Today my book-baby is born, and I arrive at the day grateful, exhausted, and excited – just like many other parents. What a joy it is to share with you a message that has been long growing within me, from the years of leading retreats and through immersing myself in the field of Christian spirituality with my master’s degree.
The book is filled with ways to pray – not only the seven time-tested practices that I outline in the seven chapters, but many hands-on exercises within the chapters themselves. So that you can try them out, whether you’re new to the way of praying or consider yourself a seasoned pray-er.
To buy a copy of the book, click here for links to purchase in the UK, the States, and Australia.
Want to use the book with a group? We’ve got that covered for you. Following are two options to help you lead a small group through the material:
The Home Group site features videos of me interviewing seven amazing people who know a thing or two about prayer. The videos are about 18-30 minutes long, and in many of them the interviewee leads us in the prayer practice. You’ll also find background reading and discussion starters. (I think you’ll benefit from these videos if you want watch on your own as well.)
Want something shorter? Sign up to The Big Church Read where you can access seven videos of me introducing each chapter, with each video about five minutes each. You’ll also have access to a leader’s guide with suggested prayer activities and discussion questions. They are also offering bulk discounts on the book.
No need for a video component? Here’s the leader’s guide, with an outline of each session with prayer exercises and questions for discussion. Want to read the introduction and first chapter? Here’s the British version and the American.
How about the free Youversion 7 days devotional journey? You can download that here. Some inspirational quotations, ready to share on social media? That’s here.
Please do leave a review, including on Goodreads – honest reviews from readers make such a difference in spreading the word.
Thanks for considering journeying with me in prayer. I’m confident that God will be delighted to hear from you.
Below, some images from our launch at church on 12 September 2021.
As we explore different ways to pray, we realize that sometimes the best practice is simply stopping and resting – or taking time to create, as we hear from my lovely editor, Elizabeth Neep. (And don’t miss last week’s funny and thoughtful contribution from my US editor, Dave Zimmerman.)
One of Elizabeth’s creations.
For most people, the global pandemic is synonymous with slowing down. Seemingly overnight, commutes were halted, city streets abandoned, projects and parties postponed. And yet, for me, things were only just getting started.
After a season of waiting (one that looks shorter and shorter the further away I am from it), I entered this now iconic year with a new job, the opportunity to develop a brand-new imprint for SPCK and seven book deals to honour in my spare time. I don’t say this to show off (if the runaway success of John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry is anything to go by, the glorification of busyness is no longer in vogue anyway!) but to say that, from the outside looking in, I was having my most productive year yet. And I was – professionally.
The truth is, as ‘productive’ as I like to consider myself, we all have the same twenty-four hours in the day. And, for every moment I have spent advancing in my career, I have not spent my time doing other things: I see necessary life admin as an annoyance and my long-suffering boyfriend has had to be content with the scraps of my time. And the reason? I too often see ‘productivity’ as a linear line graph, a steady climb, countless things I can tick off the to-do list, neat and defined. Thankfully, God doesn’t see things the same way as me.
I can’t tell you how many times I have come to God with my neatly structured agenda of the things I want to thank him for and say sorry for before swiftly moving on to my requests. I can’t tell you how many times I have asked for specific answers, for guidance, to then get nothing apart from a nebulous ‘just rest’ or ‘just be with me’ or (perhaps most frustratingly of all) ‘why don’t you go and paint?’. But why would I go and paint when I have a thousand jobs people are chasing me for? I don’t need to paint a picture or even know what to paint. And where on earth would I hang it? Time again God reminds me it’s not about the outcome.
Where my (perceived) productivity looks like an ascending line graph, God’s productivity looks like a deepening, the gentle sanding of a stone until it is shiny and smooth, a ‘task’ that is never ticked off the to-do list but is even more productive for the fact it’s never ‘done’. It’s the kind of productivity that sees us cultivate deep and long-lasting relationships, not by checking in once every month because we have to but laughing with each other late into the night because we want to. It’s the kind of productivity that brings us back to the pages of the Bible, the one book we can never finish because even though we’ve read the words before, we are invited to enjoy the same lines a million different ways. It’s the kind of productivity that scribbles over my agenda and asks me to paint, precisely because it’s not for anyone, and though I might not even know what I’m painting, God knows that somewhere along the way, I will stop thinking about the end product and just enjoy playing and resting with him.
Which paradoxically, I am learning (again and again and again…) is the most productive thing we can ever hope to (not) achieve.
Elizabeth Neep is a Senior Commissioning Editor at SPCK, where she heads up their Form imprint. She is also a novelist writing under her name and Lizzie O’Hagan, a trustee for Kintsugi Hope and can usually be found drinking flat whites around Central London.
Find out more about 7 Ways to Prayhere, including how to pre-order in the US, UK, and Australia. Publication date is Tuesday!
Welcome to a new series on prayer! As I launch my book 7 Ways to Pray, I’m delighted to share with you each week a blogpost from someone special. One of the things I love about prayer is that we’re all so different and thus enjoy different ways to pray. Shining the spotlight on the experiences of others will be a rich and encouraging experience, as you’ll see from this first post.
