It interests me that a fairly common barrier some people have to a more robust prayer life is reticence in praying to God for very personal, concrete matters. To pray for God’s will, courage, or peace? Sure, because they are broad and perhaps generalized kinds of prayers. But to pray for all the cancer cells to be gone from the body; to pray about personal finances in a month when it seems impossible to pay all the bills; to pray for a specific issue in one’s marriage… these seem to be to audacious, if not presumptuous. Doesn’t God have more important things to worry about – like world peace – then my little old problems and issues?
I believe one reason people think this way is because it is frankly easier to keep God at a distance. Perhaps we do not really want a personal relationship with God. Or, more likely, perhaps we have not been encouraged enough to develop one. Recently one of the women in our church’s Alpha program said, "Why didn't anyone tell me about all this stuff before? I have now realized that I can have a personal relationship with Jesus."
My good friend and clergy colleague Tim Jones notes an incipient Deism pervasive in the churches. In a recent blog entry on his website, Tim writes that this reality “represents a revival and resurgence of an old philosophy. This dwindled-down version of prayer is deism redux. Deism as a philosophical movement, as some of us remember from high school or college history classes, that had its heyday at the time of the American Revolution. Deists stressed that God does not intervene in the world he has made. He exists, they said, a kind of watchmaker who created the universe, wound it up, set it running, and stepped back. They found something freeing, I suppose, in a picture of a God who does not much invest or involve himself. (I was intrigued to learn recently that in the book Soul Searching, social commentator Christian Smith [along with cowriter Melinda Lundquist Denton] finds a contemporary parallel to deism also, in what they term the youth culture’s "moralistic therapeutic deism.")”