Dan J. Brennan

A Quote on Prayer

"And prayer is indeed the stuff of life: a way of being, feeling, sensing, understanding, doing, dwelling, caring, seeing, knowing, imagining, reasoning, falling, failing, suffering, relating, and transforming....The idea that prayer is a way of life opens us to contact, conversation, and interaction with creation, others, Scripture, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God in new ways.  Ot allows us to enter fully into anxiety, grief, and loss.  Prayer  as a way of life holds us in a community of care and healing.  It fosters self-understanding, relationship, and memory even in the face of  pain, suffering , and abandonment."
Steven Chase

Pastoral Prayer: A Missional Practice of Loving Your Neighbor

According to Alan Hirsch, the missional impulse is "an outwardly bound movement from one community or individual to another."  Pastoral prayer is one such outward movement.  The dynamic movement of pastoral prayer can happen anywhere outside the church building: IM, blogs, next door neighbor, associates at work, etc.  Paul Wadell states that "The portrait of Jesus presented in the Gospels shows him to be daring, imaginative, and amazingly creative in his efforts to institute and proclaim the reign of God.  Jesus had no problems setting aside laws and traditions if he felt they were stifling the work of God and harming God's people."  He notes "Love doesn't sound so dangerous until you've tried it, especially if you try to imitate the costly love of Christ....Christians are to honor one another, accept one another, care for one another, be servants of one another, bear one another's burdens, be at peace with one another, bear with one another lovingly, and forgive one another.  All these are concrete practices of love--they show us what love actually looks like." 

Men and Women: From Different Planets or the Shared Image of God? Part 2

If I wasn't encouraged by the boldness of Eugene Peterson to awaken the church out of indifference, detachment and boredom when it comes to pastoral praying, I might be nervous about blogging on such passionate intimacy in praying for others, particularly in this second post on cross gender praying.  Pursuing pastoral intimacy in prayer with friends of the same gender is equally meaningful and significant, something I enjoy doing.  However, cross gender praying, intimate cross gender praying with someone who's not your spouse, is rarely ever addressed even though men and women work together (both in the church and outside the church), interact with each other's blogs, IM each other, and socialize in many other forums.  Cross gender praying is something I want to address deeper in a book, but I think Christian men and women in our postmodern world have a rich opportunity to practice relational intimacy before the nonChristian world as well as before others in the Christian community:  men and women were and are created and redeemed for cross gender intimacy in the presence of God.  That's startling fact in a world where in some academic and popular circles it is insisted men and women are from different planets and just have to get along because they are wired differently.

In the Christian community we have something that is unrivaled--as men and women made in the image of God we will share relational intimacy, yes, cross gender relational intimacy in the presence of the relational intimacy shared between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in heaven. 

Some thoughts on missional prayer ministry

I've been thinking about missional prayer ministry. Scot McKnight has observed that the emerging movement believes that praxis shapes theology and theology shapes praxis.  We could also say that prayer ministry shapes the way we believe and the way we believe shapes prayer ministry.  While I was thinking about my own prayer ministry about a year ago, I had this conversation with a professor from Trinity Divinity Evangelical School.  I mentioned briefly to him that I was seeing prayer ministry as ushering an individual into the presence of God through language, intuition, touch, imagination and intimacy.  It was something I was working on.  His first response to me was "But where's the gospel?"  I found that to be interesting, for if anyone has heard me pray, they would hear the gospel--but they would hear it through my own grammar of faith as I prayed, they would "feel it" through touch, and they would "see it" through imagination, etc.  I think this comment reveals the current emerging conversation between orthopraxy and orthodoxy.

In my next post, I'll give some thoughts on the praxis of missional prayer ministry.

What is Relational Prayer?

