Yes! -Prayer beyond words and evangelism

Andy G at Emerging Evangelism writes about an encounter following a youth death in their community after which they kept the church building open for people to come and pray or whatever. The incident he narrates is significant for me in that it illustrates things I have been saying in relation to the importance of how we relate to the new spiritualities that are growing up. "A couple of girls, aged around 15, came in. They said they wanted to prtay, but had never prayed before. What should they do? It was the verb that got me thinking. They didn’t ask ‘what should we say?’, they asked ‘what should we do?’ So I introduced them to apophatic prayer - prayer beyond words. I talked them through a basic relaxation exercise, then I told them 3 minutes’ worth about the God who made and loved them and the Saviour who died for them and now sits with God, praying for them. I invited them to be themselves quietly in the presence of God and Christ, without feeling a need to say anything if they didn’t want to. So we sat there, in companiable silence - three of us down in Galleywood, three Persons of God up above. It felt right. I met one of them a few weeks ago. She said she’s prayed like that everyday since, and she felt different because she had. No, I haven’t seen her in church. But it’s a start."
And the point is that it is not so much the preaching [there was only something going on indirectly at that level] but the showing of ways to meditate and be in God's presence. It may be that Andy was able to start further on with people in a more fully Christian country [?] and so the stuff about Christ sitting at God's side to intercede was less problematic than it might have been here, however the instinct is right. We need to share what we have and not be too apologetic about what that is. We need to trust that God's spirit is active.
Emerging Evangelism � prayer beyond words and evangelism.
Some of my blog posts that impinge on this topic:
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2005/06/silence-is-golden.html
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2005/06/shamanic-retreats.html
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2005/06/new-spirituality-apologetics.html