The Compassion Renaissance

What is the M:6 prayer vow? This vow – based on Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 6:5-13 – is the seed of a prayer discipline. We vow to follow Jesus’s direct instruction on how he wishes his follower top pray. The discipline involves the avowed commitment to use prayer as a two-way communication with God and to refrain from: attempting to tell God what we want him to do (“vending machine prayer”; “wishing well prayer”); from using “prayer” as a way to communicate with, or perform for, or influence in any way, other mortals. It is not an exercise in eloquence or a demonstration of religious knowledge. Instead, the M:6 prayer will be a beseeching of his guidance. It will include gratitude for grace, it is asking for direction in character development. It will ask to understand His will – in order for us to accept it and shape our hears and actions in conformity to it. It is asking for forgiveness. Rather than treating God like a consumer-culture-inspired Santa Claus, M:6 prayer inste

  James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World , Oxford UP, 2010. 87 – Noncommercialized art by Christians is, as I said, vital, and growing through organizations such as Image , Christians in the visual arts (or CIVA) [which ended operations in 2022], and the international arts movement (IAM), but such efforts are small and constantly underfunded and, like the commercial art (e.g., Thomas Kinkade), it is typically peripheral to the major galleries and reviews. What is more, this vast commercial empire [of Evangelical cultural production] does not operate in the major centers of culture formation (such as New York City, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles) but rather in medium-sized cities on the periphery (such as Wheaton, Illinois; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Orlando, Florida; and Virginia Beach, Virginia). Third, cultural production in the Evangelical world is overwhelmingly oriented towa

  Godly Prayer vs. Magic Spells: Avoiding the Misuse of Intercessional Prayer  *** Many evangelical Christians have used prayer for too long as a substitute for action, dumping back on God the responsibility for doing what He has already commanded us to do throughout the Bible. Yet neither is social action a substitute for prayer. [John D. Robb, “Strategic Prayer,” Chapter 28, pp. 163-? In Winter and Hawthorne, eds., PERSPECTIVES (on the World Christian Movement), William Carey Library, 2013 ; John D. Robb, Unreached Peoples Program Director with MARC, the Missions Advanced Research and Communications Center of World Vision International.] Make no mistake: We have a whole lot of work to do. When we roll up our sleeves, our prayers will start to mean something.  But prayer without action is just noise. [Rev. Matt Mardis-LeCroy (Senior Minister, Plymouth Church in Des Moines), “Bible teaches us that prayer without action is just noise,” Des Moines Register, Nov. 7, 2017