Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers
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Overview
"Prayer is not so much about convincing God to do what we want God to do as it is about convincing ourselves to do what God wants us to do." —from the Introduction
Activists Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove show how prayer and action must go together. Their exposition of key Bible passages provides concrete examples of how a life of prayer fuels social engagement and the work of justice. Phrases like "give us this day our daily bread" and "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" take on new meaning when applied to feeding the hungry or advocating for international debt relief.
If you hope to see God change society, you must be an ordinary radical who prays—and then is ready to become the answer to your own prayers.
Synopsis
Activists Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove show how prayer and action must go together. Their exposition of key Bible passages provides concrete examples of how a life of prayer fuels social engagement and the work of justice.
Publishers Weekly
This latest publication from the new monasticism movement is the third book each for the two young Christian activist-authors, and it offers fresh insight on the well-worn topic of prayer. Some themes are repeated from earlier works, but the book deftly succeeds in drawing the reader out of the weeds of daily life and into a more spacious field. The text is structured around three New Testament prayers: the Lord's Prayer, Christ's intercessory prayer in Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John and Paul's prayer in the first chapter of Ephesians. From the very first pronoun of the familiar Lord's Prayer ("our"), the authors extract a compelling sermon on the power and centrality of community in Christian life and thought. The dominant theme-that prayer invites human beings into a partnership with God in answering prayer-is enlivened with earthy tales from the authors' own lives, wrenching stories of service and redemption from the people they know and lesser-known anecdotes from Christian history and sociology. Readers will never see prayer or community in quite the same way again. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Editorials
Marva J. Dawn
"Not everyone will agree with every particular detail of biblical interpretation in this book by Claiborne and Wilson-Hartgrove, but no one can deny the truth of their main argument: God is calling each and all of us to be eager agents fulfilling His purposes in the world! This book compels us passionately to ask, in the power of the Holy Spirit, 'How am I "putting legs on my prayers"?' This is a tested book and a necessary one!"Christine D. Pohl
"Who learns more fully about the importance of prayer than folks living in Christian community and engaged in social activism? The authors of this wonderful little book share graciously and truthfully from the spiritual wisdom they have gathered."Richard Rohr
"God always raises up new and courageous voices when the church is tempted to forget its own gospel. Here are two of those voices—and two who have been made into the answer to our own fervent prayers."Bart Campolo
"Jonathan and Shane—along with the many friends they quote and tell stories about in these pages—are on a journey together toward a bold and beautiful way of living that makes people more truly alive. As one trying hard to stay that same course, I am more than grateful to them for sharing in such clear and practical language what they have been learning along the way about prayer, about community, and about keeping faith with God and our brothers and sisters with their backs against the wall."Christopher L. Heuertz
"Jonathan and Shane, contemplative activists, humble prophets, and sincere lovers of humanity and God, provoke a new way of understanding prayer. Avoiding the tendency to reduce prayer to 'three easy steps' or trite formulas, Jonathan and Shane press the integrity of our prayer lives by challenging us to live into our prayerfulness. Rather than suggesting prayer as wishful thinking or hopefulness wrapped around memorized bedtime recitations, Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers recovers the essence of truly prayerful life—it's the recovery of a sacrificial embodiment of our prayers. God's answer to our prayers might be as close, or as far away, as our willingness to be available as part of the solution. Jonathan and Shane make this simple truth accessible and available, inspiring us to an authentic prayer life—a life lived to answer prayers."Calvin Miller
"Claiborne and Wilson-Hartgrove have slipped the bonds of the ordinary and leapt the chasm of the customary. They have stood at brightly burning bushes that for most of us just won't catch fire. This book is a small invocation which, once prayed, calls for those who thought they knew the far country to see it for the first time. The far country is not so far as we supposed: it lies vivid and visible betwen our 'our Fathers' and our 'thy will be dones.'"Publishers Weekly
This latest publication from the new monasticism movement is the third book each for the two young Christian activist-authors, and it offers fresh insight on the well-worn topic of prayer. Some themes are repeated from earlier works, but the book deftly succeeds in drawing the reader out of the weeds of daily life and into a more spacious field. The text is structured around three New Testament prayers: the Lord's Prayer, Christ's intercessory prayer in Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John and Paul's prayer in the first chapter of Ephesians. From the very first pronoun of the familiar Lord's Prayer ("our"), the authors extract a compelling sermon on the power and centrality of community in Christian life and thought. The dominant theme-that prayer invites human beings into a partnership with God in answering prayer-is enlivened with earthy tales from the authors' own lives, wrenching stories of service and redemption from the people they know and lesser-known anecdotes from Christian history and sociology. Readers will never see prayer or community in quite the same way again. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
Sometimes spiritual writers make their mark by demystifying the mystical. Warner's (Hardcore Zen) effort goes beyond rendering Zen Buddhism itself accessible to showing how his own unglamorous and knockabout life indicates that special reverence for Zen "masters" is misplaced. Becoming the Answer is by two Christian activists whose work, together and separately, emphasizes the radical and communitarian aspects of Jesus's message; along the way, they offer new insights into the Lord's Prayer, John 17, and Ephesians 1:15-23.
Fatica, the controversial speaker and focus of the HBO documentary Hard as Nails, espouses a more athletic, theologically conventional Christianity in his ministry. His is an evangelical Catholicism with a hectoring overtone that reinvents "muscular Christianity" for today's adolescents. Here he mixes memoir, story, example, and anecdote to drive his message of heart-conversion home. All are for most collections.
—Graham Christian