I was having lunch this past Sunday with some new friends and one of them asked me about where I thought the Lord was leading me.  That's a great question when you're getting to know someone.  I responded that I wasn't sure about the details but I was pretty sure it was going to involve ministry, relational prayer and spiritual formation.  I was then asked, "What do you mean by relational prayer?"  Great question.  If I am going to use this phrase, I should know what I am intending by using it.  That challenged me.  Relational prayer is something I have lived and breathed the past few years.  My notion and practice of relational prayer has been shaped and molded by experience, by others, by the Lord and by reading the wisdom of others.  How do I introduce the practice, the relational discipline, the interpersonal connection I am intending when I use the phrase relational prayer?  Can I do that in a succinct fashion?  Sheila, (my wife) was present in this conversation and she later commented to me in private, "You need a write your book to unpack that."  Yes, but it would be helpful if I could clearly articulate some distinctive essentials about relational prayer in a conversation. 

What is relational prayer?  That feels like it would be so easy for me but then here I was, attempting to explain it to a new person and there was so much I wanted to say, and I was wrestling with what I wanted to emphasize.

Relational Prayer and Spiritual Formation

Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger's new book on Pray without Ceasing: Revitalizing Pastoral Care is about the ministry of prayer in spiritual formation and pastoral care.  Her chapter on the "Theology of Koinonia" is worth the price of the book. 

"Koinonia" she writes, "is the central purpose of Christian pastoral soul care.  The loving communion of persons, both human and divine, is its telos.  Being fully present to others, listening with care, and praying for their needs are ends in themselves.  They are not means to an end"( bold print my emphasis). 

Leanne Payne: The Healing Prayer Model

"The unique intimacy that comes with praying for other's healing holds great power, and we must manage that power wisely" (Rick Richardson, 197-198)

My life has been greatly impacted by the ministry of Leanne Payne.  I am deeply indebted to Payne.  My progress in fighting with self-hatred, my sense of who I am in Christ, my experience of incarnational intimacy with the Lord and others, for that and much more, I am grateful for the Lord has used her.  This post and possible subsequent ones under this title, is some of my thoughts concerning the healing prayer model in her books and ministry.  Much like my other recent posts, this is a conversation about healing, prayer, wholeness, and intimacy. 

Redemptive Intimacy: Radical Healing from Narcissism and Self-Hatred 2

In a previous post, I put forth the idea that it is possible to experience a radical healing from narcissism and self-hatred.  I suggested this radical healing is what I would call redemptive intimacy.  This is different than redemptive or correct theological information.  The roots of self-hatred are too holistic, too spiritual, too relational, for mere correct theological but impersonal and abstract information to overcome. 

The Healing Intimacy of Relational Prayer

I got  Eugene Peterson's Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work in the mail yesterday.  This book explicitly targets pastors, but my immediate reaction to the first chapter is that it has enormous wisdom for everyone involved in pastoral ministry, everyone who wants to go deeper in bearing one another's burdens,  praying for wounded souls, or who want to experience deeper intimacy in their current relationships/friendships. 

His first chapter on "The Pastoral Work of Prayer-Directing: Song of Songs" is probably the closest thing I have seen so far to understanding the deep dynamic of healing intimacy in relational prayer, that is praying with and for others, a dynamic I want to write a book about.

Deep Tracks of Prayer and Sexual Intimacy

I received a tip from Jennifer about a book authored by Eugene H. Peterson back in 1992, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work.   He begins this book in his first chapter with a story about a woman who had been frustrated after seeing so many psychiatrists who finally called him on the phone after a friend had recommended she talked with Peterson.  "Her opening statement to me was, "Well, I guess you want to know all about my sex life--that's what they always wanted to know" (p. 23).  As he begins this story, Peterson astutely observes, "I was interested in the details of her prayer life for the same reason that her psychiatrists had been interested in the details of her sex life--to find out how she handled intimate relationships."  He rightly notes, "I like to tell the story because it juxtaposes two things that crisscross constantly in pastoral work: sexuality and prayer.  And it juxtaposes them in such a way as to show that they are both aspects of a single, created thing: a capacity for intimacy" ( p.24).   

Peterson goes on to state that "Much of pastoral work has to do with two with nurturing intimacy: that is developing relationships in which love is successfully expressed and received--shared."  Yes, I can definitely see that.  Peterson goes on to make it very clear that intimacy is not just for married couples, but for relationships.