Nouslife: The The trouble with the Prayer of Jabez ...

11 February 2006

The The trouble with the Prayer of Jabez ...

Dave Batstone comments on the disengagement of Bruce Wilkinson, author of the Prayer of Jabez, from his projects in Africa. By all accounts it was not an exit covered in glory. Dave Batstone reflects on how the approach of PoJ falls short of the realities of life outside of the global North-West.

Wilkinson's doctrine in fact implies that social structures are immaterial. An individual reciting the right prayer can transcend an AIDS epidemic in his or her village or escape being bought and sold into slavery (like 27 million people on this planet yet today). Perhaps now that Wilkinson has immersed himself in Africa, he better understands that the curse of poverty is not a spiritual punishment, or an indication of a lack of faith. To bring blessings to the orphans and widows of Africa, a dramatic shift in values - political, economic, and personal - will be required. And that challenge cannot be owned by Africans alone; it falls squarely on the shoulders of us in rich nations, who enjoy such great material "blessings."

I entirely agree and in fact it is an issue I wrote about in Praying the Pattern when dealing with the issue of praying for our daily bread in conjunction with 'your kingdom come'. Permit me to excerpt the relevant bit from the book.

I am concerned that we are careful with this aspect of prayer. It would be a tragedy if we allowed it to be co-opted by the prosperity teaching that goes on in some Christian circles and in various parts of the world. By this I mean the kind of teaching that has at various times been characterised as 'name it and claim it' or 'God wants you rich'. As with most bad ideas and like successful lies, there is enough truth in it to carry conviction for those who take it on board. In this case the truths it picks up and uses are that it is God's will that we should be provided for, and that God's world reflects God's will for provision to be be made and God's love and care for humanity. The difficulty is that these true observations are then made out to be inflexible laws, wrested from their context and end up serving human pride and veniality quite apart from the actual will of God. So let's pay some attention to the clause in context.

This clause of the prayer seems to reflect the context of the sermon on the mount in that it follows on from praying for God's will to be done, in this way echoing the teaching about seeking God's priorities first and letting God provide the things we need. But we should also place this in the contexts firstly of scripture where voluntary giving has a big place and a major theme of the gospels is warnings against wealth and accumulation of riches. The second context is one of a world where many faithful Christians have starved to death in famines and have not seen God's provision of food. I would argue that this is because, at least in part (no claims to solve the perennial questions about evil and a God of love here), the promise of provision is set within a context of an ecosystem and social systems that have largely worked in a providing way. However, if corporately we flout too much the will of God in areas touching on environment and social justice, we will find that this will have impacts on provision which will fall disproportionately in the most vulnerable in the world.

So it may seem to certain groups of Christians in affluent societies, that God provides all they need and many of their wants, but the reality is often that they (we) are working the system to our advantage: diverting God's provision meant for answering the prayers of the poor for daily bread to our own use. The fact that 'we' can name it and claim it may be saying more about a privileged position in the global web of trade and power than supernatural aid. We should see this petition in the context of gospel calls to redistribute to the poor. In our global context, praying 'your will be done' in conjunction with 'give us our daily bread' means praying and working for a world where the global systems of production and distribution are fair and sustainable. And it means being prepared to act with restraint with regard to our own desires. Prosperity gospellers should take note of their ecological footprints, and take in the fact that for everyone in the world to live at their level, it would take three to five planet earths. Then they might explain to the rest of us whether they really have faith that God is going to multiply the whole planet like the bread at the feeding of the five thousand.