The 9 Arts of Spiritual Conversations

by Mary Schaller

  I heard quite a bit of her story in the next few minutes, and by the time I left we had exchanged contact information and set a time to meet again at a local coffee shop. A relationship and a conversation about God had begun! As I drove back home, I smiled at how God had a purpose in all of this, which I might have missed had I not taken focus off myself and noticed someone’s name.

  3. CHRISTIAN BUBBLE

  My (Crilly’s) pastor friend shared a conversation he had with one of his elders. They were discussing the idea of having spiritual conversations with people who did not know Jesus when the elder confessed, “I don’t know any non-Christians!” I often hear this from pastors, elders, and church attenders alike. Those of us who are involved in churches tend to spend much of our free time absorbed in “fellowship” or church work with other Christians and rarely interact closely with people who don’t move in our Christian circles.

  To overcome this barrier, you can make a point of recognizing others who are already part of your everyday life—at the store, at work, at school, at the gym, in your neighborhood. Every day, wherever you go, you’re surrounded by hundreds of people who are desperate for someone to pay attention to them.

  4. ATTITUDE

  We tend to be judgmental of, rather than open to, those around us whom we don’t know. Often, we don’t view people the way God views them. In Luke 15, Jesus paints a clear picture of God’s heart for each of us. In three separate stories he describes something that is greatly missed—the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son—and someone who desperately wants to find their possession again. What if our attitude toward those who are “missing” reflected this picture of the heart of God?

  Our attitude can cloud our view from seeing people the way God does. Greek Orthodox bishop and author Kallistos Ware states:

  This idea of openness to God, openness to other persons, could be summed up under the word love. We become truly personal by loving God and by loving other humans. By love, I don’t mean merely an emotional feeling, but a fundamental attitude. In its deepest sense, love is the life, the energy, of God Himself in us. We are not truly personal as long as we are turned in on ourselves.[17]

  One way to overcome this barrier is to turn outward and go on a treasure hunt, looking for the image of God in each person. Follow Jesus’ example and treat each person you notice with love and respect, recognizing his or her intrinsic value as an image-bearer. As Bill Hybels often says, “We have never locked eyes with someone who did not matter to God.” Pray that God would re-form your habit, replace a judgmental attitude with a generous spirit, and cultivate an attitude of love and openness in you. Meditate on Scripture passages like Luke 15 that remind you of God’s compassion for the lost.

  Ken Sande, founder of Peacemaker Ministries, says that instead of judging critically, we can choose to judge charitably. “Making a charitable judgment means that out of love for God, you strive to believe the best about others until you have facts to prove otherwise.”[18] We can choose to believe the best about people first. Hunt for the positive attributes in those around you.

  Three Simple Noticing Practices

  While we may need to deal with these barriers periodically, simply being aware of them will help us set them aside. Once we do that, we can follow three simple ways to practice noticing in our everyday lives: paying attention, secret prayer, and genuine listening.

  The first of these simple practices is paying attention. It costs you something—whether time, attention, or money—to stay focused on someone else, even for a few minutes. This simple, nonspeaking practice refers to more than a quick glance at another human being. Rather, paying attention means concentrating on someone long enough to wonder about him or her. This “spiritual peripheral vision” is not hunting for a victim; it’s simply paying attention to people you ordinarily come into contact with and opening your heart to where God may be at work. Think about questions such as What is her story? Where is he from? Does she seem happy, sad, angry, lonely? Make a mental note about what you observe. This practice helps you begin to see another person with God’s eyes of love and compassion. Nobody knows you’re doing this except God, who is always delighted when we take our focus off ourselves and our own agendas for a moment to pay attention to someone else. This takes no bravery—just intentionality.

  The second way to practice noticing is secret prayer—or what we might call noticing’s first action. In the next chapter, we’ll talk in more detail about why and how we pray for others, but here our focus is on what we could call “praying behind people’s backs.” When you’re praying secretly, nobody but God knows you’re praying. It’s a covert operation. It’s discreet. You don’t stare, but you just send up a silent prayer while you are in the vicinity of someone you have noticed. You don’t close your eyes or move your lips. Just pray for people as you see them. Pray that they would sense the presence of God in some undeniable way. Pray for their day. Pray for their peace. Pray for their relationships. It doesn’t have to be a long prayer, either; just a quick one will do.

  You could also call secret prayer “unauthorized prayer” because you are not asking people for permission to pray for them. Though they know nothing about your prayer, it counts with God.

  Jesus, of course, is our model for this practice because he seemed to have a thing for praying in secret: “When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). Once you are secretly praying for someone, God begins to change your heart toward that person. Secret prayer prepares you to cooperate with God as he seeks out the lost sheep in our world. It invites you into this search.

