Morality and Religion

• One of the most distinct phenomena of the Modern, Enlightenment world is how religion is disconnected from morality.  It is assumed that one can be moral without a moral God.  I have been reading Zavi Zacharias' apologetic work Jesus Among Other Gods each day as I work out.  Zacharias, a Hindu convert to Christianity, writes that it is very difficult to have morality apart from God.  In his discussion of evil, he writes, "If evil exists, then one must assume that good exists in order to know the difference.  If good exists, one must assume that a moral law exists by which to measure good and evil.  But if a moral law exists, must not one posit an ultimate source of moral law, or at least an objective basis for a moral law?" (2000, 112).  (Personal Reflection by Gailyn Van Rheenen)

 Spiritual Renewal

• "There has always been a spirit of prayer and intercession associated with spiritual awakening, both in Scripture and in history. Revival is preceded by prayer, birthed through intercession, and sustained by fervent, persevering prayer. Prayer is the central living element to every spiritual awakening and every moving of the Holy Spirit" (Frank Damazio, Seasons of Revival, Portland: BT Publishing, 1996:363)
   

• Reflection on devotional communities:  "Most missionary teams are not communities, but teams.  The focus of most teams is to work.  On the other hand, traditional communities in the church are by definition primarily committed to relational caring, worship and a devotional pattern."  -- (Viv Grigg, Cry of the Urban Poor (Monrovia, CA:  MARC, 1992, 17).
   

• "Christianity had never been more itself, more consistent with Jesus and more evidently en route to its own future, than in the launching of the world mission." -- (Ben Meyer. The Early Christians: Their World Mission and Self-Discovery. 1986:206).
   

• "The gospel is never about everybody else; it is always about you, about me. The gospel is never truth in general; it's always a truth in specific. The gospel is never a commentary on ideas or cultures or conditions; it's always about actual persons, actual pains, actual troubles, actual sin; you, me; who you are and what you've done; who I am and what I've done." -- (Eugene Peterson. Leap Over the Wall: Earthly Spirituality for Everyday Christians. 1997:185)

 Gospel and Culture

• "Identifying the gospel is both simple and challenging.  No culture-free expression of the gospel exists, nor could it.  The church's message, the gospel, is inevitability articulated in linguistic and cultural forms particular to its own place and time.  Thus a rehearing of the gospel can be vulnerable to the 'gospels' that we may be to read back into the New Testament renderings of it.  The first tellings of the gospel in Scripture themselves have richly varied quality.  they are as culturally particular as our own.  Nevertheless, they are the root narrative of God's action in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the work, and as such the church's originating message.  It is of the essence of the church to root itself in what those first tellings portray of the character, actions and purposes of God" (George R. Huntsburger, Missional Church 1998, 87).
   

• “The Gospel is the story of God, told from His perspective, to His glory. Only God is bigger than the Gospel. At first it sounds like a foolish paradoxical mystery. And so we try to make it sound more believable and sane. It is not. The Gospel in neither rational nor irrational, but trans-rational (Webber, The Younger Evangelicals 2002,  91).”
   

• “The gospel always comes to people in cultural robes. There is no such thing as a ‘pure’ gospel, isolated from culture”-- (David J. Bosch. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. 1991:297)
   

• "The New Testament writers were not scholars who had the leisure to research the evidence before they put pen to paper. Rather, they wrote in the context of an 'emergency situation', of a church which, because of its missionary encounter with the world, was forced to theologize" -- (Martin Kähler [1908] 1971:189)
   

• "The gospels...are to be viewed not as writings produced by an historical impulse but as expressions of an ardent faith, written with the purpose of commending Jesus Christ to the Mediterranean world" -- (Fiorenza 1976:20)
   

• "Western Church has made the mistake of girding the Eastern David in Saul's armor and putting Saul's sword into his hands" -- (J. Merle Davis. New Buildings on Old Foundations: A Handbook on Stabilizing the Younger churches in Their Environment. 1947:108)
   

• "A mission which becomes a commercial concern may end by ceasing to be a mission" -- (Stephen Neill)

