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Podcast: The Most Important Thing Our Churches Have Forgotten to Do (Paul Miller)

February 19, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Are Our Churches Praying Together?

In this episode, Paul Miller deepens our understanding of prayer by highlighting why we need to pray with one another if we really want to experience the full blessing of prayer.

A Praying Church

A Praying Church

Paul E. Miller

Paul E. Miller, bestselling author of A Praying Life, has written A Praying Church to cast a vision and provide direction for a return to the simple yet life-changing practice of praying together.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:13 - The Struggle to Pray

Matt Tully
Paul, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Paul Miller
Thank you, Matt. It’s great to be here.

Matt Tully
I think it’s fair to say that prayer is one of those topics that most of us maybe feel a little bit conflicted about. On the one hand, we know that it’s really important, foundationally important, for our lives as Christians. And maybe we’ve even experienced seasons or moments of real vibrancy in our prayer life. We felt the Lord coming near to us in prayer, and we’ve loved that, and yet I also think we can feel a sense of guilt or inadequacy or frustration when it comes to our prayer lives. So I guess I wonder first, to start us off, can you resonate with that kind of seemingly oxymoronic sense that we can have sometimes when it comes to prayer?

Paul Miller
Yeah. Even though I’ve written a book on prayer and I’ve done—I don’t know how many—a hundred seminars on prayer—

Matt Tully
You’re kind of the prayer guy.

Paul Miller
Yeah, yeah, I’m kind of the prayer guy. I pray for my praying because it’s really a function of my faith life, of my confidence that the unseen world has more weight than the seen world. And there’s been no culture in the history of humanity more than ours that has flipped that. That sentence was too complicated. In other words, our world is just alien to faith.

Matt Tully
The unseen world is out of our mind in our society today.

Paul Miller
Yeah. Actually, there was some speculation, and I think even John Owen mentions this, but in the early church the word “Holy Spirit”—there are a couple of references in Isaiah to the Holy Spirit, but it’s really Jesus who begins to use the phrase “Holy Spirit.” But it’s in the context of a world that’s saturated with overt demons. And John Owen even makes a reference to this, that “holy” is to differentiate. Because if someone were to say, There’s a spirit in my closet, most of us would think, and assuming he’s not kooky, that would make us afraid.

Matt Tully
And we see in the New Testament that “unclean spirits” are everywhere.

Paul Miller
That’s right. And so in this pre-modern world, which saw things better than our modern world, you had to differentiate. So Jesus is saying this is a Spirit that’s good. But our world is so spirit-less. tf their world was filled with The dangers of evil, with ours it’s just like God has disappeared.

Matt Tully
This materialism that surrounds us and that sort of pervades our secular culture, you think that’s part of the reason that prayer can feel difficult for us at times.

Paul Miller
Oh, yeah. If you just look at the history of civilizations, prayer is omnipresent in some form. It’s done badly. It’s always an attempt to control the gods (small “g” gods), but at least people are aware that the unseen world has weight. And there’s nothing in our world, and in fact, there’s this active suppression of that. It’s a very active suppression. So there’s the legal act of suppression, but that really gets into people’s bones. For example, I tell the story in A Praying Life about when I was doing a science experiment with my daughter Emily. She was in seventh grade. I took it over from my wife, who had accidentally thrown out the science experiment of my son the year before. It looked like a bag of trash. Anyway, so we were doing this stream project. We were analyzing bacterial levels of streams, and I said to Emily, Let’s pray. And so we prayed, and God helped us. So Emily said, Okay, dad, we have to log everything we did. What was the first thing we did? And I said we prayed. And she said, Dad, I can’t write that. And of course now I’m in dad fighting mode.

Matt Tully
I’m going to teach her something here.

