A couple in Durban, South Africa, was driving Dallas Willard from a conference to the airport. Sweet people, Dallas called them. Their son was trying to start a business, and the work was hard. Dallas asked them a question.
“Are you praying for the business?”
They were shocked. They thought a person should not pray for anything wanted and needed. That would not please God.
Dallas told the Fuller class the story because pastors have to face that shock in themselves. The son’s business was the work in front of them, and they would not bring it to God. Prayer, Dallas has already taught, is talking with God about things we are doing together. If we will not ask God to act on the work before us, we have decided God will do whatever He was going to do anyway. Then we have lost fellowship with God, and we have lost the power of prayer. Dallas says, “you have really redefined the whole idea of fellowship with God.”
A congregation is supposed to live that fellowship with people, not only with God. If we will not bring the real work to God, the people we lead will not bring it to each other.
This is Lecture 31 of Willard’s Fuller series, the hour after the cycle of two gospels. You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/prayer-fellowship-confession-submission/?collection=2409
These four practices train a church to participate in the kingdom now: ask God for a specific request, stay with one another long enough to be known, tell the truth to a few, and stop having to win.
Prayer Stays Until Something Happens
Dallas is finishing the disciplines of engagement. He wants prayer as a practice, partnership with God as He governs the world. “Prayer is a power-sharing device for a world of recovering sinners.” “God doesn’t stand back. He involves Himself.”
Ask, or the conversation is already over. “You need to come to a healthy understanding that your prayers make a difference in what happens in this world.” Refuse that understanding, and prayer turns into what Dallas calls spiritual happy hour. We think it helps us. It does not change what happens in the world. A church like that will have nothing honest to do with one another either.
Partners have to say exactly what they want, or they cannot tell when God has answered. “Specificity is crucial.” For ministers: “focus on exactly what you want to happen in your services, in your life, in your church or community.” Leave the request vague, and a good gift can pass before us and we will call it a coincidence. That, Dallas says, is one of Satan’s primary ways of shutting down prayer.
Then stay. “Don’t dive bomb with prayers.” “Many people buzz in and drop the bomb and get out and don’t even stay around long enough to see if anything happened.” The man at midnight who needed bread is still at the door. Luke 11:5-8. “You stay in the posture of prayer. Don’t quit.”
Jane Willard had a circle of friends who prayed for Dallas. He thought their praying made a huge amount of difference to “what actually comes out at the end of the pipe.” “Don’t go forward with your work unless you have some people praying for you.” When a person asks us to pray for them, we pray right then. “Praying with people proves to have more power than praying for them.”
We take the request to God, then to two or three who will pray it with us.
Fellowship Needs Sandpaper
Fellowship, Dallas says, is being with others, especially in the common enterprise of worship, learning, and service. That is not turning at a set time, shaking a hand, and saying, “God loves you and so do I.” The greeting is over before anyone has time to scrape anyone else, so it forms nothing.
Stay in the work together, and problems come. The twelve were in the work together, and they had problems. Dallas does not treat those problems as a failure of fellowship. They are the tool. “Problems are the sandpaper which smoothes out the fellowship.” We accept the problems and stay.
In a congregation those problems are often people we do not like. In the second of the Screwtape Letters, a young convert walks into church and the people look odd. Keep those people. Make the service too slick, keep the difficult people out, and the tool is gone. “Fellowship is deep. Intimacy is a matter of shared life.”
Dallas turns to John Wesley, the eighteenth-century English preacher who organized the Methodists. People who wanted to flee from the wrath to come joined a society, a regular gathering for that life together. Inside it, a class had a leader who saw each person once a week, to inquire how their souls prospered, to advise, reprove, comfort, and exhort. Still smaller circles, which Wesley called bands, asked searching questions. “Do you desire to be told of all your faults? And that plain and home?” Without mincing words.
“This is serious business and this results in intimacy, the intermingling of lives. There is no distance here.” A church can fill a calendar of gatherings and still refuse that inquiry. If no one is permitted to ask how our souls prosper, we do not have what Dallas is describing. We have the gatherings.
Confession Lays Down Pretense
Confession “breaks the dam in many peoples’ lives even in a community.” It lets us “lay down the burden of pretense and hypocrisy.” That burden always separates us from other people. “You can’t have fellowship unless there is a laying down of pretense and things that separate us from one another.”
Jesus had heavy things to say about hiding. “You know everything that is hidden is going to be revealed.” Dallas asks the class, “Can we afford that?” If we have built our lives around pretense, and never owned what we have done and what we are, that revealing will be hard. Confession is owning it now. The relief, Dallas says, is “incredible,” and it “reconfigures our relationships to others.” “Good-bye to pride and good riddance.”
We do not confess everything to everybody. That starts to prove something. We stay open with a few close friends. Pastors have a bigger difficulty here than usual, because we think we have to sustain an appearance. We go to two or three people who already know the work we are asking God for, and we tell those friends the fault we have been managing.
Submission Is the Cross in an Ordinary Disagreement
“This discipline is simply doing what others think best.” Dallas ties it to pride, stiffness of will, and stubbornness. Where a principle is at stake, we stand by what is right as we see it, in humility, and we hear others. More often the fight is not about what is right. It is about what is best to do, and we are hung up on our own judgment.
“The cross is crossing our will, not having to have our way.” Where the only issue is my will, we say, “Well, let’s do it your way.” Dallas says churches break over the refusal: someone will not say, “Ok, have it your way.”
Submission is never one way. Dallas reads Paul in Colossians, and also in Ephesians: submit one to another in the fear of the Lord. When our own will is out of the way, we can look at what is right and what is good, and we can let someone else determine what is best to do.
For Reflection
Dallas asked a couple on the way to the airport, “Are you praying for the business?” What specific work in your congregation have you not yet asked God to do?
Wesley’s bands asked, “Do you desire to be told of all your faults? And that plain and home?” Who in your church is allowed to tell you that, and when did you last let them?
Dallas asked the class, “Can we afford that?” Everything hidden is going to be revealed. Whom will you ask this week to pray with you for that request?