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Finishing with grad school allowed me to get back to some of the important things of life, like sleeping and having a life of the mind. If you know me, chances are good you’re aware that I love the writing of C.S. Lewis. It’s one of those primary facts, like “Lindsay is my wife,” “I’m a Kansas Jayhawk fan,” and “My jump shot is probably better than yours.”

Is Your Lord Large Enough? is the first book on C.S. Lewis I’ve read since the ground-breaking Planet Narnia (review), and it went a long way toward refreshing my mind via the thinking of Lewis, who has kind of served as a mentor in my spiritual life.

What Peter Schakel does is a welcome variation on the usual approach to Lewis, which typically examines his life (biography) or accumulated writing (theology) or apologetics (philosophy). While Schakel is certainly an adept scholar, he deliberatly mines Lewis’ collected works to write a book with strong devotional momentum. Rather than simply clarifying what Lewis meant here and comparing it with what he said there, Schakel ransacks C.S.’s life and books for insights into lived-out theology.

To do this, Schakel poses questions like, How did Lewis pray? What advice did he offer to people struggling with prayer? What help does he extend to people who need help forgiving and loving? What did he say about Heaven, and our expectations of it?

The practical thrust of each chapter gets help from follow-up questions from Schakel that, in my opinion, were really excellent, as opposed to the lukewarm “discussion” stuff that often gets tacked on to books. All told, Is Your Lord Large Enough? was a great restorative for my tired mind and a good kick in the pants for my walk with Jesus. Lewis, a man as practical as he was imaginative, would approve. Highly recommended.

Don’t miss “Spurgeon is the Man Week” at the Resurgence site. Here’s a piece from the third installment in the series, which is mining Spurgeon’s remarkable life for what he can teach us:

Prayer

Spurgeon prayed both spontaneously by breaking from the affairs of his day to speak with the Lord, and also during scheduled times of prayer for himself that included walks in the woods, days away at a cottage, and months away in France for Sabbath, study, and prayer. Prayer for him was so significant that he aptly said, “Prayer has become as essential to me as the heaving of my lungs.” His commitment to prayer extended to a team of hundreds of intercessors who were appointed to pray for his preaching and people’s hearts during the church service. They prayed on their faces in the church basement that was aptly titled the “war room.” Occasionally when Spurgeon prayed over the sick they were healed and many believed he had the gift of healing. He also told his preaching students that his power, authority, and insight came from continually praying the text of his sermon before preaching it. His church prayer meetings were on Monday nights and as many as 1,200 people attended to pray as the Spirit led, which did not included printed prayers or long prayers because he hated both.

We have as much control over “in a minute” as we do over a random moment in the next millenium, so our best bet is to pray, then happily flail away:

The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. - C.S. Lewis

N.T. Wright makes the point that all God’s people are called to pray but apostolic leaders more so than the rest. He derives this from the passage in Acts where Peter, James, John, etc., appointed new leaders so that they, the apostles, could devote themselves to prayer and the teaching of God’s word.

This makes perfect sense. It’s an almost glaringly obvious assumption, like connecting two dots when they are the only ones on the page, they are gigantic, and they and are framed by flashing neon arrows. Blink, blink, blink: Apostles devote themselves to prayer -> That means prayer is a huge priority.

These days, church planters are often described in apostolic terms, as the dudes who will start new movements of people toward Jesus by preaching (and praying) in regions where the gospel previously made as much sense as a Burger King breakfast commercial.

This is sort of disquieting for a guy whose best prayer often seems to be, “GOD HELP US!”

Nevertheless, I am trying to work prayer into my life more, similar to the way you work chalk into your palms to get a better grip on your climbing surface, or spray Stickum Grip Spray on your hands so that you can throw down a really sick dunk. Prayer has a great deal to do with our ability to navigate reality accurately and find traction–conversing with God has this calming, gracious, strengthening effect.

Not to mention that, should he want to, God can answer our petitions with dramatic and immediate results, such as when he allowed KU to win the national championship.

So when I hit a patch of silence, I let it be for awhile and pray, rather than immediately blasting Shai Linne or Josh Ritter. Lindsay and I are taking a running start at praying together every night, and while we don’t have an unbroken record by any means, praying together has been immediately healthy and good. I also think it increases the likelihood that we’ll make out.

Ultimately, I’m trying to become a man who is open and sensitive to God’s spirit, aware of what’s going on in my heart–as opposed to an ignorant and cocky dude. For anyone called to plant a church, this seems like a biblical mandate.

Every so often, there’s a question that crops up when I’m reading/thinking about church planting. This is especially true when church planting gets slotted under the heading of “apostolic ministry.” Here’s a quote from N.T. Wright that assesses, accurately, I believe, the priority of first century apostles:

The heart of the apostles’ reasoning in all this was the priority of the word of God and prayer. Only when a crisis emerges do we see what is really important. We noted earlier that ‘the apostles’ teaching’ was top of the list of the defining marks of the church (2:42), and that the apostles, faced with persecution, were instructed by the angel to ‘go and speak the words of this Life’ (5:20)… The early apostolic testimony stands solidly: the task of an apostle is the word of God and prayer.

Based on what we find in the New Testament–that apostolic ministers, the men God uses to begin new gospel movements, are first and foremost preachers and prayers–how do we reconcile the massive amounts of time that church planters today typically pour into fund raising, advertising campaigns, and infrastructure?

I’m not saying that any of those latter things are extraneous. Just wondering how to keep first things first and how to go about explaining this apparent dichotomy… If anyone else wants to take a shot at this, I’m all ears.