How the Spirit Shapes Prayer: Research Findings for Traditional Christians

By David S. Luecke

How the Spirit Shapes Prayer answers qustions about:

• Conversational prayer prompted by the Spirit

• Why prayer can be so satisfying

•How a better prayer life happens

•Overcoming blockages to prayer

After a major church planting disappointment followed by a serious illness, Dave Luecke had a series of deep prayer experiences with God that awakened him to a new relationship. He became curious about personal prayer experiences of ordinary churchgoers and did a survey of over 1,000 members in Lutheran congregations. He found much more involvement than expected:

• Three out of four reported they pray at least daily other than at meals.

• Half regularly experienced the peace and presence of God.

•Half called personal prayer the most satisfying experience in my life.

After holding monthly services of prayer for healing, Luecke wondered what other Lutheran pastors thought and did with such prayer. This prompted another survey, with more surprising results:

• Four out five said they had experienced or witnessed a miracle.

• Two out of three said members reported a miraculous healing in response to congregational prayer.

Yet Lutheran pastors never talk professionally about miraculous healings. How the Spirit Shapes Prayer reopens the discussion. addressing many important questions about prayer and Gods response, such as:

• Can God change his mind in response to prayers?

• Can God be influenced by multiple prayers?

• Why is God so frugal with obvious interventions in natural processes?

Pastor and psychologist David S. Luecke has an M.Div. from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and an M.B.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. He worked as Vice Chancellor for University Services at Washington and then as full Professor for Administrative Sciences at Valparaiso University before going on to serve as Vice President for Administration at Fuller Theological Seminary. Since 1990 he has been a practicing pastor, first at Community of Hope in Brecksville and then at Royal Redeemer Lutheran Church in North Royalton, Ohio.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512757439

David S. Luecke

Pastor David S. Luecke brings fifty years of experience to researching, teaching and practicing church leadership. He holds a Master of Divinity from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis (1967). His Ph.D. is in Organizational Behavior. For over thirty years he has been with Royal Redeemer Lutheran Church in North Royalton Ohio, first planting a church and then serving as Administrative Pastor and then as Missions Pastor. He has written eighteen books on church leadership, half exploring the Holy Spirit's impact. His website is WhatHappened.church.

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Copyright © 2017 David S. Luecke.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-5744-6 (sc)

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WestBow Press rev. date: 01/19/2017

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Spirit Is More Active Than Many Of Us Think

Chapter 2 A Sampling Of Prayer Experiences

Chapter 3 Conversational Prayer Is Basic

Chapter 4 Why Prayer Can Be So Satisfying

Chapter 5 How A Better Prayer Life Happens

Chapter 6 Overcoming Blockages To Growth In Prayer

Chapter 7 Intercessory Prayer Can Make A Difference

Chapter 8 Basic Questions About Intercessory Prayer

1. Why Do Some Think Effectiveness Of Prayer Is Irrelevant?

2. Do Expectations Of Results Change Prayer Behavior?

3. Are We Wise To Pray For Healing That Won’t Happen?

4. Does God Respond To Our Prayers Differently Than He Would Without The Prayers?

5. Can God Really Change His Mind In Response To Prayer?

6. Can Multiple Prayers Influence God?

7. Why Do So Many Christians Have Special Difficulty With God’s Responsiveness To Prayer?

8. How IsModern Resistance To God’s Supernatural Interventions Changing In Our Post-Modern Times

9. Is There Modern Evidence For Miraculous Interventions By God?

10. Why Is God So Frugal With Obvious Interventions?

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

The research results reported in this book refer to two surveys I did on prayer. One was twenty years ago, and the other was ten.

They are worth reading in this summarized form because they can give you reference points for understanding your own prayer life and how to improve it. Strangely, in our American society today we know much more about people’s sex lives than we do about their prayer lives. While the former is perceived by most as more urgent, I am assuming Christians today would consider their prayer lives as more important for living well now and in eternity.

My academic specialty is organizational behavior, also known as organizational or industrial psychology. I have been a member of the American Psychological Association since finishing my Ph.D. in 1970. Organizational psychology is the study of normal people in relation to their motivation, satisfaction, and productivity, as opposed to clinical psychology, which studies abnormal behavior. Research is done mainly through survey questionnaires. After spending the first part of my career in academia, I went back to my prior seminary education and became a pastor in my church body—The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

While experiencing difficulties planting a church, I had a deep prayer experience. This made me curious about prayer practices of ordinary Christians, as opposed to prayer masters. With help from others in my church body, I developed and distributed a survey of prayer practices and experiences to a random selection of eight members of 105 congregations across the nation. A sociologist helped me pattern this survey on work done by the Gallup organization. That survey was also distributed in each congregation to two recognized prayer veterans, as selected by the pastor. Of 1,050 surveys distributed, 548 were returned, which is a very good response rate. When I presented the manuscript to our church publisher, it failed doctrinal review. I later self-published it as Talking with God: How Ordinary Christians Grow in Prayer, but very few ever read it. Chapters 1–6 of this book present findings and observations from Talking with God.

