of accountability and of hospitality.

There have been times in the history of monasticism when the religious community has been over-identified with the Kingdom of God, but this theological excess need not detract from the essential emphasis on a people gathered together and organised for the express purpose of faithful corporate prayer that the will of God may be fulfilled on earth as in heaven. The office frames the whole; the community is formed by its common prayer, and it is unsurprising that Benedict dedicates many chapters to what can seem trivial detail. To him, a community fit for purpose is a community that prays. Out of prayer arise hospitality, service and mission. The Prologue describes this praying community as a dominici schola servitii, [18] a ‘school of the Lord’s service’. At its heart, it is a disciplined school of prayer, a school of disciples.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer established a semi-monastic discipline at Finkenwalde to secure the Confessing Church against the predations of National Socialism, he drew on the revived monastic traditions of the Church of England, at Kelham, [19] at Mirfield [20] and in Oxford. [21] The strong implicit Benedictine spirituality that he found emerges in the early pages of Life Together:

According to God’s will Christendom is a scattered people, scattered like seed ‘into all the kingdoms of the earth’ (Deut. 28:25). That is its curse and its promise. God’s people must dwell in far countries among the unbelievers, but it will be the seed of the Kingdom of God in all the world. [22]

Here, as in the declining years of the Western Roman Empire, we have a people with no city to sojourn in, exiled, a spiritual diaspora, for whom their scattering is both terror and vocation, terror because of the loss of any homeland, vocation because in that diaspora they are called together to witness to a new kind of community that may transform the world. This is a community which looks away from the world to structure, regulate and authenticate itself, prays to the Father in order to orient itself, prays in the name of Jesus to identify itself, prays in the power of the Spirit to dispel the powers of darkness, and then is reseeded back into the world to witness to a better way.

Much of what Bonhoeffer writes in Life Together is scandalous to our ears. In explaining that Christian community is a spiritual, not a human reality, he observes that “within the spiritual community there is never, nor in any way, any ‘immediate’ relationship of one to another… Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them.” [23] But it is precisely in the scandal of his writing that the monastic spirit is identified. The only valid community, the only community that bears within itself redemptive and Kingdom possibilities, is the community which is a gift of God. And it keeps that character only as long as and insofar as it is true to the Christic character of that community: τὸ ζῆν Χριστὸς, to live is Christ. [24]

In the current fascination with hospitality as one of the key opportunities for the church’s mission, Bonhoeffer’s point needs to be attended to carefully. We are not in the business of presenting the church as a good place to make friends, reach the lonely, home-make or model good social skills. Rather, we are called to form authentic community, clearly and unapologetically built into Christ, on prayer, and yet utterly open and vulnerable, welcoming and spacious for all who will come. Let this alone be the good news.

The emergence of ‘new monastic movements’ since the Second World War is testimony to the missional potential of this radical, disciplined and uncompromising attempt to follow Jesus together in the face of threatening cultural challenges and an often compromised institutional church. These movements have recognised the power of the monastic stream, both eremitic and coenobitic, to locate the primary action of the church in its relational axis with God the Holy Trinity, and the consequent impact of this in forming resilient, resourceful disciples under orders, ready for battle. In this, they echo the spirituality of the Carolingian church, which at a synod at Metz in 888 observed that ‘we should seek Christ’s piety, by which the pagans will be kept out.’ [25]

What the newer movements have done, very much in the spirit of the 16th century Society of Jesus, is to recognise that what they have, the world needs. The looking in demands more clearly than before a consequent looking out. The inward action of prayer and contemplation enables the outward action of mission, the ‘battle’. The message that new monastic movements are wanting to send out is that when we are who we ought to be towards God, we are enabled to be who we ought to be towards the world, a people of God acting as a sign or sacrament of the coming Kingdom.

One of the key texts of this new stream of thinking about monastic spirituality is Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s New Monasticism. [26] In his chapter on ‘God’s plan to save the world through a people’ he says that though personal conversion and faith are significant, the church is key: “If the Bible is a story about God’s plan to save the world through a people, then my salvation and sanctification depend on finding my true home with God’s people. Apart from the story of this people, I can’t have a relationship with God.” [27] His 12 marks of new monasticism [28] strongly emphasise the foci of the third and fourth marks of mission, [29] which have been somewhat lacking in evangelical Christianity since the middle of the 19th century. It is most important, however, to note that his attempt to recover this missional focus lies in ‘nurturing common life among members of intentional community.’ [30]

Graham Cray regards new monasticism as key to the missional process which is at the heart of fresh expressions of church. In New Monasticism as Fresh Expression of Church, he offers a missional trajectory based on communities of prayer:

• community demands commitment
• commitment forms disciples
• disciples stand firm against contemporary cultural temptation, together
• such disciples stand a chance of ‘sustaining the long haul in planting church’

And so “[n]ew monasticism offers the possibility of important frameworks of support for those deployed on such mission.” [31] To juxtapose this with the monastic “pray much, and that God would count you worthy, for the Will of God is known only to him to whom God will reveal Himself” [32] is to demonstrate the congruity of monastic discipline with missionary commitment so desired in the contemporary church.