Postmodernism

• "The experience of European churches suggests that the synthesis between Christianity and the Enlightenment, which was inherent in much of the missionary thrust of the last century, is not sustainable forever." -- (Lesslie Newbigin, 1993, p. 4 in “Preface.” In Toward the 21st Century in Christian Mission, ed. James M. Phillips and Robert T. Coote, 1-6. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)
   

• "Postmodernism has become infamous for its supposed rejection of absolute truth.  The postmodern reaction, however, has not been against absolute truth as much as it has been against the way it has been manipulated.  The Church employed absolute truth to defend its message against modernity--against Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' or Nietzsche's 'God is dead,' for instance.  But Christians unknowingly succumbed.  They allowed modernity to choose the battlefield.  'If we can provide rational, scientific proof for our beliefs," Christians concluded, "we can refute the liberals and win!"  To keep fighting on that field of battle is to never reach the postmodern.  This battle has taken the Church nowhere.  As for postmoderns, we're over it.  Already we soar far above the limits of secular science.  We are not bound by it. and we care far more about how to live than about how to prove"   (Laura Buffington, John Emert, Erin McDade, and Cris Smith in "Postmodern Issues in Church Planting," Church Planting from the ground up, 2004, 87).

Missional Ecclesiology

• "The image of the church as the 'body' of Christ has resulted in a new awareness that the church is the continuation of the presence of Jesus in and to the world.  Even though there is only one actual incarnation of God, and that is in Jesus Christ, the church as the 'body' participates in the incarnation as an 'extension of God's presence in the world.'  God continues by the power of the Spirit within and through the church to have a special presence in the world.  This presence is understood as a pneumatological, christological, soteriological, and eschatological presence of the new creation"  (Robert Webber, The Younger Evangelicals, 2002, 112).
   

• "The church is where the Spirit of God is forming a people who are the expression of God's redeeming wok in the world.  they are the people in whom the dwelling of God is forming a new creation."  (Robert Webber, The Younger Evangelicals, 2002, 112).
   

• “The calling of the church in every culture is to be mission.  That is, the work of the church is not to be an agent or servant of the culture.  The churches’ business is not to maintain freedom or to promote wealth or to help a political party or to serve as the moral guide to culture.  The church’s mission is to be the presence of the kingdom. . . .  The church’s mission is to show the world what it looks like when a community of people live under the reign of God” (Robert Webber, The Younger Evangelicals, 2002, 133). 
   

• "A church without a missions or a mission without the church are both contradictions. Such things do exist, but only as pseudostructures" -- (Carl E. Braaten. The Flaming Center. 1977:55)
   

• "The church is the church only when it exists for others...The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving" -- (Dietrich Bonhoeffer; words written in prison in 1944)
   

• "Just as one could not speak of the church without speaking of its mission, it was impossible to think of the church without thinking, in the same breath, of the world to which it is sent." -- (Bosch. Transforming Mission. 1991:377)
   

• "The church's final word is not 'church' but the glory of the Father and the Son in the Spirit of liberty" -- (Jurgen Moltmann. The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology. 1977:19)
   

• "The church is both the goal and the agent of world evangelization. Mission disengagement from the church is a biblical oxymoron" (Frank Severn. Mission societies: Are they biblical? Evangelical Missions Quarterly. 2000:321)
   

• "Kingdom people seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice; church people often put church work above concerns of justice, mercy and truth. Church people think about how to get people into the church; Kingdom people think about how to get the church into the world. Church people worry that the world might change the church; Kingdom people work to see the church change the world." -- (Howard Snyder. Liberating the Church. 1983:11)
   

• What would an understanding of the church (an ecclesiology) look like if it were truly missional in design and definition? (Darrell Guder, Missional Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998: 7).
   

• "For the church to live out an intimate engagement with the narrative of God's action in Jesus Christ that shapes its life and thought, it must use personal and communal ways of knowing that reach beyond the merely rational." -- Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1989), 222-23.
   

• "Falling into an ultimate relativism and subjectivity are always dangers within the emerging postmodern condition, but the postmodern worldview can nevertheless be conducive to establishing critical points of contact with a more holistic approach to knowing. Referenced in Guder, Missional Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998: 41).
   

