Preach Magazine Issue 4 - Preaching in the digital age | Page 33

REVIEWS

Why we pray
William Philip, IVP (2015)

33

Practising resurrection:

The Church being Jesus’ hands, feet and heart
Cris Rogers, Authentic (2010)

How reassuring to find that I am not alone in sometimes
feeling disheartened when told why I should pray, or on
hearing about other people’s strong prayer lives. William
Philip acknowledges this tendency towards discouragement
about prayer and takes a different approach, looking at why
we pray. Why would God want us to speak to him?
Philip’s exploration of this question is laid out over four
chapters. God is a speaking God, and we are made in his
image, and therefore we speak. But at the Fall, humankind
stopped answering God, and the relationship was broken.
The gospel message is the restoration of the relationship
between humans and God; a restoration of true prayer.
Prayer is our privilege as children of God. Furthermore,
we pray because God is sovereign, and so we focus on him
rather than ourselves, and we pray through the Holy Spirit
who leads us.
But this is far from being purely a theoretical book. Philip
puts prayer back into perspective – ‘the very essence of real
prayer is simply answering God in the call that come to us in
Jesus Christ’. He stresses the importance of our relationship
with God – ‘unless relationship is real, prayer is just pretend’.
Each chapter contains a wealth of Bible references, as well as
illustrations and questions at the end for discussion.
I think this book would form an excellent basis for group
study, taking a chapter per session. It is written in a style
reminiscent of sermon transcripts, resulting in it being a
little repetitive and slow paced when read through as a book,
but this would make it ideal to be read aloud, with time to
consider the Bible passages and questions.
Most importantly, Why we pray makes sense. The emphasis
is on a relationship with God, with prayer being a natural
expression of this: something that, through Jesus, is an
invitation open to us all.
RUTH LOGAN

In this challenging and vibrant book, London-based
church leader Cris Rogers makes his contribution to
proclaiming the faith ‘afresh in each generation’ by
retelling the gospel in a contemporary way and exploring
its implications for the whole of life. The foreword is
written by the well-known ‘new monastic’ Shane Claiborne,
and there is a strong social and communal element
throughout the book. However, the style, if not the
theology, reminded me even more of Rob Bell, whom I was
surprised to find absent from the ‘further reading’ section.
There is the same punchy use of language, fresh angles
on familiar topics, explanations of historical contexts, and
a tendency to use Hebrew and Greek words rather than
their more familiar, and perhaps misunderstood, English
equivalents (Cris Rogers prefers to explain and use the
Hebrew chatta’t instead of ‘sin’, for example).
It’s a style that may appeal more to millennials than
generation X-ers like me, but it could help that readership
to take a new look at Christianity and find in it something
far more attractive, subversive, wide-ranging and exciting
than they had imagined. What makes this book more than
an anglicised Velvet Elvis are the often gritty stories from
Cris Rogers’ own ministry (at All Hallows’, Bow in East
Lond