Paul Miller
Yeah. I’m not going to give the ground on this. I said, Well, why not? She said, They don’t want that. All her friends were Christian. We went to church every Sunday. She was in a Christian school. She was in this Christian bubble, and yet she had inhaled the spirit of the age at seventh

Matt Tully
Yeah. What an awesome little microcosm of the world that we live in—that mindset. As you said, you are the author of, and probably what people know you best for, your book A Praying Life. It’s this massive bestselling book that I think touches and responds to the sense of frustration that we can feel when it comes to our prayer lives. And you offer a real breath of fresh air. Take us back briefly to before you wrote that book. What was it in your own experience, your own heart, that made you think, I need to study this for myself more, and perhaps I need to even write something on this?

Paul Miller
The things that fed my prayer life are really, as I try to capture in the book on the J curve, where the idea that the “J” is dying and rising with Christ, and it was that sense in Paul. I had immersed myself in the 1980s in justification by faith and had written a course on that that was really influential in the church, but I couldn’t escape this pattern in Paul that he actually just didn’t preach the gospel, but his life looked like the shape of it. And I begin to ask God to draw me into that. And he just drew me into a lot of suffering. And in that suffering, I learned to pray. I did not set out to study this. There’s almost nothing in my life I set out to study. God kept drawing me into, what Paul calls in Philippians 2:10, a fellowship of sharing in his suffering. And that was my school of prayer.

Matt Tully
So prayer was less of this topic that you set out to think about because it was the right thing to do as a Christian, and it sounds like it was more of a necessity, given what God was putting you through.

Paul Miller
Yeah. I developed the prayer cards, which a lot of people use and have been helpful, in one of the hardest years of my life when the suffering was so great that I was just frozen spiritually. I was filled with faith, but absolutely frozen. The only thing I could do is sit on the couch in the morning for twenty minutes and read Psalm 23. I call them these prompts from the Spirit. They’re not at the level of the word of God, but I do think the Spirit, and I don’t like using the phrase “speak” because it can elevate our intuition. It could just be human intuition. You don’t know. But this little thought, Put the word to work, came to my mind and I thought, Well, how do I do that? And I wrote out these prayer cards. I took a piece of paper (I didn’t have any three by five cards) and cut it up and made my first three by five cards, and I still use them. I would write out a Scripture verse and a situation, and then just begin to pray them.

Matt Tully
In your experience talking to Christians about prayer and about their prayer lives, do you find that many Christians come to prayer to rediscover the importance of prayer in the midst of suffering like you did?

Paul Miller
Oh yeah. In A Praying Church I talk about the praying Annas in the temple, and I have yet to meet Anna in the temple, or a Simeon in the temple that has not learned how to pray through suffering. I mean, it does help to have teaching and mentoring on that. It really, really does. But it’s hard to learn how to pray if you think you’re in control of your life. It helps to have kids.

Matt Tully
That’ll teach you that quick.

Paul Miller
That’ll teach you that.

09:02 - Pray Like a Child

Matt Tully
I recently did a search on Amazon for books on prayer, and I saw that there were over 70,000 results. I’m sure that’s not a complete list in many ways. And it just got me thinking that many people have said many, many things about prayer—both Christians, as we said, but as you were emphasizing earlier, non-Christians as well often value some kind of prayer. So if you had to boil down your core message—the core message behind A Praying Life; behind your ministry; when you help people with prayer; and even this new book, A Praying Church; the core idea about prayer that you would want people to get—what would you say that is?

Paul Miller
I’ll say it simply, and then I’ll say it complicated. Here’s the simple one: it’s just what Jesus tells his disciples—become like a little child. Don’t overthink this. Tell God what’s on your heart. Bring your heart as it is, messy, to God. Grace is for sinners. You qualify. Don’t go fixed up. Just bring the real you to the real God.

Matt Tully
That’s seemingly so simple and so obvious, and yet I’m sure we all can feel that temptation to kind of fix ourselves up before we go to God. Why do we do that?

Paul Miller
This is the more complicated answer. Partly, it’s the human heart, but in the church, and it’s particularly in the world of prayer, there is a Gnosticism that functions at the DNA level of the church. And I do mention this in a praying life, that spirituality is kind of on a hierarchy. You have to say it the right way, or your heart has to feel right. There’s a lot of legalism that people bring to prayer, even in the feelings world. Like, My prayer life should feel good. That’s like saying my marriage should feel good. Well, I mean, that’s all over the map. You know what I mean?

