In over 70 years of communism in Russia and the former Soviet Union, the vast majority of church buildings in the Soviet Union, especially in Russia, were destroyed or closed. Millions of Christians were imprisoned and put to death.
I first went to the Soviet Union in 1981 and came away frustrated and confused. I experienced pain to see beautiful churches turned into warehouses, factories, and communist meeting halls. For a long time after that, the picture I had of the Russian church was elderly women, grandmothers—they’re called babushka—wrapped in their head scarves, clad in heavy sweaters and coats, sitting in the dark corners of the two or three churches we visited, sometimes dusting and polishing the altar and furniture of churches that were no longer dynamic places of worship, praying before the icons. I kept asking myself, “What can these grandmothers do? How can they keep alive the faith of the church? Where are the young people, and how are the young people going to receive the Christian witness?”
A few years after that, at the celebration of 1000 years of the church in Russia, when someone asked a Russian priest whether it was healthy for the church to be composed of so many aged mothers, he replied with a story: “In the early days of communism,” he said, “many churches were blown up and the priests, monks, and nuns were executed. (Parenthetically, one of the worst holocausts of the ages was the slaying of Christians in the early years of Communism—some estimate that during the Lenin/Stalin regime, over 40 million Christians were killed.) Lenin argued that once the grandmothers died, nobody would remember there had been a church in Russia. But now, the priest said, Lenin is long dead, and the church is still full of grandmothers who were children when he was alive.”
Then he concluded, “As long as the Russian church has its grandmothers, it will survive.” (The Christian Century, December 24, 1986.)
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the crumbling of the atheistic system of government and economics, I have visited many former Soviet Union countries, and heard a similar word. It was the grandmothers—the praying grandmothers, who kept the faith alive in all those countries.
Keep that word of the priest and the picture of “praying grandmothers’ in mind as I make this claim, “prayer means that no one of us can ever say, ‘There is nothing I can do.’” We can pray.
Prayer is one of the greatest works that Christians are given to do. God needs us. Does that sound blasphemous—that God, the all-powerful, sovereign Lord of the universe—that God needs us? I’m not questioning God’s power or sovereignty. I’m confirming the witness of Scripture: in His sovereignty and power, God chose to order creation, all of life, in such a way to include us humans in accomplishing His will.
Though it sounds simple, it is a profound issue: prayer is God’s idea. Prayer raises some very tough questions. What about the sovereignty of God? Isn’t God going to do whatever God wants to do whether we pray or not?? Or what about healing? Does our praying make any difference? These are tough questions and many people do not pray because of tough questions like these. So it is important to register the fact that prayer is God’s idea.
I don’t want to be irreverent, but all the questions and objections and contradictions surrounding prayer are God’s problems—not mine—because God has commanded us to pray.
The witness of Scripture, and the experience of faithful followers is that prayer is God’s idea—and that means that God needs us. There is mystery here, and this does not diminish the power and sovereignty of God, nor does it make God capricious. It simply affirms the relationship that is ours with the Creator Redeemer God. It underscores the fact that God has given us the superlative opportunity to be active participants in the fulfillment of His Kingdom. We can—we must—God calls us to pray.
It’s commonplace to think and affirm that God acts through persons. Acts of mercy and reconciliation, expressions of loving kindness—deliberate righteous activity, justice deeds, performance that makes for peace—we see all of this as God’s work through persons. And we all agree that God’s will is accomplished through us. Why is it? Why is it such a long leap in our minds to think that as God is dependent upon our acting, as He is dependent upon our praying. Prayer means that no one can ever say there’s nothing I can do, we can pray.
God’s invitation and command is that we are to pray and act as partners in God’s Kingdom enterprise.
I’ve written more than 40 books; the most popular, The Workbook of Living Prayer, has sold over a million copies and is printed in six languages. A new book, co-authored with David Chotka, Healing Prayer is God’s Idea, is being launched this week. In this book we seek to provide the resources to do what you can do and are called to do: through your praying, partner with the Holy Spirit in the healing that is in ‘God’s heart and plan. We cannot ever say, there’s nothing I can do; we can pray.