Ancient disciplines and the mystical quest

The use of the terms ‘mysticism’ and ‘mystic’ tend to put off evangelicals, worried by any suggestion that there is available to us an access to God independent of or superior to the Holy Scriptures. James Wiseman helpfully draws a distinction between the contemporary use of the term, in which ‘a special state of consciousness surpassing ordinary experience through union with the transcendent reality of God’ [33] is intended, and a historic, more orthodox approach, in which mysticism is about presence and immediacy: “the mystical element in Christianity is that part of its belief and practices that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God.” [34]
Here, two examples will have to suffice: the Eastern tradition of the Jesus Prayer, and the allegorical use of the Song of Songs.

Jesus Prayer

This prayer, whose deep origin lies in the cry of blind Bartimaeus [35] and in the semi-formulaic ‘in the name of Jesus’ of the Acts of the Apostles, is described by the Pilgrim as ‘the abbreviated form of the Gospel.’ [36] It aims to develop the remembrance of Jesus, to make the invocation of Jesus spontaneous and ‘self-acting’ so that we call out to him even in sleep, keep guard over the intellect or heart and reach out beyond language into the living silence of God. It is a unitive prayer which is “a way of unifying the inward attention, stripping the mind of images, and so attaining hesychia.” [37] To the mind unfamiliar with the seemingly esoteric, detached and apparently mechanical repetitiveness of this prayer, it is easy to discount it as an individualistic journey away from the things of earth.

The truth is entirely other. The Pilgrim’s search for the way of unceasing prayer leads him not away from the world, but into it. Praying the Jesus prayer opens the door to life-changing encounters with others, new ways of looking at the world, a heart broken in intercession, and the exercise of spiritual power. This last we will return to later in touching on the rise of Pentecostalism. À propos of life-changing encounters, we need only observe that the pilgrim is both recipient and giver, of grace, of goods, of spiritual insight. His journey is one of profound interdependence, in which his search for ‘true prayer’ gives him back God, other people and himself.

Similarly, this prayer helps him to see the world as far more alive, both to itself and to others, more, not less real: “When I began to pray with the heart, everything around me became transformed and I saw it in a new and delightful way. The trees, the grass, the earth, the air, the light, and everything seemed to be saying to me that it exists to witness to God’s love for man and that it prays and sings of God’s glory.” [38]

The intercessory character of the Jesus Prayer, which must surely lie at the heart of any missional prayer, is best illustrated by Simon Barrington-Ward’s response to his early encounter with the Franciscan Brother Ramón: “I had already had the feeling when I was praying with him of a further pull, flowing underneath all our talk and laughter, of a profound, far-reaching compassion for all those for whom he would intercede… Within that intercession was an immense, almost lonely hunger and thirst, on behalf both of himself and of our world, a longing in the depths of his being for the living God. This was the driving force behind his quest for solitude.” [39] It is remarkable though unsurprising that the quest for solitude is the journey that took Ramón – and takes many mystics – right into the heart of the world.

Song of Songs: Lover and Beloved

In 1547, the reformer Sébastien Castellión was driven out of Geneva by Calvin for claiming that the Song of Songs was a “lascivious and obscene poem… As it dealt merely with earthly affections, he deemed it unworthy of a place in the sacred canon and demanded its exclusion.” [40] For most Christians in the Middle Ages and beyond, and for many still today, the book’s presence in the canon of scripture invites a multi-layered interpretation which at its heart contains an invitation to intimacy with God. Bernard of Clairvaux first wrestled with the text in convalescence, and from 1135 till 1153 preached on it in a now famous series of sermons.

