Ontario MBs practice prayer

Refresh 2004, a one-day retreat event organized by the Discipleship Ministries of the Canadian Conference in conjunction with the Ontario MB convention, offered a day of relative silence and intentional prayer to more than 40 participants, Feb. 20 at Scott St. MB Church, St. Catharines.

Daniel Wolpert

Daniel Wolpert, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Crookston, Minn. and author of Creating a Life with God: the Call of Ancient Prayer Practices, led the group in two kinds of prayer: praying the Scriptures and the prayer of examen.

Discipleship involves “active practices,” Wolpert said. Although we understand “practice” in relation to our children’s sports and music activities, “it is very challenging for us to carve out time for prayer practice.” Yet, he said, we also desire to “pray without ceasing.”

“The practice is the thing that helps us move where we desire to go.”

Praying with Scripture “takes very seriously that this is the Word of God,” Wolpert explained. It means “we can hear God speaking directly now.”

The hardest thing about this prayer, he said, is letting go of the intellectual question, “What does this passage mean?” Meaning is not unimportant, but here the purpose is “meeting the living God.”

After he had introduced this prayer practice, people scattered throughout the building to follow his instructions on how to read and listen to what God is saying in a Scripture text.

The group was asked to eat the noon meal of soup and sandwiches in silence. Later, Wolpert reflected on silence.

Calling it “indispensable” for a life of faith, he wondered why Christians are so uncomfortable with it. He suggested that “the quasi child abuse of being shushed in church” has made silence a negative experience in the church world, and secondly that the realization we might encounter God and ourselves in silence makes us nervous. It takes faith, he said, that God will be a loving God.

Wolpert described the prayer of examen as an opportunity to notice “where God is actually working” in one’s life. Such prayer is discernment, he said, and the point of discernment is to “move as God wants me to into the future.” As they had done in the morning, participants scattered to practice this prayer individually. They also expressed what they heard from God by drawing pictures on a large sheet of paper.

The retreat ended with the opportunity to drop a pebble into a bowl of water as a reminder of prayer’s role in “developing a life that ripples.”

Responses to the experience indicated that people had come with varying levels of familiarity with these prayer practices. Whether used to them or not, however, they seemed to appreciate the opportunity to learn more about prayer and to immediately practice it.

Similar Refresh 2004 retreats will be held in Saskatoon (Mar. 12), Calgary (Mar. 19) and Montreal (tba).

—Dora Dueck