• This is a time for drastically new vision. The current predicament of churches in North America requires more than a mere tinkering with long-assumed notions about the identity and mission of the church. Instead, as many knowledgeable observers have noted, there is a need for reinventing or rediscovering the church in this new kind of world. -- Peter C. Hodgson, Revisioning the Church:Ecclesial Freedom in the New Paradigm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).
   

• "The churches shaped by the Reformation were left with a view of the church that was not directly intended by the Reformers, but nevertheless resulted from the way that they spoke about the church. Those churches came to conceive the church as 'a place where certain things happened.' The Reformers emphasized as the 'marks of the true church' that such a church exists wherever the gospel is rightly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, and (they sometimes added) church discipline exercised. . . .  Over time, these 'marks' narrowed the church's definition of itself toward a 'place where' idea. . . .  This perception of the church gives little attention to the church as a communal entity or presence, and it stresses even less the community's role as the bearer of missional responsibility throughout the world, both near and far away."  -- (Huntsburger in  Missional Church 1998: 79).
   

• "He who has not the church for his mother hath not God for his father."   

Mission to the Poor

• "God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply."  --  J. Hudson Taylor, In Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret by Howard and Mary Guinness Taylor. Chicago:  Moody, 1932(?).
   

• These are the words of Jesus at the beginning of his ministry in his home synagogue in Nazareth:  "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and  recovery of sight for the blind, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 418-19; cf. Isa. 61:1-2, Luke 7:22-23).
   

• "The church has given bread to the poor and has kept the bread of life for the middle class" -- Viv Grigg, Cry of the Urban Poor (Monrovia, CA:  MARC, 1992, 12).
   

•  "As mission leaders, we have failed to foresee both the immensity of urban growth and the fact that most of the urban growth would be in squatter areas.  The opportunity to save the cites from many traumas associated with this development, as well as the opportunity to establish a church in every squatter area that has formed, have been lost almost entirely" -- (Viv Grigg, Cry of the Urban Poor (Monrovia, CA:  MARC, 1992, 14).
   

• "Some missions have made a deliberate attempt to reach the rich, believing in a sort of religious 'trickle-down' theory.  'Trickle-down' works no more in he kingdom than it does in the economic realm.  This strategic mistatkes lacks support both in biblical exegesis and in sociological analysis. . . .  The gospel 'trickles up'."  -- (Viv Grigg, Cry of the Urban Poor (Monrovia, CA:  MARC, 1992, 14).
   

• "A church trapped by cultural perspectives on affluence rather than adopting the biblical stance of opposition to the 'god of mammon' has exported this into missions.  We must return to the pattern of Jesus, who chose non-destitute poverty as a way of life, took the time to learn language and culture, and refused to be a welfare agency king. . . .  Non-destitute poverty and simplicity must again become focal in mission strategy."  -- (Viv Grigg, Cry of the Urban Poor (Monrovia, CA:  MARC, 1992, 15).
   

• "The propensity for the Western church to accept the agenda of aid organizations as focal to the Great Commission has seriously skewed mission.  Mission to the middle class is seen as proclamation.  To the poor it has become giving handouts or assisting in development as defined by Christianized humanitarian perspectives.  It is far easier for churches to give thousands of dollars than to find one of their members who will walk into the slums for a decade."  -- (Viv Grigg, Cry of the Urban Poor (Monrovia, CA:  MARC, 1992, 16).

Money and Missions

• "The Western temptation is to conceptualize and organize the missionary task on an economic level that can only be sustained by Western support and oversight"  (Van Rheenen, Monthly Missiological Reflection #2, "Money and Mi$$ion$," www.missiology.org/mmr/mmr2.htm).
   

• "The Western Church has made the mistake of girding the Eastern David in Saul's armor and putting Saul's sword into his hands.  Under these conditions the Church on the mission field has made a brave showing, but it is reasonable to expect that it will give a better account of itself by using its own familiar gear and weapons" (J. Merle Davis 1947, 108; in Charles R. Taber, "Structures and Strategies for Interdependence in World Mission," in Supporting Indigenous Ministries, edited by Daniel Rickett and Dotsey Welliver, p. 68). 
   

