In a meeting earlier today, I was taking notes and in order to try to express a nuance found myself making a neologism in the phrase, "to participray 'your kingdom come'.
It was an attempt to capture the idea of praying but recognising that we are often called to be part of the answer to our own petitions. And indeed, to be engaged in an ongoing dialogical process around the petition -discerning different dimensions of what impinges on the petition and being open to nudges from God about what to pay attention to or to bring to the foreground of our prayer and action.
In this I know that I am indebted to explorations as a relatively young Christian in intercessory prayer. One of the big take-aways for me from those explorations was the idea that intercessory prayer might be distinguished from petitionary prayer*. In this schema of prayer, petitionary prayer is where a person names before God a situation and asks a particular thing: a desired outcome is commended to God; a request has been presented. Quite a lot of everyday praying is petitionary and this conceptualisation leads to the idea that God responds to such petitions with, for example, "Yes, no or not yet". This is often the kind of praying that is actually envisaged by many people when they talk about being persistent in prayer.
However, this is not what the kind of writers I was reading meant when they talked about intercessory prayer. In this sort of account, intercessory prayer involved more empathy, self-identification with the matter of prayer and a more dialogical approach. To unpack those a bit more ... empathy is about having a sense of fellow-feeling with the suffering, with the groanings of those who are the subject of the prayerful concern This correlates to an emotional connection and commitment to the matter at hand. By self-identification, I'm getting at that connection and commitment: we begin to make the concern our own and to hold it, as our own, before God. It is dialogical in the sense that I mentioned above in writing that it involves contemplating the matter and seeing it from different angles, finding out more about the context and entailments: it is dialogical with the context and the wider concerns involved. It is also dialogical in not stopping with presenting a request to God and simply waiting for a 'no' or a 'yes' or 'wait'. Rather, that request is a starting point for the kind of investigation just mentioned and also to listening to God: what does God seem to lay on our hearts or awareness in relation to our concern? How does God nudge us to develop our request? Does God seem to be keeping us focused on some particular element? Does God bring to us something new, a perspective or new development to incorporate?
And, I'd add 'participatory'. In inviting us to intercession, God invites us to share the Divine concern. A scriptural model for this might be Abram at Mamre. Abram offers the three figures (later named 'the Lord') hospitality. At the end of the visit (one of) the visitors asks whether they can share with Abram what they're about to do and there follows a haggle in which Abram appears to beat the Lord down to sparing Lot and his family from a disaster about to befall Sodom. That dialogue might be regarded as a kind of prototype of intercession. Intercession is being drawn into God's concern and learning to share it and to share the playing out of what happens.
'Participatory' also, to my mind, is about the possibility -even likelihood- that in some way or ways, we seek to be part of the 'answer' to our own prayers. At a simple level this could be exampled as praying about just trade in the world would go along with promoting and buying fairly traded goods. Or, presenting concerns for climate change would tend to suggest that we should be seeking changes in lifestyle to downsize our carbon footprints.
So, my question beyond these considerations is how we do this not just individually (the prayer-warrior model, perhaps) but in company? In practice, how do we change a typical prayer meeting from a collecting of concerns in prayer leading to a serial presenting of requests (more or less elaborated), to a sharing, naming, listening and discerning mode in which we begin also to share what we think God is responding and discerning those promptings and tentative suggestions we begin to sense?
I think that this implies a different way of organising prayer meetings than I usually see. I think it also implies a re-founding of Christian shared prayer such that our default understanding and practices are reformed.
Notes
* Obviously people's use of terminology may vary. So I sit loose to the terminology. This is how the terms and ideas lodge in my brain. Please do adapt and adjust if yours differs.
