Taking Prayer too Far?

I'm a big fan of the public radio show This American Life. Last weekend a friend recommended to me an episode from 2001 that I had never heard before which was about prayer. Actually the broader theme was about whether or not people with secular and religious views can live together. In the longest segment of the program, a reporter goes to Colorado Springs to interview members of New Life Church. Then the members were strategically dividing up their community and praying for others street by street, house by house, etc.

If the name New Life Church seems like a familiar name, well it made headlines last fall when its then pastor Ted haggard (who was also president of the National Association of Evangelicals) was accused and then essentially confessed to having sexual relations with a male prostitute.

The ironies are rich in this 2001 episode that interviews Haggard before his fall and in one of its most powerful moments the segment interviews church members who regularly go and pray outside porn shops for the men who frequent the shops to feel convicted of t heir sin and leave. Hearing Haggard speak about the practice is beyond bizarre considering what happened to him a few years later. Perhaps, he should have been praying for his own sexual temptations.

The reporter on the show goes to Colorado Springs expecting the Christians praying to be gracious folks who pray for others' well-being without asking for anything in return. Some are, but others aren't. In sort of a bizarre look into this type of evangelicalism she interviews Christians who view their walking as spiritual warfare and seek to cast out demons and purify areas polluted by liberal ideas.

In the most powerful part of the episode, she goes into one of the porn shops being prayed for to interview the owner--he reports that business is good in spite of the prayers. She also interviews a customer who used to go to New Life Church before coming out as gay. Strangely and wonderfully, this excluded gay man begins to actually witness to her of his faith and encourages her to differentiate between the real Jesus and the Jesus portrayed by judgmental and prejudiced Christians.

It's worth a listen and it's worth considering whether or not our prayer for others generates from our love for them our our own sense of pride and superiority. Jesus had more than a few negative things to say about the latter.

Grace and peace,

Chase