  The most challenging part of secret prayer is our willingness to surrender the outcome to God. By releasing control of the results, we submit to God’s will and align our hearts with his plans for the people around us. This secret prayer practice affects the way we look at ourselves, others, and God.

  The third simple Noticing practice is genuine listening, which is part of the broader topic of listening that we’ll look at in chapter 5. Paying attention to someone may prompt you to start a dialogue; this may be your chance to engage. Genuine listening requires that you look the person in the eye, conveying your interest and attention; hold the look; lean in a little; and say, “How are you?” Then keep quiet. I’m serious . . . it’s that simple. Simone Weil said, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’”[19] Be genuinely interested in hearing the other person’s story—the truth of what is going on right now. Don’t correct, preach, talk over, or editorialize. Don’t offer your own opinions. Just listen to theirs.

  If you genuinely listen to people this way, they will almost always tell you how they really are. They may even tell you things that shock you. People become extraordinarily open when they sense that you’re really paying attention. Use a couple of phrases liberally as you are genuinely listening, such as “Wow!” or “That’s really interesting.” This helps you deal with your own response in the moment without having to hijack the conversation.

  Genuine listening opens the possibility of entering into an authentic conversation in which we allow God to control the outcome. When you’ve already noticed someone by paying attention and secretly praying for them, listening is a natural next step.

  A Simple Way to Start

  The Art of Noticing is a starting point for building more genuine, caring relationships with people who are separated from God. It involves doable, everyday practices that get you “in the game” during your normal life routines. To develop any habit, you follow a certain behavior pattern regularly until it becomes almost involuntary. For example, a parent teaches a child the habit of looking both ways before crossing the street. With regular practice, before long, the child develops the habit. The same is true of noticing. What if you practice paying attention to people throughout your day? Small attempts cou
nt. The more you practice, the better you get.

  By practicing the Art of Noticing, you will begin to recognize that people are longing for your attention (which is like a cup of cold water to them), you will become aware of what God is up to right where you are as you secretly pray for people behind their backs, and you will find yourself authentically engaged in conversation as you learn to really listen to others. This practice is unintimidating and life-giving; in fact, the Art of Noticing is a stealth gift you can give to anyone. By taking the time to intentionally pay attention to others, you take your eyes off yourself and create an opportunity to get to know them and recognize them as treasured creations of God. It doesn’t require memorizing or presenting anything. It doesn’t call for any courage on your part. The important thing is that you start doing it.

  Noticing changes your view of God. (He gets bigger!) It changes your view of others. (They begin to matter to you in ways you can’t explain.) And it changes you!

  Discover

  How do you recognize when God is up to something in the lives of people around you? How can noticing raise your awareness of God’s activity?

  What small changes in your day would help you to develop a habit of paying more attention to people?

  Practice

  Commit to spending thirty seconds each day paying attention to people in your ordinary routine and being unusually curious about them. Whom can you notice in thirty seconds at school pickup? At the grocery store? In the elevator on your way to work? On the highway in traffic? What do you notice happening inside of you as you pay attention to others?

  After a few days of paying attention, now commit to spending sixty seconds per day paying attention to and secretly praying for people behind their backs based on what you noticed. Share your experience with a friend and celebrate that you made the attempt!

  CHAPTER 4

  THE ART OF PRAYING

  My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

  JOHN 17:20-21

  If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, and this will lead us to prayer.

  RICHARD FOSTER

  WHEN I (CRILLY) GO TO CONFERENCES, I am often moved by the content or the speaker. Unfortunately, the fire of inspiration quickly cools as I reenter my daily rhythms. But something changed in me after hearing a presentation in 2011 by pastor, church planter, and speaker Lon Allison. The topic was evangelistic prayer.

  Lon explained that the spheres of influence in our lives are generally divided into four categories: friends, family, work, and neighborhood. He explained the value of focusing prayer on these four simple categories to see a harvest in each one. When I arrived home that evening, I resolved that, each night as I put my head on the pillow, I would pray to see God’s harvest in these four areas. I invited my wife to join me too.

  On my neighborhood block, there are eighteen homes, with thirty-one adults and twenty-four children: a total of fifty-five people. (My neighborhood.) Before I left my marketplace job, I had a team of twelve that I interacted with daily and a workforce of about 250 that I knew by name. (My work.) I have a whole slew of aunts, uncles, and cousins. (My family.) I also have friends from grade school, high school, and college. I have a bunch of acquaintances—the guys at the gym, the owner and staff at my favorite café, and the clerks at the cleaners. I have connections through tutoring and mentoring as many as forty African refugee children and young adults. (My friends.) All in all, that is a pretty large network of connections that I interact with on a regular basis, full of many people who are not particularly interested in following Jesus. Now, I realize that I am an extrovert who finds it relatively easy to build relationships. But I believe we all have many more relational connections with people than we think we do—people who are spiritually curious (John 6:2; 1 Corinthians 1:22), spiritually poor (Matthew 16:26; Luke 12:20-21), spiritually blind (1 Corinthians 2:14; 2 Corinthians 4:3-4), spiritually bound (Ephesians 2:1-2; 2 Timothy 2:25-26), spiritually helpless (John 6:44), and spiritually hopeless (Ephesians 2:12).