Matt Tully
Sometimes it does.

Paul Miller
A lot of times it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. So our world is dominated by kind of a secularized pietism now. Pietism was very focused on how I’m feeling in relationship to God. And so it searches in prayer for a kind of feeling. So that’s what I mean. So it’s a kind of a feeling legalism. And that’s actually very Gnostic, where you’re hunting for a particular emotion. Gnosticism tries to float above this world.

Matt Tully
There’s a secret knowledge or experience that we want to attain somehow.

Paul Miller
That’s right. And you’re trying to escape your embodiment. And that’s why becoming a little child is so important. Just go as you are to God. Don’t try to be something you’re not. And Gnosticism and one of its modern stepchildren, pietism, tries to create a new you to improve your praying, or hunt for a new you. It’s a kind of hypocrisy.

Matt Tully
One of the most interesting, penetrating things that you say in A Praying Church, your new book on corporate prayer, is you highlight how we often tend to relegate prayer to the world of feelings. And we even approach it almost with the mindset of it’s a kind of personal therapy, rather than it is a real conversation with God. Can you unpack how that approach to prayer could impact even our motivation for praying with other people?

Paul Miller
Well, if it doesn’t feel good, then we’re not going to want to do it. And one of the most striking differences between praying with other people and just your own individual prayer life is that with other people, you have to love them in the act of prayer. Now, it really does help to have someone to be schooled in how to pray so they don’t get stuck with what I call Aunt Edna’s hip.

Matt Tully
We all know exactly what you’re saying.

Paul Miller
Yeah. Body parts. Although, as I’m getting older I want to know from Aunt Edna, What doctor are you going to?

Matt Tully
Do you have any recommendations?

Paul Miller
Any recommendations? So people measure their prayer meeting by the feeling of it. And there are some times that prayer meetings are amazing, just like your personal time, but a lot of time it’s just work, like a lot of things like. How do I feel about my work? But if someone were to say, You know, I don’t really feel good about my work today. Actually, a lot of people are talking that way now. But in general in the normal world, if someone doesn’t feel good about their work, they still have to work.

Matt Tully
It’s almost kind of expected at times. You just know that work sometimes often feels like work. But you’ve still got to do it. It’s still good for you.

Paul Miller .
And the great thing is it’s connected with getting a paycheck and things like that. So we bring this feeling, what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the “emotivism.” That’s his word for it. I don’t know what I call it in The J Curve book. It’s very strong in the world of prayer, that I should have a sense of God. Well, sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. Why are you looking inward when this is actually a moving outward.

Matt Tully
And even if you don’t have this intimate, special, heightened sense of God, it doesn’t mean the prayer was pointless or ineffective or not worth it.

Paul Miller
Emotions are the tail. And this is not a new idea; a lot of people have said this. Emotions follow the heart. So it’s the bringing the heart to God, and then doing that in community together.

14:46 - The Prayerless Church

Matt Tully
As we’ve said already, your newest book with Crossway is called A Praying Church, and you’re trying to help Christians not just pray individually and see the value of that but actually see the special importance, the special power, of praying together with other believers in many different contexts. But your assessment of the church’s prayer life, the prayer that we do together in many different contexts, is not very good. You write, “The American church is functionally prayerless when it comes to corporate prayer.”

Paul Miller
And Barna backs me up on that. In a recent poll just maybe five years ago in a very extensive study, Barna found that 70 percent of Americans pray at least once in the previous three months. So that includes everybody. And so it is the most common experience. And the majority of those 70 percent are Christians. But of the people that have prayed at least once in the last three months, only 4 percent of them did it with another person. So I’ve got Barna to back me up.

Matt Tully
It’s not a big feature of our spiritual lives, generally.

