The House Of Prayer

Perhaps an unlikely subject for an ethnographic case study, the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto in Canada is a large predominantly LGBT church with a robust, and at times fraught, history of advocacy. While the church is often riddled with fault lines and contradictions, its queer and faith-based emphasis on shared vulnerability leads it to engage in radical solidarity with asylum-seekers, pointing to the work of affect in radical, coalition politics. A House of Prayer for All People maps the affective dimensions of the politics of citizenship at this church. For nearly three years, David K. Seitz regularly attended services at MCCT. He paid special attention to how community and citizenship are formed in a primarily queer Christian organization, focusing on four contemporary struggles: debates on race and gender in religious leadership, activism around police–minority relations, outreach to LGBT Christians transnationally, and advocacy for asylum seekers. Engaging in debates in cultural geography, queer of color critique, psychoanalysis, and affect theory, A House of Prayer for All People stages innovative, reparative encounters with citizenship and religion. Building on queer theory’s rich history of “subjectless” critique, Seitz calls for an “improper” queer citizenship—one that refuses liberal identity politics or national territory as the ethical horizon for sympathy, solidarity, rights, redistribution, or intimacy. Improper queer citizenship, he suggests, depends not only on “good politics” but also on people’s capacity for empathy, integration, and repair.

Crippled by deformed hips as a child, Mark Richard was told he would spend his adult life in a wheelchair. The son of an unpredictable, violent father and a mother who sought inner peace through scripture, Richard spent his bedridden childhood in the company of books. As a young man, he set out to experience as much of the world as possible before his hips failed him. He spent years doing odd jobs and getting into trouble, grappling throughout with his faith and his calling, before winning a national fiction contest and launching an extraordinary writing career. In this irresistible blend of history, travelogue, and personal reflection, Richard draws a remarkable portrait of a writer’s struggle with his faith, the evolution of his art, and the recognition of one’s singularity in the face of painful disability.

In the gospel of Luke, the disciples of Jesus ask Him, "Lord, teach us to pray." They saw the great importance Jesus placed on having a daily rhythm of prayer, and they wanted to learn how to have this same rhythm in their own lives. And so can we. In this refreshingly different look at prayer, Johannes Hartl explores twelve simple ways to build a thriving prayer life--twelve steps that have transformed his life. Hartl encourages readers to explore different forms of prayer, from embracing silence, to creating your own "inner garden" in which to meet with Jesus wherever you are, to overcoming the scripts and traffic in our heads that prevent us from encountering God. With inspiring stories, spiritual exercises, and practical ideas, Simply Pray will help you develop daily rhythms of prayer, even in the hectic pace of day-to-day life. For those who long to meet with God in prayer, experience more depth, and discover God's presence in the everyday, Simply Pray is an invitation to the biggest challenge and the loveliest secret--the adventure that will change your life.

To love God with an undivided heart is to serve Him with an undistracted life. Prayer releases the purpose of God. It brings into focus the practice of God and aligns us with His divine providence. From this little book on prayer, we will discover that our trajectory to the heavens is ultimately determined by orientation to the ground.

When everything we’re going through--pain, loss, tragedy, grief--suggests that God can’t help us or doesn’t care, it seems unwise to place our confidence in Him. But nothing could be farther from the truth. This discussion guide to Trusting God by Navigator author Jerry Bridges features discussion questions that study what the Bible has to say about God's sovereignty, His mercy, and His love. • For individual or small-group discussion

The Prayer-Saturated Church provides step-by-step, practical help for mobilizing, organizing, and motivating believers to make their church a house of prayer. Written by a veteran prayer leader with hands-on experience in local church prayer, The Prayer-Saturated Church will enable any church to take prayer to the next level.

If you love to pray, or you need to pray more effectively, this book will change your prayer life forever. Your entire approach to prayer is about to improve!