Chapters 7 is from a survey of prayer attitudes and practices of pastors from both The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Karen Soeken, professor of research at the School of Nursing of the University of Maryland, did the section on Medical Research on the Healing Effects of Prayer. I self-published the findings in How Much to Pray for Healing? Attitudes and Practices of Lutheran Pastors.

Chapter 8 is also from that publication. It was my attempt to work out a theology of intercessory prayer in the form of basic questions and possible answers. I was surprised to find that among Protestants, little work has been done on a theology of prayer, even though intercessory prayer is fundamental to the relationship between believers and God.

CHAPTER 1

The Spirit Is More Active Than Many of Us Think

The passage is very familiar. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door I will come in and eat with him, and he with me (Rev. 3:19).

The one who knocks is the Christ figure, who has a message for the seven churches near Ephesus. Today we should recognize him as Christ’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit. The Spirit frequently knocks on the door to the heart of every believer. The knocks are thoughts and questions, to which he draws our attention. When we respond with continued thoughts, we open the door to the conversation that is the essence of our prayer relationship with God.

This personal experience of Spirit-initiated conversation is different from the approach traditional Protestant churches feature. For them prayer is usually featured as a duty to be fulfilled in the life of discipleship Christians are called to live. Prayer is something we initiate, with the encouragement to read or remember set prayers that cover life’s concerns.

What difference does it make who initiates the prayer relationship—the Spirit or the human believer? Is prayer something we do for God or an interaction the Spirit does for us?

The difference, I believe, is in the quality of the prayer experience. When we depend on ourselves to offer prayer to God, we are likely to repeat the same thought patterns and words, with little change in our perspective, as if such holy words have little relationship to our daily lives. Some who pray with this routine find comfort in it. Others, like myself, get bored and have to force themselves to do such a routine that brings me little personal satisfaction and growth. Guilt is seldom a good motivator.

Prayer, as something the Spirit initiates, opens up new horizons and brings greater satisfaction of experiencing personal change and growth. Arriving at this level of conversation assumes a change in perspective over and against the traditional Protestant understanding of how God relates to us in our daily lives. The basics remain the same—through his gracious favor, God reconciled us to himself through Christ. Yet that fundamental relationship essentially looks backward.

New to me was the realization that God through his Spirit is reaching out to me daily, wanting to change my thoughts and feelings and even desiring to challenge and guide me to new levels of living in Christ. I find these forward-looking conversations at his initiative to be exciting and very satisfying.

RECOGNIZING THE ACTIVIST SPIRIT

I think this greater appreciation of the Spirit’s interventions today has many implications for traditional Protestants. Our heritage hasn’t featured this activist Spirit who wants to bring change. Certainly we confess our belief in the Holy Spirit as well as in the Father and Son. My Lutheran heritage focuses on God the Son as the key doer in our lives today. John Calvin’s heritage focuses on God the Father and his providential acts. Both Reformation heritages leave God the Holy Spirit vaguely in the background. Coming to the realization that the third person, the Spirit of the Father and Son, is their Advocate who initiates repeated daily conversations has been exciting for me.

Adding an activist Spirit who can actually change me brings new levels of excitement to my ongoing relationship with Christ. My heritage values faithfulness. The Spirit advocates growth and new life.

Recognizing encounters with Christ’s Spirit opened the door to personal spiritual experiences I, as a lifelong Lutheran, wasn’t encouraged to recognize and appreciate. The ideal Christian life was something out there I should try to fit myself into as a duty. Big decisions in life should be undertaken with sanctified common sense learned through study of God’s word. My personal experience of this sanctified life wasn’t nearly as important as the objective truth that should inform it.

New appreciation for Christ’s Spirit, who can intervene and surprise believers, necessitates a basic change in understanding how the world works in our times. Does God do interventions today that cannot be explained with normal reasoning? Can the supernatural intervene in natural processes? Events for which there is no natural explanation can rightly be called miracles.

The traditional Protestant heritage resists this view of the world. The reason goes back to John Calvin’s very rational declaration that those miraculous powers and manifest workings of Bible times have ceased; they rightly lasted only for a time. Luther and his successors accepted this prevalent assumption to resist the superstitions so prevalent at their time. In my home church culture, miracles were neither expected nor talked about; in fact, they were even look down on as unworthy of intellectual consideration. These traditional heritages highly valued advanced education and rational scholarship. We have a natural affinity for modern university culture, which scoffs at the miraculous.

Various experiences resolved that issue for me. God can and does intervene in ways that cannot be explained. This conclusion has implications for the traditional Protestant perspective that relegates the Holy Spirit to a vague presence in the background. Christ’s Spirit can and does intervene frequently in shaping a believer’s experiences of following Christ.

This change in perspective of how God can intervene is a really big deal. But don’t just take my word for it. Seminary professor Loren Halverson explains the implications for his new appreciation for the results of intercessory prayer:

This cultural revolution suggests a shift in one’s mode of being and doing that so radically reverses, upsets, and disorients that it amounts to a conversion or a passage through Alice’s mirror. In it the same reality is seen, the same data observed, but everything is different, perhaps even opposite. I believe that the change has more to do with