• “The effectiveness of the gospel is hindered by insensitive affluence that makes social relationships not only difficult but embarrassing; for as long as there is an economic gap between missionaries and their converts, fraternal fellowship is difficult to maintain.  In the end, the gospel that the missionary tries to proclaim is watered down, not intentionally but watered down nonetheless” (Nthamburi, "Wealthy Missionaries:  An African Viewpoint," In Bonk's Mi$$ion$ and Money:  Afluence as a Western Missionary Problem, 1991, xv). 
   

• “. . . prosperity, while enabling the Western Church to engage in numerous expensive, efficient, and even useful activities, overseas, has an inherent tendency to isolate missionaries from the cutting edge of missionary endeavor, rendering much of their effort either unproductive or counterproductive, or sometimes both” (Bonk Mi$$ion$ and Money:  Afluence as a Western Missionary Problem, 1991, xix).
   

• “Since Biblical faith is above all a relational faith, it is not only sad, but also sinful, when personal possessions and privileges prevent, distort, or destroy missionary relationships with the poor.  But this is the almost inevitable price of affluence” (Bonk Mi$$ion$ and Money:  Afluence as a Western Missionary Problem, 1991, 48).
   

• "The use of money is like a two-edged sword:  It can empower missions on the one hand while hindering or destroying it on the other.  Money can empower missions by (1) supporting effective missionaries to open new areas of the world to the Gospel, (2) partnering with developing national churches to train and oversee effective national leaders, and (3) developing media and materials to strengthen specific local ministries.  Money can hinder missions by (1) creating unhealthy dependence, (2) controlling churches which should be self-supporting, (3) creating jealousy between those supported by the West and those not supported, (4) unknowingly attracting leeches and con-men who hope for benefits, support, or a chance to study abroad, and (5) over-support of missionaries who physically separate themselves from the people among whom they hope to minister" (Van Rheenen, Monthly Missiological Reflection #2, "Money and Mi$$ion$," (www.missiology.org/mmr/mmr2.htm).
   

• Following is a list of specific questions that will aid in evaluating the use of money in missions. (1) Are missions resources used to maintain local churches or to plant new ones?  (2) Does support create unhealthy dependence or encourage national church initiative?  (3) Are national church leaders ethically, morally, and spiritually responsible to other national church leaders who understand their culture?  (4) Are missionaries ethically, morally, and spiritually responsible to teammates on the field, national church leaders, and church leaders of their sending congregation or agency?  (5) Do supported national leaders expect to be supported by their own people in the near future? (6) Are national leaders supported on a level consistent with the local economy or on the economic level of members of the supporting church?
  (7) Does the support of one national leader create jealousy because other equally qualified people are not supported? Who determines who is qualified or not? (8) Does support unknowingly create hierarchies so that churches and institutions are controlled by the West rather than by local Christian leaders?  (9) Do missionaries from other countries live on a level that local Christians feel comfortable visiting and fellowshipping in their homes?

  (Van Rheenen, Monthly Missiological Reflection #2,  "Monthly Missiological Reflection #13, "Money and Mi$$ion$ (Revisited):  Combating Paternalism" www.missiology.org/mmr/mmr13.htm)

Evangelism

• “Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstractions and propositions; long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself; shsort on dondemning the irreligious, long on confronting the religious.”  (McLaren, More Ready Than You Realize 15). 
   

• "Preach the gospel always, and if necessary, use words" -- (St. Francis of Assisi, St. Francis of Assisi Parish. Hompage. http://www.stfrancisa2.com/welcome.htm).

Missionary Acculturation

• "The missionary who is immediately immersed in the local community has many advantages. If the newcomer lives with a local family, he or she can learn how the insiders organize their lives, how they get their food, and do their shopping, and how they get around with public transportation. Much can be learned during the first months about the insiders' attitudes and their feelings about the ways foreigners live. As the newcomer experiences an alternative lifestyle, he or she can evaluate the value of adopting it. On the other hand, the missionary whose first priority is to get settled will only be able to settle in a familiar way. Since nothing else has been experienced, no other options are possible. And once a missionary is comfortably settled in the old life-style, that person is virtually locked into a pattern that is foreign to the local people." -- (E. Thomas and Elizabeth S. Brewster. "The Difference Bonding Makes" in Perspectives of the World Christian Movement [3rd Edition]. 1999:445)
   

