This week's reflection on encouraging prayer comes from Rev. Elsa Worth at St James Episcopal Church in Keene NH. Over the past few years RenewalWorks has worked with the Diocese of New Hampshire to help their churches understand parishioner's needs and to re-orient church activities around deepening their faith. Of participating in RenewalWorks, Elsa writes....

"The pandemic had not yet fully wound down when St. James embarked on the  RenewalWorks process.  As the priest of the parish, I will admit I was more than a little intimidated by the strong emphasis RenewalWorks puts on the Heart of the Leader.  How could I, especially during the pandemic, be in any way a model or example of faith for my congregation when we often had no way of even being together in the same room?  How could anything about my heart be conveyed in a written blog post or even over Zoom? 

But I knew I had heart to share. I’d experienced an extremely painful personal loss in 2017, and my prayer life had not only helped me through but renewed my life.  Then, given more room to grow in prayer during those strange pandemic years, my faith had deepened in new ways even more profound than I could have imagined.  So even though my contact with my parishioners had been curtailed, I longed for a way to somehow share the joy of prayerfulness in the midst of that grievous and anxious time.  I was hoping I could encourage my parishioners to commit to a regular prayer practice of their own, especially while we were apart so much of the time.  

It seemed like a daunting task, honestly, because I already knew how challenging it is - even in person - to get people praying. I’ve learned how often people can be intimidated by the idea of developing a prayer practice.  Not only is it a sometimes an overwhelming idea to commit time every day to any practice, I’ve come to see that people are often at a loss about how to pray anyway.  They may be stuck with the simplistic prayers learned by heart when they were children.  They may be put off by the formal language of the liturgical prayers we use at church and wonder why they’d want to just read them at home.  They may be shy to speak to, ahem, GOD.  (How on earth do you speak the right way to God?) 

And they may not be sure what to expect out of prayers, or how to gauge if you’re doing it ‘right,’ and then they can feel bad about themselves for not being more sure about these things - more faithful already.  Sadly, sometimes the idea of praying just makes people feel unsure of themselves or even inadequate, and they can simply avoid the whole thing altogether.  Let’s leave this for the professionals. 

I also know that people are praying all the time without even noticing that what they are doing could be framed as prayer.  I thought - maybe I can make some short videos that help people recognize their own way of praying and maybe also try on some new ideas. So, with my uncut, unflattering pandemic hair and sitting in my own prayer chair at home in my pajamas, I made this series of short videos, each suggesting a different way to think about prayer.  The pandemic had required me to learn this new skill of video editing, and I thought, why not put it to work?  And it turned out that not only were these videos popular with our own parish, they have been watched hundreds of times all over the world by virtue of our website and Facebook page.  

Here is one of our favorite of Elsa's 2 min prayer prompt examples:

I’ve come to think that if it had not been such a vulnerable time and I had not been so casual in my appearance and approach, they might not have caught on so much.  And I realized that no one wants a really together looking clergy person telling them how to pray.  What all people need is a seasoned companion in the exploration of faith. Until people come to know Christ as that very companion, they are in need of onramps that are not intimidating to find their own way there - safe people and pathways to encourage them to experiment and stretch.

The pandemic has been over for a while, but my experience sharing myself vulnerably as a person of sincere prayer helped me to understand why my heart as a leader is so important.  Like anything important, faith is caught, not taught.  If people aren’t able to see the church leaders’ spiritual life in action, that leader will have a hard time getting people to be curious or intrigued about putting their own spiritual life in motion.  My approach to teaching has remained casual and personal ever since.  I am not as shy about revealing my love for God and far less concerned about having the ‘right words.’ 

And because I have an active prayer life, I always have new questions.  I always have new struggles and doubts with Scripture and tradition.  I share these struggles and how I’ve made ‘sense’ of them  as well as sharing the obvious joys of my spiritual life. I’ve learned that my heart does matter very much in my parish, and by tending to it and to my own faith practices, I encourage the faith of others."