MattGlover.com

In 2006 we’re going to explore the spiritual disciplines as a community and setting up this blog is part of the preparation for that. the disciplines are not magical things that put us in touch with God, but practices that have been proven with time to put us in the best place possible for God to speak to and change us. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to focus on a discipline (eg prayer, meditation, fasting etc) each month and use the blog to continue the discussions we start on the weekends and share some of our experiences.

Anyway, I’ve been having a discussion with Steve Said about what the classic disciplines might look like in the places we find ourselves on a normal school or work day. I thought this comment was quite challenging:

Prayer.

The person in the office in the CBD says “pray that I get the promotion”.

At what point do we ask the person who works in the CBD office to attempt to reflect on their role, and somehow conceive and translate the notion of the coming Kingdom of God right where they are?

As they are attempting to perceive the conjunction of these two realities, they somehow sense the prompting of the spirit to… work in a different way, …challenge management for the inhuman way in which employees are treated, …re imagine how the current delivery of their product needs to be modified in order to reduce the impact that they are having on the local indigenous people in the country where they are being manufactured etc ad infinitum.

How do we as communities of faith help people develop this kind of “prayer discipline”? How do imagine what it would look like? How do we encourage those who are working in offices in the CBD to realise that this is what it means to practice the prayer discipline in their context? How do we create a learning environment in our faith communities where these kinds of experiments can fuel our collective imaginations?

We could easily replace CBD with school, university, home or whatever.

How could we develop prayer disciplines in these settings?