  As Danielle and I have prayed each day, I have come to realize more than ever the privilege of being invited by God to be an ambassador of his love to these folks, guiding them out of the darkness into his wonderful light. Almost every night, as we drift off to sleep, we pray for the people in our lives whom we long to introduce to Jesus. We pray for spiritual awakening among an entire refugee community, for longtime friends to bow to Jesus, for baptisms to occur in the sprinklers of our neighborhood. We pray that God would use us and mobilize other followers of Jesus to bring the Good News to these people we know and love.

  I would be thrilled to see dramatic results in the lives of all the people we pray for. But I have been surprised to discover that, although we have seen God’s activity in the lives of many of these folks, the results have not been the primary benefit for me. The biggest personal impact of this practice is that it has changed me—my heart toward people, my trust in God, and my love for those who do not have God’s help and hope.

  The Struggle

  A lot has been written on prayer by people much smarter, more theologically astute, better read, and generally wiser than I am. This chapter is intentionally targeting folks like me who have struggled with evangelistic prayer. I honestly don’t have any business writing on the topic other than as a fellow sojourner who desires to pray for people in my life to come to know Jesus and see God’s power flow through me for the advancement of his Kingdom.

  I often suffer from practical prayerlessness. I want to pray without ceasing, but I don’t. I want to ask God for my heart to be attentive and open to his promptings, but I don’t. I want to pray persistently for the people in my life who do not yet know Jesus, but I don’t. In my years of following Christ, I admit that over the long haul I have not had a consistent prayer life for people separated from God.

  At some unconscious level, I used to think that their conversion was up to me and my clever presentation of the gospel, my compelling apologetic, my solid argument. I thought it was my job to convict, confront, and convince people of their theological errors. I thought that if I won the argument, then surely they would convert—but I did not find that to be the reality. In fact, if I won an argument or debate with a friend, it often wedged greater distance between us. Of course, I felt good that I won and proclaimed the truth to my friend, but he left the interchange feeling bullied, judged, and diminished. Somehow, I can’t believe that is what Jesus had in mind when he invited us to announce the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is loving, enchanting, beautiful, exciting, attractive, inviting, gracious. Yet my approach did not seem to convey those attributes. As I have operated from my own strength, I have seen the powerlessness of my words in the absence of God’s influence. Paul reminds me in Romans that “the gospel [not my profound words added] . . . is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).

  I am faced with the humbling reality that I cannot save anyone. I cannot convict or convince anyone. This is not my role, as Jesus reveals; it is the Spirit’s role:

  When [the Holy Spirit] comes, he will convict the world of its sin, and of God’s righteousness, and of the coming judgment. . . . When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.

  JOHN 16:8, 13, NLT

  My job is to pray to the One who can convict, convince, and save, as Jesus teaches in John 6:

  No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them to me, and I will raise them up at the last day. As it is written in the Scriptures, “They will all be taught by God.” Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me.

  JOHN 6:44-45

  I have also discovered that I must depend on God in prayer because my own strength is insufficient to combat our spiri
tual adversary. Yes, a spiritual adversary. We easily forget that we have an opponent in this spiritual battle for the hearts, minds, and souls of our friends and neighbors. C. S. Lewis provides a sobering perspective when he writes, “There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”[20] Similarly, Paul reminds us of this reality in Ephesians 6:12: “For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places” (NLT).

  God is the source of all the power we need, and he alone can defeat the enemy and rescue a human heart. We cannot fight our adversary with our own strength. We need the weapon of prayer.

  Prayer is powerful because the God to whom we pray is all-powerful. He lovingly draws people to Christ—even the most unlikely men and women. As Lon Allison says, “It is the prayers of God’s people that break down the strongholds that the enemy holds over the people in our lives who do not know God.”[21] When we become aware of prayer’s transformative power, we are motivated to pray to the only one who can change a person’s condition: God.

  Invited to Participate

  With the burden of results lifted, God invites me to participate with him in his redemptive activity in the world first through prayer. To believe that my prayers could have an impact requires me to believe that my prayers are heard—that they are valued. Revelation 5:8 captures the significance of our prayers: “The four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people.”