The last few weeks have been filled with farewells. Three assemblies have now sung ‘God be with you till we meet again.’ Overnight I went from being the Minister of Word and Sacrament of a specific local church to a pastor without the pastoral responsibility of a particular assembly. Now that my former assembly responsibilities are gone, that’s made me think about what my responsibility is now. You see, I come from a tradition where being a pastor (or an ordained teacher as well in my case) isn’t just a temporary function or job. When you’re ordained as a pastor, you then ‘are’ a pastor. So, I need to think about what my responsibilities are as a pastor without the responsibility of an assembly.

But how? Well, my solution was to get out my Ministers’ Manual (which is basically our liturgy book) and re-read and reflect on my ordination vows. A vow is a promise, and so it should be remembered and kept. We’d be amazed if anyone forgot their wedding vows! And an ordination vow is just as solemn a promise before God. So, if I’m to be a faithful pastor and teacher while I don’t have the responsibility of a local assembly, I need to remember and keep my ordination vows.

At the centre of the ordination vow taken by ministers in the Apostolic Church stands a promise always to trust in the Holy Scriptures as ‘our sufficient and final authority in all matters of doctrine and practice’ and so always to ‘develop your ministry in accordance’ with this sufficiency and supreme authority of Scripture. Before promising my fidelity to ‘the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith as contained in the Tenets of this Church’ or that I would maintain its ‘worship, discipline and government,’ I (and all other Apostolic ministers) promised that my ministry would always rely upon the sufficiency and authority of Scripture.

So, for the last few days I haven’t been the pastor of an assembly. Yet I have spoken to a number of people about the Christian faith, and sat with people answering many questions about the Bible and the Christian life. I haven’t done it as ‘their’ pastor, but a have done it as ‘a’ pastor and teacher (for that is what I am). And so, again and again, in response to all sorts of questions about ethics, prayer, doctrine, the Christian life, and church practice, I’ve taken people back to the Bible to see what it says – pointing people again and again to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. I don’t do that merely out of duty because I’m a pastor; I do it because I trust in Scripture’s sufficiency and authority as the Word of God. But if I weren’t to do that, I wouldn’t be keeping the promise of my ordination vow.

So, how can I, as a pastor without an assembly be a faithful pastor? By keeping my promise, and so bringing people to the green pastures of God’s Word: pointing them not to me and my words or actions, but to the sufficient Word which God has spoken.

A.W. Tozer’s name is well-known by Evangelicals around the world today. Yet, Tozer wasn’t a celebrity pastor, constantly making the rounds of the conference circuit. First and foremost, Tozer was a man who loved to spend time with God in prayer and meditation. And he was a man who believed strongly in the importance of unceasing prayer.

Tozer explained what it means to pray without ceasing by drawing on definition from Dr Max Reich: ‘Praying without ceasing [is] a continual, humble communion with God, day and night, under all circumstances, the pouring out of my heart to God in continual unbroken fellowship.’ (from Tozer’s article ‘The Church is on a Stormy Sea’, in Faith Beyond Reason).

But, if we’re to know this continual communion with God in prayer, then we need to be aware of, and deal with, the problem of distraction:

Whatever excites the curiosity, scatters the thoughts, disquiets the heart, absorbs the interests or shifts our life focus from the kingdom of God within us to the world around us—that is a distraction; and the world is full of them. … Distractions must be conquered or they will conquer us. So let us cultivate simplicity; let us want fewer things; let us walk in the Spirit; let us fill our minds with the word of God and our hearts with praise. In that way we can live in peace even in such a distraught world as this. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” (The Set of the Sail, 117-119)

It is only with such peace from Christ that we know what Tozer calls ‘the power of silence’:

There aren't all that many contemporary worship songs about the Trinity, the Eternal Purpose, or the Covenant of Redemption. To be honest, there aren't many older choruses either, and most people would be surprised to discover they were incredibly important themes in the early Pentecostal worship of the Welsh-speaking Apostolics. So, here are two Trinitarian hymns that take in these themes which I've translated from the Welsh of D.P. Williams. I've made rough recordings and attached PDFs of the lyrics and chords as well, so that if anyone wants to they can get an idea of the tune. (For one I've used the tune suggested in Molwch Dduw, our Welsh hymnbook, but I couldn't find the suggested tune for the other one, or one that seemed appropriate or usable today in the right metre, so I came up with one myself.)

Luther said that none of us could say we don't have time to pray without ceasing. Here's how he explained it:

There is no Christian who does not have time to pray without ceasing. But I mean the spiritual praying, that is: no one is so heavily burdened with his labor, but that if he will he can, while working, speak with God in his heart, lay before Him his need and that of other men, ask for help, make petition, and in all this exercise and strengthen his faith.

This is what the Lord means, Luke xviii, when He says, "Men ought always to pray, and never cease," although in Matthew vi. He forbids the use of much speaking and long prayers, because of which He rebukes the hypocrites; not because the lengthy prayer of the lips is evil, but because it is not that true prayer which can be made at all times, and without the inner prayer of faith is nothing. For we must also practise the outward prayer in its proper time, especially in the [Lord's Supper], as this Commandment requires, and wherever it is helpful to the inner prayer and faith, whether in the house or in the field, in this work or in that; of which we have no time now to speak more. For this belongs to the Lord's Prayer, in which all petitions and spoken prayer are summed up in brief words.

CTS, where EPTA was held this year.

This last fortnight has been conference time for me, first with the Tyndale Fellowship Conference Christian Doctrine Group in Cambridge, and then the European Pentecostal Theological Association (EPTA) at Continental Theological Seminary (my old institution) in Brussels. This was my first trip to the Tyndale Fellowship Conference and my second to EPTA, and I recommend them both highly. So, I thought I’d tell you a bit about them. (I also gave papers at both conferences this year, so I’ll tell you a bit about that too.)