Who better to kick off the series than my editors? I have a huge respect for this breed of individual – having been one previously, I know how fragile the author ego can be, for instance. They bring an added extra to book projects, and the fingerprints of Dave Zimmerman, my US editor, and Elizabeth Neep, my UK one, are all over this project in fantastic ways. Today we hear from Dave – I challenge you not to chuckle (and then ponder deeply) – and next week we’ll hear from Elizabeth. Enjoy!
Not every editor gets to work for a Big Five publisher (or Big Four these days, as some entities are too big to fail but not too big to be absorbed into something bigger). Not all of us can take the company jet to an author lunch, and order the jumbo shrimp instead of the shrimpy shrimp, and then fly back to the Big Apple to ring the bell at an IPO or accompany their author to a taping of The View. No, some of us do our editing in relative quietude, at the desks of nonprofits, serving as the metaphorical sous-chefs to our authors as they bake the metaphorical bread of their books for us to cast onto the metaphorical waters of the book selling marketplace, with hopes of many happy returns (and very few sad ones).
Some of us on that end of the editorial spectrum, it should be said, occasionally do get to spend time in a castle. I can’t speak for my colleague Elizabeth Neep, Amy’s British editor for 7 Ways to Pray (although being in England she’s statistically more likely than I to drive past a castle on her commute). But drive past a castle on my commute I do, because tucked away on the front range of the Rocky Mountains of southern Colorado is the Glen Eyrie Castle and Conference Center, which, like NavPress, is a ministry of The Navigators. And every September that castle is opened to myself and my colleagues at The Navigators HQ for a day of prayer.
Dave and a colleague at the Glen Eyrie Castle and Conference Center. Photo by Kara Zimmerman.
We pray for the various ministries of The Navigators. We pray for unity among our diverse and distributed staff. We pray for the needs of our world and our nation and for the resiliency of our shared mission. And we end our day by dispersing into extended periods of time alone with God.
On one such day of prayer I decided I would take a hike as high into the hills as my little legs and delicate deck shoes would take me. I found a trail and kept on going, chatting with God as I went. The higher I went the thinner the air got, and the sparser the foliage. Eventually the trail leveled off relatively high against the tree line, and I decided to sit a bit and journal.
I am not a natural pray-er. Amy’s book has been very good for me in that way. I need prompts and practices to latch onto, because otherwise my mind wanders and my prayers turn to mutters.
On occasions like this day of prayer, however, I’m a little better able to focus. Prayer is the point of the day, and our program has primed my pump. I have lots of thoughts, but those thoughts are mostly turned toward God, thanks to the careful curation of my colleagues.
Photo credit: Kara Zimmerman
So there I found myself, at the top of a trail, pump primed, a journal in one hand and a pen in the other. I offered a moment of consecration and commenced to drafting a dialogue with God. It was pretty impressive if I do say so myself: earthy but elegant, pious but authentic. I was in some kind of zone.
Then I got restless, so I started walking again, taking joy in the day. I had a thought and I decided to share it with God as I walked. “You know what would make this time of prayer perfect?” I offered. “I would love to see some wildlife.”
It’s worth noting here that seeing wildlife on the grounds of the Glen Eyrie Castle and Conference Center is not at all uncommon. We are, after all, up against the Rockies, surrounded by mule deer and bobcats and bears and bighorn sheep. This was not, in my pious mind, an extravagant request.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of movement. I turned my head and found myself face to face with a dragonfly.
I turned to my left and saw a squirrel. I turned to my right and saw a bird.
I turned my attention back to God. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know,” I believe God said to me in that moment. “I don’t care.”
It can seem like a faith crisis to hear the voice of God tell you he doesn’t care about what you want. I don’t know about you, but I have been steeped for some time in popular theologies that suggest God is actually preoccupied with what we want. The ways that we so often pray reflect that assumption: We list our requests or register our complaints or otherwise offer God a guided tour through our drama.
That’s one reason why books on prayer abound, why books like Amy’s are so important. As natural and primal as talking to God is, what constitutes a meaningful conversation with God can easily get all jumbled up in our heads. We need guidance. We need a mix of confidence and humility. We need to think about what prayer is. And we need to get over ourselves a little.
On that day of prayer I had gotten a bit lofty. I needed to return to earth. In his grace, God gave me a lift.
When I heard God say he didn’t care about my request, I pictured him smiling as he said it. I don’t have a mental image of what God looks like, for the record, any more than I heard an audible voice deliver me that message. But God made himself manifest to me in that lofty space, during that consecrated time, and I believe he conveyed clearly to me that (1) he was for me and (2) I could maybe take things down a notch.
I envisioned myself sharing a chuckle with God, remembering that I am made of the dust of the earth, like the grass that inevitably withers—but also remembering that it was God himself who breathed life into me, and that he made me, and you, a little lower than the angels, in his own image and likeness.
I ended my day of prayer shortly after I shared that laugh with the God of the universe. I walked back down the hill to the parking lot of the Glen Eyrie Castle and Conference Center, hopped in my car, and drove home. And I have remembered that divine encounter ever since.
David Zimmerman is Publisher of NavPress, the publishing arm of The Navigators. He started his editorial career at InterVarsity Press. His Twitter bio says that he’s a “Middle aged middle child in middle management. I work as a publisher of Christian nonfiction. I’m interested in books, music, work, and everyday life.” Find him at Twitter.
Find out more about 7 Ways to Prayhere, including how to pre-order in the US, UK, and Australia.
