How Not to Pray in groups

I have to say that this is a nice article on attitudes in praying using the Sermon on the mount as a guide. Good stuff and mostly sensible and sane. I did want to look at the following more closely, however.

Now, what about prayer meetings? Is Jesus condemning those? Well, no, He is not. But He would condemn prayer meetings where people pray to other people rather than to God. If you are in a prayer meeting, or are in a place where other people are going to pray, say, family night, or Ladies' Aid, then beware lest your prayers turn into a performance for the other people there. What you must do instead is lift the people to the very throne room of God. You are not on display for other people, but are rather to be talking with God.

I agree with what is being tried to be communicated. However, there is a potential misunderstanding lurking which could be disabling of praying with others. The reason I say that is that I think we need to be a bit more self-aware of the realities of group dynamics and language. Language is a shared resource. We pray out loud in order to share our prayer with others in the hope that they will add their 'amen' [at least that is the hope and aim]. As such we are bound to be influenced by our inner representation of what others may hear from us and we will be attuning our verbal performance [and I mean that descriptively not as a veiled criticism] to that. In other words we are likely to speak to God differently in a group setting to how we might in our personal prayer because we take account of others' presence and overhearing. Of course, that is where the potential pitfalls lie and which the post I'm referencing draws attention to. But we need to be careful that we don't think that it is somehow hypocritical in itself to do this. It is in fact part of loving our neighbour to do so. The other potential pitfall in not recognising this is that we talk to God in the presence of others as if they are not there. I'm sure that many of us have been in places where it may be that the needs and feelings of the other group members is not apparently being taken seriously enough, even though the person praying may not be acting in a way that is mostly about trying to impress the other group members.

The point is, I guess, that we need to both keep in mind that it is God who is the pre-eminent audience but that we owe it to our co-prayists to speak accessibly, but to do so without slipping into trying to impress them rather than leading them in relating verbally to God.
Green Baggins: How Not to Pray: Filed in: prayer, groups, hypocrisy, piety