The second sermon, ‘On the kiss’, reflects on ‘the ardour with which the patriarchs long for the incarnation of Christ’ and the privilege which is ours of letting Christ speak to us, by way of a ‘kiss’, an encounter. In the third sermon, the kiss is divided into three: the kiss to the feet, in repentance; the kiss of the hand, in receiving Christ’s grace for growth in holiness; and the kiss on the mouth, in intimacy. “And now what remains, O good Lord, except that now in full light, while I am in fervour of spirit, you should admit me to the kiss of your mouth, and grant me the full joy of your presence.” [41]

400 years later, John of the Cross wrote a series of poems, several of which pick up on the same theme. and relate it to the dark night of the soul in which nothing is known but God:

En mi pecho florido,
Que entero para él sólo se guardaba,
Allí quedó dormido,
Y yo le regalaba,
Y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.

I gave him there
My thought, my care,
So did my spirit flower.
Love lay at rest
Upon my breast
That cedar-scented hour. [42]

Both Bernard and John are mystical activists whose desire for intimacy can be dismissed as erotic displacement, or more seriously as a theological dualism in which mission is regarded as secondary or inferior, because it deals with the evanescent things of this world, while ‘in your presence there is fullness of joy’ (Psalm 16:11). The truth is that both were busy men engaged in reaching out to the communities around them with deep vocational commitment. The end of Bernard’s Third Sermon has him interrupting his reflections in mid-flow, saying “These guests whose arrival has just been announced to us oblige me to break off my sermon rather than bring it to an end.” [43] This is no navel-gazing, but an intimacy with Jesus which drives us out to ‘kiss’ others with the kiss with which we ourselves have been kissed. To change the metaphor, in order to love with Kingdom love, we must daily know ourselves loved.

For John’s part, apart from his exhausting and often harrowing ministry in a conflictual era, it is worth remembering that the first 31 stanzas of his Spiritual Canticle were composed while he was in prison, in filthy and severely deprived conditions, yet another testimony to the deeply engaged and world-affirming resilience which intimacy with Jesus has brought to many saints of the gospel.

New languages and a new Pentecost

Having addressed monastic and mystical traditions as sources of missional prayer, I turn to the Pentecostal movement of the past century for my third and final example of the interface between prayer and mission.

Ronald Knox’s idiosyncratic study of religious movements: Enthusiasm [44] has fascinated me for many years, not least because of its dismissive perspective on ecstatic forms of religious experience as ‘ultrasupernaturalism’ in which “the first fervours evaporate; prophecy dies out, and the charismatic is merged in the institutional. ‘The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard’ – it is a fugal melody that runs through the centuries.” In his chapter on ‘Some Vagaries of Modern Revivalism’, he mocks glossolalia interminably: “When men and women got so carried away as to be frankly unintelligible, you could see… that they must be actuated by some Force wholly out of the common.” [45]

It is neither my task here to show (though I could) that Ronnie Knox’s argument is driven more by intellectual prejudice and snobbery than by academic rigour, nor to argue the opposite on the basis of the extraordinary way in which Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal movements have embedded themselves in the mainstream of Christianity in little less than a century and a half. My aim is rather to suggest in this final section that the rise of Pentecostalism, from a missiological perspective, gives the church back its gospel voice, and that this voice is given back primarily through prayer.

Velli-Matti Kärkkäinen says that “the key to discerning and defining Pentecostal identity lies in Christ-centered charismatic spirituality with a passionate desire to ‘meet with Jesus Christ as be is being perceived as the Bearer of the ‘Full Gospel’. [46] Stephen Land summarises this spirituality as ‘worship and witness in the light of the End’. [47] As Pentecostals give voice to their spirituality primarily through testimony, I will use an early Anglican Pentecostal narrative to further elucidate the point that in Pentecostalism, as in our examples from the ancient church, it is in “returning and rest [that] you shall be saved” and “in quietness and trust shall be your strength”. [48] The missionary imperative is rekindled in the Holy of Holies.

Alexander Boddy, vicar of All Saints’ Monkwearmouth in the Diocese of Durham, went to Oslo in 1907 and found his ministry transformed by the new Pentecost to which he was introduced by TB Barratt, ‘Apostle to Norway’. In a pamphlet published the same year, he describes the impact on his own congregation and wider church context. [49]

He begins by describing a vision of Jesus blessing the world, a particular act of God in mission: “An earnest ‘Seeker’ whilst kneeling before the Lord in one of our meetings suddenly saw Him with outstretched hands – as if blessing the world. The great world in darkness was below Him, and from His fingertips slowly fell drops of living flame… So she saw many little fires kindled in this country of ours.” [50]

He goes on to explain that “Pentecost’ is a ‘life of union with the Lord Jesus”. This union is experienced in prayer, which is key to new life in the church: “We were tarrying until we should be endued with power from on high. We were praying for revival, and we did not know how God was going to answer our prayer, but we were sure He would answer, and the answer has come. And the answer is from Him. [51] In the prayer meetings of the Pentecost-touched church, power is given. When that power is given, then we can validly pray, with Boddy, “Open today doors of service and of confession, and give me boldness to enter in, in the power Thou hast given me.” [52]