Paul Miller
Nor of church leadership. Barna. It was maybe twelve years ago that Barna did another research study where they took twelve areas of the church and asked pastors and Christian leaders to rank them in terms of importance. Prayer was at the very bottom. I think there was like 4 percent of pastors, or 5 percent, that put prayer as the first priority. So at every level of the church corporate prayer is a low priority. And what’s striking is that corporate prayer had been one of the dominant features of the church in the 19th century.

Matt Tully
What would you say to somebody listening right now who says, Okay, I get where you’re going with this. You really just want me to go to my church’s prayer meeting. I’ve been there before. It’s so boring. It’s so dry. Is this really what it’s all about? Is this really what we’re called to do is go to church prayer meetings? How would you respond to that?

Paul Miller
Well, first of all, I know a lot of people will say, I don’t even know where I would go to go to a prayer meeting. One of the things I talk about is just from my years of being a participant and then a leader and a teacher within two different praying churches is that there are six things—and I think this is even since I wrote the book—that characterize a praying church. One of them is that there’s a spirit of prayer within a church that gets community. People are quick to pray. It’s happens in the hallways, praying with your wife in the morning (if you’re married), or praying with a good friend. And what it does is it, and you don’t do it for this reason, but there’s this symbiotic loop going on between prayer and faith and love. It really creates a divine community. There’s this awareness of the presence of Jesus in our community.

Matt Tully
When it comes to prayer with other Christians, and even prayer in the context of the local church, sometimes our mind can go right to formal times of prayer, whether it’s a prayer meeting or prayer during the worship service. But there’s also the spontaneous culture of prayer where prayer becomes almost the default reaction that we have to situations that come up. How do you think about the balance of emphasis between the two? How important are more formal, planned times of prayer with other Christians versus cultivating this sense of prayer, a prayerfulness, in our interactions with other believers?

Paul Miller
You get a lovely symbiotic relationship between the two. I was at New Life Church from the beginning of 1973 and there for twenty-three years. Dad started this prayer meeting on Thursday morning after he’d really been through some real suffering. This is my dad, Jack Miller. So he had a Thursday morning prayer meeting that went from seven in the morning until twelve, and he just opened up his house to pray and just invited people in the congregation to come in. And it was a lovely invitation. It wasn’t like, You need to be here. There’s a macho streak that sometimes praying people have.

Matt Tully
Like, We’re going to pray for ten hours straight all night long.

Paul Miller
Yeah, and I am not a fan of prayer walls, prayer lists. Let’s pray in community. You’re not creating a prayer machine. I see a lot of pastors trying to solve the problem of prayer by mobilizing the Annas in the temple. You don’t need to mobilize the Annas in the temple. They’re already praying. Every church has a couple, and they’re really lovely and beautiful. And yeah, you grow them and you should honor them. They’re your wealthy donors who are really making this church work. So he had this lovely prayer meeting that wasn’t macho. He would invite people, Hey, come in on your way to work and we’ll pray for you. So there was a kind of a cadence. I don’t think any staff members of our church stayed the whole time. They would come in, Dad would make them tea.

Matt Tully
It was like an open house almost.

Paul Miller
It was like an open house for prayer. It was just lovely. And that then encourages people to pray. And then Dad would model that when someone would say, Would you pray for me for that? Dad would pray for them right then. It was partly because he wasn’t organized like I was.

Matt Tully
You might as well do it right away.

Paul Miller
Yeah, because dad would forget about it. So the one enhances the other.

Matt Tully
It’s so funny how often—and I think we’ve all experienced this. Maybe you haven’t, but most of us have experienced talking to somebody and the conversation is coming to an end and you say, Well, I’ll definitely be sure to pray for that. And it’s like, Why don’t I do that right now? But it’s almost that there's this pressure. It feels too awkward or it feels like something easier just to do it later, even by yourself.

Paul Miller
And what happens is usually you forget. So just to pray right then, and not to set this sort of high, weird, Gnostic spiritual bar. I mean small as spiritual, and just to pray then and keep it simple. I love to get husbands and wives praying together, and friends praying together. I love to mock with other guys, but a mocking culture becomes the sinew of how guys relate, and it kills the ability to just pray together because you feel weird. No one wants to be sort of seen as super spiritual.