• "Missionaries must cross linguistic, cultural, and social boundaries to proclaim the gospel in new settings. They must translate and communicate the Bible in the languages of people in other cultures so that it speaks to them in the particularities of their lives. They must bridge between divine revelation and human contexts, and provide biblical answers to the confusing problems of everyday life. This process of cross-cultural communication means that missionaries, by the very nature of their task, must be theologians. Their central question is: 'What is God's Word to humans in this particular situation?'" -- (Paul G. Hiebert, R. Daniel Shaw, and Tite Tienou. Understanding Folk Religion. 1999:26)
   

• "Cross-cultural reality testing forces people to examine both their own and others' understandings of reality. Most people simply assume that the way they look at things is the way things really are, and judge other cultures' views of reality before understanding them. These judgments are based on ethnocentrism, which closes the door to further understanding and communication. Furthermore, ethnocentric judgments keep missionaries from examining their own beliefs and values to determine which of them are based on biblical foundations and which on their cultural beliefs." -- (Paul G. Hiebert, R. Daniel Shaw, and Tite Tienou. Understanding Folk Religion. 1999:27)

Language and Scripture

• "The only solid foundation for the Christian character is a personal, direct knowledge of the Bible. The Bible in the mother tongue is essential for establishing faith in individuals as well as indigenous churches. The girls who speak the Indian language will teach it to their children. Spanish is the language of the conquest, the exploiters. I trust more in the power of the gospel in the mother tongue than the preaching of any missionary or evangelist." -- (Van Slyke, the first missionary to live among Zapoteco peoples of Oaxaca region of Mexico, Global Prayer Digest, February 5, 2001)

Language Learning

• "Learning a language is an irreducibly social enterprise that trains a child into a communal mode of living.  Thus Wittgenstein likens language to a series of games that require partners for playing:  'In a conversation:  One person throws a ball; the other does not know:  whether he is supposed to throw it back, or throw it to a third person, or leave it on the ground, or pick it up and put it in this pocket, etc.'  Language is not a picture that succumbs to distanced observation, it is a socially involved enterprise that by its very nature engages human subjects" -- (Brad J. Kallenberg,. Live to Tell:  Evangelism for a Postmodern Age.  2002:24)

Conversion

• "One is not born a Christian but becomes a Christian" (Tertullian)
   

• "It is easier to become a Christian when not one than it is to become a Christian when already one" (Soren Kierkegaard).

Persecution

• "Challenges and opposition to biblical Christianity will grow more strident. There will be persecution physically as well as psychologically. Militant Islam and Hinduism specifically target evangelizing Christians in many parts of the two-thirds world. Sometimes the persecution is official, other times it is informal and in subtle ways" (Dr. Peter Chao, The Changing Mission Field, Presentation at Godsmission, September 21 2001).
   

• "The blood of the martyrs is always the seed of the church." -- (In Light the Window, a video of the Christian Broadcasting Network. 1995, quoting Tertullian)
   

• "Martyrdom and mission belong together. Martyrdom is especially at home on the mission field" -- (Hans von Campenhausen. Das Martyrium in der Mission, in Frohnes & Knorr. 1974:71)
   

• “There are no closed countries if you do not expect to come back” -- (Larry Poston, Evangelical Missiological Society national meeting, Nov. 15, 2000)
   

Quotes of Encouragement

• “Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God!” -- (William Carey)
   

• "The church exists by missions like fire exists by burning" (Emil Brunner).
   

• "No man is a fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."  --  (Jim Elliot) 
   

• "Mission is the very lifeblood of the church. As the body cannot survive without blood, so the church cannot survive without mission. Without blood the body dies; without mission the church dies. As the physical body becomes weak without sufficient oxygen-carrying red blood cells, so the church becomes anemic if it does not express its faith. The church . . . establishes its rationale for being—its purpose for existing—while articulating its faith. An unexpressed faith withers. A Christian fellowship without mission loses its vitality. Mission is the force that gives the body of Christ vibrancy, purpose, and direction. When the church neglects its role as God’s agent for mission, it is actually neglecting its own lifeblood. -- (Gailyn Van Rheenen, Missions: Biblical Foundations and Contemporary Strategies. 1996:31)
   

