New Online Class: Learn to Live Prayerfully With Others

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New 4-Week Online Class Begins October 7, 2013

"A prayerful life is meant for everyone, and none of us becomes prayerful by ourselves. Perhaps the synergy that surpasses that of putting together practices of praying with other people’s words, praying without words, and praying with your own words is that of putting these practices together with others. It might be on a retreat, in a small group, or with your family, but the only way we are meant to live prayerfully is to live prayerfully together." -From the Conclusion of Live Prayerfully

I hope that you will consider joining me and a small group of others as we explore together how we can practice prayerful living. In order to do this, we will begin a 4-week online class, limited to a small number of participants.

Each week, we will take a section of Live Prayerfully, discuss it together online, and use the Guides for Prayer in Part II of the book to shape our praying in the same ways together throughout the class. The class outline is:

  • Week 1: October 7-13 Introduction: Searching for Simple and Reliable Guidance in Prayer
  • Week 2: October 14-20 Praying With Other People's Words
  • Week 3: October 21-27 Praying Without Words
  • Week 4: October 28-November 3 Praying With Your Own Words

The online format of the class means that participants will be able to take part in the class according to their own schedules. Each week, we will all read the corresponding part of the book early in the scheduled week. Then, each member of the class will be asked to contribute in the following ways:

  • Briefly answer one of three reflection questions and post your response.
  • Read your classmates' responses and reply to at least one of them.
  • Practice praying in the week's respective method.

I look forward to getting to know and actively engaging with each participant.

What you will need:

  • Registration is $35.
  • A copy of Live Prayerfully (Either a print or Kindle version is fine. This is not included in the registration cost, since some participants will already have a copy.)
  • Basic ability to use the internet. If you are able to do something like respond to a blog post, you will be fine. (If you're not sure how to do that, here is one of my favorites–read it and try your hand at commenting!)

Please consider joining us as we learn together to live prayerfully. Registration will close on September 30, or when all spaces are filled.

(Registration is now closed.)

 

A Brief Break

Just a heads up: In order to save a little money each month, I'm going to be reworking some details of the site–like how it's hosted and some other details of how it works. All of my past experience with stuff like this has taught me to expect that my first attempt at it probably won't go precisely as expected, but hopefully it won't take too long. I mention that to offer an explanation for why I don't expect to post anything new for at least the next week. I'll give the time that's usually given to writing to the process of moving the blog. Hopefully, in about a week, things will pick back up as normal here. (If you subscribe by email, you won't have to change anything. If you subscribe by RSS....I'm not so sure.)

In the meantime, I'll continue to send articles from the archives to those on the "I want to receive something every day" email list, and these also get posted on Facebook and Twitter.

 

In Memory of Brennan Manning

Brennan Manning As a youngster, I didn't like to read. At times, I would find some book I thought I would like, but I virtually never made it through any books that weren't full of pictures of my sports heroes. That changed, and it altered the direction of the rest of my life, when I read Brennan Manning's The Signature of Jesus. I was at a point in my life when I was beginning to become tired of living superficially, and I needed guidance on how to connect with God in genuine ways. Going through the pages of that book was a new experience for me, in which I discovered how effective good books can be at pointing me forward in the kind of life I want to live with God.

I have read (and sometimes re-read) probably a dozen others of his books in the years since. He was as effective as anyone at communicating the grace of God and how wondrous of a thing it is that God so endlessly loves people who are so thoroughly messed up. (It can be difficult to find, but his short parable, The Boy Who Cried Abba is worth abundantly more than the cost of the book and the time it takes to read it.)

Brennan's honest words were deeply needed. He knew both the darkness of sin and the incomparability of God's grace. I'm grateful for his life and for his courage to share words which have drawn me and so many others further into "the relentless love of Jesus."

Daily Options and a New Schedule

A couple of changes to what you'll see here, based on two things I've learned from my most recent writing project: First, as I'm writing this, I've got about two and a half years in which this blog has been my favorite hobby, even if a very inconsistent one. Going back even farther, I had a previous blog which had a life of about four years before beginning this one, so apparently my track record of writing online without any predictable rhythm is now into its seventh year.

(Seeing that I've been blogging that long and have now built an email list of about seventy subscribers means my blog grows at about a rate of one reader per month. I'm quite happy with it being among the slowest-growing blogs in America. That means you're much more valuable to me than you would be to those silly famous people.)

But the intention is finally pretty settled in me to change that. Among the things that writing the 40 Days of Prayer posts taught me was that, to my own surprise, I really enjoyed writing according to a more disciplined schedule. I've overdone it for brief stretches in the past, trying to post something every day, which I can't keep up for long and still do other important things like bathe regularly. And–much more often–I've underdone it and not posted anything for long periods of time. So (I think) I've found a rhythm I can settle into while utilizing some of the things I learned while writing the Lent messages and work on a schedule of posting something new three times per week.

Second, based on the very kind feedback that a good number of folks gave me about the Lent messages, I realized that it isn't just the regularity of writing that matters, but also the regularity of reading. So, hopefully the three times per week schedule will be helpful in that regard, but for the handful of you who might want to also read something on the in-between days when nothing new has been posted, I've decided to start linking to some of the things I've written before which I think are still worth saying. (This experiment will be considered a success if anyone chooses it, and it will be a raving success if anyone who isn't a blood relative opts in.)

So, if you're interested in a daily option (except for Saturday mornings–I'll be taking a sabbath, and I'll let my internet monkeys take one too), choose one of these:

  • Email: If you choose the email subscription option "Every Single Day (Except Saturdays)", on the days new things are posted, you'll receive them by email like normal. On the in-between days, you'll receive a link to something that's already out there.
  • Facebook: If you Like the blog's page on Facebook, the same links will be posted there–new things on new thing days, and old things on in-between days.
  • Twitter: Same idea, different way to get the links by following me on Twitter (@deharris). I post other things on Twitter as well, usually related to the kind of stuff I write about here-particularly links to good stuff I read by others online or on a Kindle.