Matt Tully
Right. True prayer requires a kind of sincerity and a transparency into how we’re feeling and how we’re doing that is hard when we’re constantly ribbing each other. At one point in the book you describe the various contexts in which you pray with others. And you say something really incredible. You say, “The feel of prayer time with other Christians is resurrection.” What do you mean by that?

Paul Miller
Well, that’s really at the heart of prayer. And there has been this quiet revolution of rediscovering the Holy Spirit among Reformed scholars that began with Bavinck, who influenced Geerhardus Vos, who influenced Ridderbos and John Murray and Richard Gaffin, who just retired from Westminster. He’s really the one who has articulated it with great clarity that particularly within Paul’s corpus, but it’s all through the New Testament, is that the work of the entire Christian life is resurrection. And why is that? It’s because the entire Christian life is shaped by the Spirit of Jesus. Gaffin’s recent book In the Fullness of Time pulls together a lot of his thinking on that, and it’s just breathtaking. Gaffin wrote his stuff later, but my dad discovered that the Spirit of Jesus is at the center of the church. And what it did for dad is it moved all the institutional pieces of the church—the structures like budgets and worship and preaching and a lead pastor—those are all good things, but what I saw is it moved them to the periphery, and it really moved the Spirit of Jesus to the center. And I was in a praying community for twenty years because of my father’s rediscovery. It’s how people in my heritage get filled with the Spirit—we read books about the Spirit. But it really is true. I saw my dad change. His faith grew. The way Gaffin would put it, and my dad would not put it this way, but the way Gaffin would put it is that the gospel is not just Jesus for me. That’s the core of the gospel—the atonement, justification by faith—but it’s Jesus in me. What happened at the resurrection is continually happening in his body. And what is so critical, and this was my dad’s gift to me, is when you look at Luke and Acts and the book of Ephesians, prayer is the conduit into the ministry of the Spirit. And my dad got that, and I saw its effect on him. So I don’t think you can sustain a praying church unless you understand something of that.

24:50 - A Learned Desperation

Matt Tully
So I think compared to most of us, Paul, it would be fair to say that you have a robust prayer life. So you’re consistently praying for an extended time with your wife each morning, with your daughter, with your coworkers as you get to work. And I think our reaction to seeing someone like you in that can be, Wow! He’s really disciplined. That must have required a lot of work, a lot of intentional habit formation. And yet you claim in this book that the most important thing that we need is not discipline but “a learned desperation.” That’s the phrase that you use. I wonder if you can share a little bit more about that.

Paul Miller
It’s just like how life works. I’ve done things without prayer, and they don’t work real well. They don’t last. And the things that I pray for last. I was a history major in college, and I like to study the past and see what happens. I’m a manager. I like to manage things. I like things to go well. And I’ve learned that if you make management central, you end up running over people. My gifts are in management and organization.

Matt Tully
So it’s probably a temptation to then try to manage everything.

Paul Miller
Yeah. I think all of us want to lead with our gift, but it is a gift of the Spirit. They are Spiritual, capital S, Spiritual gifts from the Spirit. They’re only alive in a life of prayer and love.

Matt Tully
Unpack a little bit more the “learned desperation” part, though. What do you mean by desperation? And then what’s the learned component of that?

Paul Miller
I find it best to tell people’s stories. One of the stories that I continue in A Praying Church that I started in A Praying Life was our daughter, Kim, would pace upstairs in the early morning. And I’ll try to make this story brief, but Jill and I would take turns yelling. I do like to tell people I was the assistant yeller.

Matt Tully
Is that because she was up so early?