• "My soul needing God is like grass needing water." -- (In Light the Window, a video of the Christian Broadcasting Network. 1995)
   

• "Let my heart be broken with the things which break the heart of God." -- (In Light the Window, a video of the Christian Broadcasting Network. 1995)
   

• “The F-16 is an unstable plane. If the computer or pilot does not fly the plane, it will fall to the ground. Likewise, the Christian life will fall apart if one does not rely on God” -- (Adapted from Larry Poston, Evangelical Missiological Society national meeting, Nov. 15, 2000)
   

• "Wherever at the moment there is most to do for the Savior, that is our home" -- (Zinzendorf, N.; quoted in Warneck. Outline of a History of Protestant Missions. 1906:59)
   

• "Without the religious element, life is like an engine running without oil--it seizes up." -- (Romano Guardini. Das Ende der Neuzeit. 1950:113)
   

• "When religion falls apart or dries up, not only do people suffer meaninglessness but the civilization crumbles" -- (Max Stackhouse. Apologia: Contextualization, Globalization, and Mission in Theological Education. 1988:82)
   

• "The human soul abhors a vacuum. If faith in God falls away, its place is taken by other gods: 'the powers of Nature, Reason, Science, History, Evolution, Democracy, Individual Freedom, and Technology...' (West 1971:99), or other manifestations of secular religion, such as ideology"  -- (Bosch. Transforming Mission. 1991:354)
   

• "We know more about war than peace today, more about killing than living.  Knowledge of science outstrips capacity for control.  We have too many men of science but too few men of God.  Our world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.  Our is a world of nuclear giants but ethical infants."  --  (USA General Omar Bradley, Time, 1999, Millennium ed., p. 29).
   

• "There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but gets lost in most people later on."  --  (Albert Einstein)

Prayers for Missions

• "In our lifetime woudn't it be sad if we spent more time washing dishes or swatting flies or mowing the yard or watching television than praying for world missions."  -- (Dave Davidson)
   

• "Prayer needs no passport, visa or work permit. There is no such thing as a 'closed country' as far as prayer is concerned...much of the history of mission could be written in terms of God moving in response to persistent prayer."  ---  (Stephan Gaukroger)
   

• "There is nothing in the world  -- except the Church's disobedience -- to render the evangelization of the world in this generation an impossibility." -- (Robert Speer)
   
• "We can reach our world, if we will. The greatest lack today is not people or funds. The greatest need is prayer." -- (Wesley Duewel)

Prayer

• I have one passion. It is He, He alone." -- (Count Nicholaus von Zinzindorf)
   

• “In order to really know God, inward stillness is absolutely necessary.  I remember when I first learned this.  A time of great emergency had risen in my life, when every part of my being seemed to throb with anxiety, and when the necessity for immediate and vigorous action seemed overpowering and yet circumstances were such that I could do nothing, and the person who could, would not stir.

   For a little while it seemed as if I must fly to pieces with the inward turmoil, when suddenly the still small voice whispered in the depth of my soul, ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’  The word was with power, and I listened.  I composed my body to perfect stillness, and I constrained my troubled spirit into quietness, and looked up and waited, and then I did ‘know’ that it was God, God even in the very emergency and in my helplessness to meet it, and I rested in Him.

  It was an experience that I would not have missed for worlds; and I may add also, that out of this stillness seemed to arise a power to deal with the emergency, that very soon brought it to a successful issue.  I learned then effectually that my strength was to sit still.”  --  (Hannah Whitall Smith)
   

• “The essence of prayer doesn’t consist in asking God for something but in opening our hearts to God, in speaking with Him, and living with Him in perpetual communion.  Prayer is continual abandonment to God.  Prayer doesn’t mean asking God for all kinds of things we want; it is rather the desire for God Himself, the only Giver of Life.

  Prayer is not asking, but union with God.  Prayer is not a painful effort to gain from God help in the varying needs of our lives.  Prayer is the desire to possess God Himself, the Source of al life.  The true spirit of prayer does not consist in asking for blessings, but in receiving Him who is the giver of all blessings, and in living a life of fellowship with Him."  -- (Sadhu Sundar Singh)