Experiencing Faith: Three Diverse Christian Leaders Talk About Prayer
Published on THE STREAM
By JOSH SHEPHERD Published on May 1, 2018
Part of an ongoing series on “Pentecost and the Holy Spirit Today.”
In popular culture, “thoughts and prayers” has come to mean a passive stance towards current crises. What is prayer? How does it work? What do Christians believe it accomplishes?
This week, Americans will participate in the National Day of Prayer. Three diverse Christian leaders — a charismatic woman from New York, a Roman Catholic Deacon and a Protestant New Testament professor — urge believers to go beyond spiritualized speeches in prayer. They contend Christians can enjoy genuine dialogue with God. Each relates prayer to the gifts and activity of the Holy Spirit. They begin by sharing their personal stories.
When Summer Camp Propels Life Changes
Then he ended up at a summer camp in Muscatine, Iowa. “The emphasis was on the Holy Spirit,” he recalls. “We had an older professor, the president of a small Bible college, who encouraged our cabin the first night with a particular Scripture verse.”
McKnight recounts Ephesians 5:18 from the King James Version he read at the time: And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit. “The next morning, I got up early and went to the campsite where they have a breakfast area. It was closed so I wandered off and sat underneath a tree in the shade.”
He prayed a simple prayer: Father, forgive me of my sins. And Holy Spirit, come inside and fill me. “All I can say is that it was a dynamic, life-changing experience with the Spirit,” he says. “From that time on, I had a completely different mission and purpose in life.”
Three days later, on the camp’s last night, the teenager stood before his peers to give his testimony. McKnight shared God had called him to a life of ministry. Sports suddenly took second place in his life. He went to a Christian college, then seminary, then earned a Ph.D. A line from the Lord’s Prayer gripped him: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.
In thirty-plus years as a seminary professor, the author of Jesus Creed has focused on the life, message and mission of Christ in his teaching. McKnight has become more open to the Holy Spirit, whom he says “works in a hundred thousand ways.”
Prayer also led a searching New Yorker onto a path she never planned . . . . .