Paul Miller
She would get up and start pacing, and we didn’t really know why. One morning I decided to go up and just pray with her. When I went upstairs and prayed with her, it was a typical, simple, Lord Jesus, would you quiet Kim’s heart? It was like a fifteen-second prayer. And at the end of that prayer, the only way I can say it is I knew something that I hadn’t known at the beginning of the prayer, and that was that I’d underestimated Kim’s ability to grow and mature as a person, and to grow spiritually. I had put Kim in a box. She’s got a lot of disabilities, and I hadn’t really even thought about it at this time, but almost the entire church has done that with people with intellectual disabilities. So that was December of 2007. In March we moved, and I would go up once a week and pray with her. In March we moved, and her pacing stopped because we moved to a quieter street. The diesel trucks in the factory across the street from our old house had been waking her up and we hadn’t put two and two together. And then I started having devotions with her. I’m kind of following this what I call “prompt,” and I started having devotions with her that spring of 2008. And then I eventually started praying with her and sitting down with her and letting her pray. And her prayer life blossomed, and all this stuff came out of that. And that summer I also went to our pastor and said, I’m going to stop teaching Sunday school because I have to teach Kim. That’s how I start all my books. Either in a small group or Sunday school I would teach a series. And so I stopped my writing. I went down in the basement of the church and with a couple other kids and friends of kids who had disabilities and taught them. And it ended up my wife joined me a year later, Jill, and she said, You know, I could write curriculum for this. And she started writing curriculum. There are a lot of parts to this story, but it ended up launching a Bethesda ministry, we call it Bethesda, of writing curriculum for kids with intellectual disabilities. And hundreds of churches have now used that. That wasn’t part of my plan. There was no plan in there. It was just obedience. There was a whole series of what I call the killing function of the Spirit that I entered into that Paul talks about in Colossians 3 and Romans 8. I was participating in the killing function of the Spirit. I was putting to death a narrow idea I had of Kim, putting to death efficiency in the morning, putting to death my writing. And as I went into the killing function of the Spirit, he brought life out of that.

Matt Tully
It’s so clarifying, too, especially in our day and age when I think we often feel overwhelmed. We feel uncertain about the future and what we should be doing. We feel anxious about what we should be doing in our lives. You’re testifying to a certain clarity power, a simplifying power, as we bathe our lives in prayer.

Paul Miller
I’m a planner. I love to plan. I’ve done far better in management by not spending as much time planning and more time praying. So in that story with Kim and with all those pieces together, it was really important for me to be repenting. When Jesus baptizes with fire, that’s what I see. A praying community that’s not obedient to Jesus will not endure in that prayer, or it’ll just be boring. That’s why at New Life we had elders getting up and repenting. It was a spiritual community, and capital S spiritual. The Spirit of Jesus wants to conform the body of Christ to the beauty of Jesus.

Matt Tully
I think sometimes one of the big hindrances for our prayer lives can be a sense that, ultimately, it doesn’t make a big enough difference or it’s not as quick of a fix for a situation we’re in. And so we can kind of be thinking in our minds, I could either spend more time this morning trying to get that email written and think carefully about how I should word things to my boss or that person. And the thought of then actually putting that aside for a bit and spending more time in prayer about the situation, it can just feel less productive. It can feel like it’s a little bit more of a, I should do it, but I’m not sure it’s really going to actually help me with that. How do you fight against the temptation to view prayer as a less effective, nice thing to do, but when it comes down to it, I’ve got to fix this myself?

Paul Miller
There is a tendency within pietism to sort of make prayer everything. You know what I mean? So you’ve got to work your prayer.

Matt Tully
Prayer is not going to write that email for you.

Paul Miller
Right. It’s not going to write that email for me, and you need to be attentive to your boss, but no matter what I’m doing—I have a tax business on the side, and I have a couple of prayer cards on that—I just pray for it. It needs help. I need help. So I guess it really gets back to unbelief, and I would just say, try it. But try it long enough. I was mentoring some of the staff in our church with prayer, and it was new to them. They were used to management and marketing. I mean, those dominate in the—

Matt Tully
In the pastoral world.

Paul Miller
And it depends on the kind of world you’re in, but in the big church world, they’re very dominant. And one of the guys, maybe during the fourth or fifth week of our cohort, said, This really works. And he’d been hostile in the beginning. And I said to him, What the “it” is is God. He really is a thing.

Matt Tully
And that’s what prayer is ultimately about; it’s about talking to God.