The tract is pietistic, simplistic, and not much suited to contemporary tastes. In one or two places, it smacks of the prosperity gospel, though it does not shy away from speaking about suffering. [53] The most remarkable thing about it, however, is that it is above all else an extended prayer and paean of praise, in which Boddy simply gives glory to God for the wonder of new life and growth that come when ordinary people pray without restraint. For Boddy and his contemporaries, the continuum is a simple one: repent – receive – rejoice – respond.

The first Assemblies of God church that I worshipped in was in a former mining town in Nottinghamshire. I was struck as a young undergraduate by the easy confidence with which these miners and generally working class folk spoke of their Jesus, their faith, their mission. It was as if this mysterious ability to speak in tongues had given them many more tongues: to story-tell in their personal testimonies of lives that were radically changed; to preach, even on soapboxes in Nottingham’s Market Square, without shame, simply yet articulately; to proclaim Jesus and a vision of the Kingdom of God without inhibition, in the local idiom; and to pray with conviction, knowing that God was an active, healing, life-changing God.

Prayer as Mission: some concluding thoughts

The link between prayer and mission is a simple one. Prayer leads us deeper into an active relationship with a missional God, and the inevitable consequences are worship, service and mission, the three marks of the church. [54] When I launched the Simeon Centre for Prayer and the Spiritual Life in 2007, I said in my address that “I keep reminding myself that the energy of a centre for prayer is a listening ear, an obedient heart, and a driving passion to rediscover daily what it means to be friends with God – and to help others who cross our threshold to do the same.”

I then went on to say that the “passion of the Simeon Centre is to find people who are hungry for prayer, whether or not they know Jesus in a personal and intimate way yet, pray with them, and introduce them to Jesus. Let’s find out where God is at work in the people around us who don’t know him, and join in with God’s work.” In other words, if prayer is the language of our ongoing encounter with God, then inviting others to pray with us, whether or not we deem them to be disciples yet, must necessarily be at the heart of our missional task. Prayer makes disciples; in prayer disciples are transformed; and an apostolic church emerges.

‘I’m not religious, but I am spiritual’ is one of the enduring clichés of our age, a strapline of postmodernity. Suspicion of institutions of all kinds abounds, political and social, economic and ecclesial. In the face of difficulties about believing anything with a degree of assurance, and resistance to most forms of committed belonging, the surprising persistence of prayer ‘to an unknown God’ is surely a reminder to the church that prayer is one of the few contexts within which meaningful spiritual engagement and evangelism remain possible. The offer of prayer is rarely refused by the unchurched.

Let me end with a personal testimony, slightly adapted to preserve anonymity. Some years ago I went to a baptism in a Pentecostal church in the Midlands. It had been a small, struggling, prayerful, inward-looking fellowship for many years. A few faithful women (and they were mostly women) had kept it alive. There’s no formula for what happened next, but faithfulness in prayer and faithfulness to God’s work were somehow central. Now, the church having grown to a respectable 100 or so on a council estate, four people were to be baptised. One was a young man with Down’s syndrome and a deep fear of water. The second was a middle-aged man with a failed marriage and a recovered faith. The third woman was a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, and the last had come into the church in a wheelchair, been prayed for, got out of her wheelchair and never returned to it. I wept my way through their four testimonies and baptisms. I often wish that I could belong to a church like that.

But I’m not sure that I have it in me to belong there. I’m too impatient. I want quick results, and I suffer from the temptation to dismiss churches that don’t seem to be missional. This church in particular for so long seemed to have lost its way, and I thought little of it. Now that I’ve been privileged to see the end of this part of their story, I’ve learnt yet again that prayer whose primary aim is to achieve results is of little worth. It has to be enough that I pray because of who God is. God is faithful and his mission will be done. In prayer, I too will be part of it.

About the author

Adrian Chatfield is a fellow of Ridley Hall Cambridge and a mentor/spiritual director in the East Midlands.

