Contemplative Prayer

ever consciously started to pray by being quiet and just listening? on sunday i led our adult sunday school class in an exercise in contemplative prayer. on of our elders began the morning by reminding us that prayer is about conversation with the living God. in conversation, we don't always talk...sometimes we listen.
so, we had people begin by reading a passage from Isaiah and listening for a word or phrase that spoke to them. they read either Isaiah 25:6-9 or Isaiah 53:1-10. we then took 3 minutes of silence to be quite and listen for God's voice in the passage.
then, because God speaks through the Bible, we read Matt 26:26-28 in conjuction with the Isaiah passage, and then took silence to listen for how God's message grew richer.
finally, we had people look at one of several paintings that were done in response to the last supper, and again took silent time to allow the visual images to draw out the multi-faced beauty of God's word.
we asked people to take five minutes to write a short prayer of response to whatever the Lord had been saying to them that morning. some people responded with repentance, others with adoration and praise.
then, the scary (and some would say bold) part: we asked for volunteers to read their prayers to the congregation during the celebration of the Lord's Supper at the main worship meeting that morning.

here's why i'm so excited about this: first, it was just plain cool. people who did the exercise were blessed immensely by it. second, it puts into practice a number of the values that i think are key in the emerging church. things like the need for "white space" as my buddy Dan Macha would say - a conjunction of time and space that is consciously carved out for listening for the voice of God. things like valuing the input of all members of God's family. modern churches called this "every member ministry" but didn't execute it practically in the way they run their worship services...Paul called it the way things were in the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 14:26 and following. I had always read these verses as a condemnation of the chaos caused by various people having things to say during the "service", of of the reason for why we only let the pastor speak and plan things out ahead of time, but lately i'm wondering if he wasn't saying that since everyone has something to offer, they should each be given a chance to offer it in an orderly way that demonstrates the value of what each person brings. maybe i'll post on this more later. Emerging Worship first turned me on to this way of understanding the passage.)