Paul Miller
I actually get nervous about people talking about the power of prayer or prayer works. Prayer is the conduit. It’s God. It’s that my God hears me when I call. I love in the Old Testament the rich language in the Psalms for prayer— Hear me when I cry; I lift up my voice to you; Where are you God? Are you deaf? My wife talks to me that way. Why haven’t you taken out the trash? This is the second week in a row. It’s real communication with a real person.

Matt Tully
It’s so important to remember that. We can so easily slip into, again, viewing prayer as its own isolated thing, even detached from God himself.

Paul Miller
And that’s very strong in the prayer movement.

33:42 - How Can Pastors Cultivate a Community of Prayer?

Matt Tully
You mentioned pastors a minute ago and the training that you’ve done with pastors over the years in churches. I wonder if you could speak to the pastor listening right now who maybe, if he’s being honest, knows he hasn’t done a great job leading his church in prayer—cultivating a community of prayer, giving opportunities for the church to pray together. What are two or three specific things that he could do—next steps for him—to start to change that in his church?

Paul Miller
He should start praying. I would tell him to write out a little prayer card that says you want your church to become a praying church. I wouldn’t do anything for a couple months. I would just slow down new things and just begin to pray every day, God, show me how to do this. I don’t know how to do it. So be like a little child. I tell pastors, Don’t preach on prayer. I just want you to begin to pray. Stop all the planning. Slow your planning life down and to begin to ask God. When I’m working with pastors in small groups, I’ll ask them how powerful is sexual temptation in your life. It’s called confidential groups. And it’s strong. How are you praying about that? And usually it’s just zip. So there’s something really powerful in their life that is a struggle for many of them, and yet they are functionally prayerless with it. Then, I’ll switch to another topic. Do you have any difficult men and women in your church? Often, there is a temptation for wealthy businessmen or women to be dominant because they’re used to leading. Especially if they own their own business, they know how to do it, they’re self-made people, and they often clash with pastors who don’t have much managerial experience. They actually need the help of these guys, but a lot of these guys are just sort of quick and judgmental. And so how are you praying for these people? And there’s very little response. And often these guys will drive pastors out of churches. So how are you beginning to pray for them?

Matt Tully
So you would say that if a pastor would focus on his own prayer life, that eventually that’s going to inevitably have a ripple effect on the church as a whole?

Paul Miller
Yeah. And then I would encourage them probably to just begin, depending on who you have in your staff, to get a prayer meeting started. In Luke 16 with Jesus teaching, start small, and let it grow. Just be careful of turning things into prayer shows and prayer machines. Just let this thing grow steadily. Develop your own confidence in God. Begin to pray with your staff. I generally suggest a separate meeting on prayer. If your primary way of praying is praying before or after a meeting, in a staff meeting, then the meeting eats up prayer. The value of having an hour or a half hour prayer meeting—keep the size of the prayer meeting to your faith size. If you can pray for fifteen minutes well, then take a half hour for a staff prayer meeting, and then take maybe ten minutes to hear, What are you concerned about in your lives? And then we then pray for ten minutes or fifteen minutes together. I even tell them to set a clock. It’s okay with silence. Keep your prayers short. Don’t overstretch your faith. Build your faith slowly.

Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s so good. One final question for you, Paul. In your book you mention your dog.

Paul Miller
Tully.

Matt Tully
Tully. “A very bad golden retriever” I think is the phrase. And I just have to ask, as someone who shares the last name with your dog, Tully, where did you get that name?

Paul Miller
My wife came up with it. I have no idea where she got it. And we had been using Hebrew names for like twenty years for our dogs. And I think we left the blessing of using Hebrew names.

Matt Tully
And everything went downhill from there.

Paul Miller
And everything went downhill.

Matt Tully
Paul, thank you so much for helping all of us to think a little bit more clearly about this thing, prayer, that we've all experienced. It can sometimes feel so mundane to us, but as you said, we’re really tapping into the power of the resurrection when we approach God in prayer, and all the more so when we do it with other Christians. Thank you so much.

Paul Miller
Thank you.

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