More from this issue

Notes

[1] With acknowledgement to Jean Daniélou, Prayer: The Mission of the Church, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 9.
[2] Sebastian Karotemprel, (ed), 1995, Following Christ in Mission: A Foundational Course in Missiology, (Nairobi: Paulines, 1995), 135.
[3] C Rene Padilla, Spirituality in the Life and Mission of the Church (Edinburgh 2010 Study Group 9), 1
[4] Daniélou, op.cit.
[5] Opening of the Shorter Westminster Catechism of 1647.
[6] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Chapter 20, Section 8; 1536.
[7] Ian Randall, What a Friend we have in Jesus: The Evangelical Tradition, (London: DLT,2005), 37.
[8] ‘Remembrance’ in the NRSV and ‘name’ in NIV but ‘memory’ in John Goldingay’s translation. See John Goldingay,  Psalms Volume 1, (GrandRapids, Baker Academic,2006),  Kindle loc.9702-9704.
[9] Matthew Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality, (Rochester VT: Bear and Company, 1983)
[10] Karl Barth, Prayer: 50th Anniversary Edition, (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 5.
[11] Daniélou, op. cit. page 26
[12] This is martyrdom without blood or violence such as strict asceticism.
[13] For example, in the Tract on the Supreme Virtue of Gelassenheit by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, in (Furcha EA, 2013), Fifteen tracts by Andreas Bodenstein (Carlstadt), (Scottdale PA: Herald Press, 1995).     
[14] Laura Swan, Forgotten Desert Mothers, The: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women, (Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 2001), 37.
[15] κοινόβιον or ‘coenobium’ from κοινός (common) + βίος (life).
[16] 6th century.
[17] ‘officium’ or work of the people in relation to the worship of God
[18] Luke Benedict and Dysinger, The Rule of St Benedict: Latin & English, (Santa Ana CA: Source Books, 1996), Prologue 45.
[19] Society of the Sacred Mission.
[20] Community of the Resurrection.
[21] Society of St John the Evangelist.
[22] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, (London: SCM, 1954), 7.
[23] Ibid, pages 20 & 22.
[24] Phil. 1:21.
[25] Canon 1, quote in S Coupland, ‘Rod of God’s wrath or the people of God’s wrath? The Carolingian theology of the Viking invasions’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 1991; 42. 
[26] Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, New Monasticism: What it has to say to today’s church, (Grand Rapids MI: Brazos, 2008).
[27] ibid, 58.
[28] ibid, 39.
[29] [3] to respond to human need by loving service, [4] to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation
[30] ibid, 39, Mark 6.
[31] Graham Cray, et al (eds), New Monasticism as Fresh Expression of Church, (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2010), 6.
[32] Herbert Kelly, Principles: Society of the Sacred Mission¸ (Kelham: SSM, 1909), Principle vii.
[33] James Wiseman, Spirituality and Mysticism, (New York: Orbis,2006),  9.
[34] ibid, page 10, quoting Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, (New York: Crossroad, 1991), xvi.
[35] Mark 10.46ff.
[36] Helen Bacovcin, The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim continues his Way, (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 23.
[37] Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff  & Jean Leclercq, Jean, Christian Spirituality: Origins to the 12th Century, (New York: Crossroad,1993), 406. Hesychia (ἡσυχία) is quietness or stillness in the Orthodox tradition.
[38] Bacovcin, op.cit,  25.
[39] Brother Ramón, and Simon Barrington-Ward, Praying the Jesus Prayer Together, (Oxford: BRF 2001), 23.
[40] John Baildam, Paradisal Love: Johann Gottfried Herder and the Song of Songs, (Sheffield: Academic Press, 2009), 140.
[41] G R Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works, (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 223.
[42] Kathleen Jones, tr., The Poems of St John of the Cross, (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1993), 20f.
[43] Evans, op.cit, 224.
[44] R A Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with special reference to the 17th and 18th centuries, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), 1.
[45] ibid, page 554.
[46] Velli-Matti Kärkkäinen, ‘The Pentecostal Understanding of Mission’, in  Wonsuk Ma, Velli-Matti Kärkkäinen, & Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, eds (2014), Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity (Oxford: Regnum, 2014), 34.
[47] Steven Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 95ff.
[48] Isa. 30.15 NRSV.
[49] Alexander Boddy, (1907 republished as ebook by Full Well Ventures, 2012), A Vicar’s Testimony: “Pentecost” at Sunderland.
[50] ibid, Kindle locs.41-44.
[51] ibid, Kindle locs.183-185.
[52] ibid, Kindle loc.392
[53] It is worth noting that though “for the last sixteen years of her life, she [Mary Boddy] was an invalid… she still ministered healing to others.” Stanley M Burgess and Gary B McGee (eds ), Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1988), 91.
[54] I often use these as the three marks of the church, and often wonder why the Lambeth Conference of 1988 gave us five marks of mission but has never seen fit to give the prior marks of the church. I would be interested to know if any readers have similar lists!

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