What did they have in common?

The most obvious commonality is that both are academic conferences. Yet, both are also academic conferences hosted by confessional associations, and so they’re largely (though not exclusively) evangelical affairs. Most attendees are practicing Christians, and so both conferences include daily prayers as well as the academic papers. Both also attract people working in academia as well as those working in church settings, and so, it’s a time of the academy serving the church, but also a time for those working in the academy to spend time talking with, learning from, and being challenged by those whose ministry takes place in local congregations as we talk over meals and coffee. So, for example, at Tyndale, I spent one evening with a Brethren New Testament scholar from the United States and an English Anglo-Catholic priest, from which I’ve come away with much to think about in terms of church ministry, including multi-cultural integration in church life, making disciples in contemporary western inner city environments with high levels of deprivation and functional illiteracy, and lovingly addressing problematic disruptions in church services. Over the last evening meal at EPTA, I learnt from the experience of Canadian and Scandinavian Pentecostals about the challenges facing Pentecostal congregations in their parts of the world in passing on Pentecostal distinctives, such as the place of the baptism and gifts of the Holy Spirit, to a new generation. So, while both conferences provided lots of intellectual stimulation, they also both helped me to think about issues in church life as well.


How were they different?

As I’ve said, at both conferences we prayed together, yet that was probably also one of the big differences as well. Tyndale began each morning with morning prayer. EPTA began and ended the conference, as well as beginning each day with times of worship, prayer, and reflection on Scripture, but prayer wasn’t confined to those times. The chairs prayed for each presenter before they gave their papers, and sometimes papers led to people huddled in a corner praying together afterwards. The last night, some friends and I sat on talking and praying together until midnight, in a large part due to what, in good Pentecostal language, I would describe as the anointing of the Holy Spirit on an academic paper. Perhaps that’s simply due to some cultural differences between Pentecostals and wider evangelicalism, but it just gave a different feel to each of the conferences. Tyndale felt like a scholarly gathering of Christians. EPTA felt like a Christian gathering of scholars. Both of those are good things: they’re just a bit different, that’s all.

EPTA also felt much more multi-cultural. While there were some scholars from other parts of the world, Tyndale seemed more dominated by the British and Americans. EPTA, on the other hand, had a good mixture of people from about 15 different countries (and at least 5 continents were represented).

The other big difference is that Tyndale is divided into different groups for the different sub-disciplines. The Christian Doctrine Group and New Testament Group were running in parallel, so I did meet some New Testament scholars in the evenings or over meals, but otherwise, we theologians were by ourselves for the most part. EPTA, on the other hand, is completely inter-disciplinary. So I mingled with Old Testament scholars, ecumenists, sociologists, church historians, theologians, and NT people. Many of the papers run in parallel at EPTA, so you have some choice in what to go and hear, but I still managed to attend Old Testament, New Testament, Systematic Theology, Pastoral Theology, Church History, and Theological Ethics papers, with some liturgics and sociology thrown in for good measure. (I want to emphasise this, as, I think some people don’t realise how much variety there is at EPTA. Another Pentecostal said to me at Tyndale, ‘I don’t go to EPTA, because I don’t do Pentecostal Studies.’ Yet EPTA is so much more than merely Pentecostal Studies.)


The Themes

Both conferences had particularly interesting themes this year. At Tyndale we were engaging with the work of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen upon the completion of his 5 volume Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World. At EPTA, this year’s theme was ‘Holiness and Ethics in the 21st Century.’

(Next year, the Tyndale Doctrine Group is looking at ‘Theology and Science’, while EPTA will be thinking about ‘Pentecostalism in a Changing World.’)


My Papers

Hopefully I’ve persuaded you by now that going to a conference is about much, much more than giving a paper, but it is true that I happened to give a paper both at Tyndale and at EPTA this year. My Tyndale paper looked at Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s ideas about justification and theosis. Kärkkäinen has previously argued that an investigation of early Pentecostal sources could provide a finding that would support his concept of justification as theosis. So, I compared his views to early British Pentecostal accounts of theosis and justification, and concluded that they don’t really do what he would like them to have done. Yes please, they say, to theosis; but, only if they can hold onto a robust doctrine of the imputation of Christs’ righteousness, sola gratia, sola fide. Their ideas about theosis would, however, help with Kärkkäinen’s desire to see a robust engagement of the themes of Spirit baptism and charismatic empowerment in systematic theology.

As soon as the theme for EPTA this year was announced at last year’s conference, I knew I wanted to write a paper on Pentecostals, Holiness, and the Breaking of Bread. So, starting with the words ‘Holiness to the Lord’ (which are so often engraved upon British Pentecostal chalices and patens, embroidered on the cloth and veil for the Communion Table, and even sometimes engraved on the Table itself), I had a look at how holiness is both proclaimed and offered in the Breaking of Bread, through the encounter in the sacrament with the presence of the crucified and risen Saviour. It was strange, because I ended up giving the paper in the same room in which I had given my very first conference paper a decade ago, also on the Breaking of Bread.


An Invitation

Both the Tyndale Fellowship Conference and EPTA were stimulating, well-organised, and encouraging times. (And I’d really like to thank all those who put in so much work to organise them and keep things running smoothly.) I’m really looking forward to next year’s events, and, for anyone involved in academic theology, I’d really encourage you to think about it too.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a long-standing professor with billions of publications to enjoy these conferences. There were Master’s level students in attendance at both (and, in fact, one of the best papers I heard between the two conferences was delivered by a rather nervous Master’s student attending his first ever conference!) So, whether you’re a long-established scholar, a nervous new MA student, or a pastor who has been out of college for quite a while, but would like to reengage with some serious and critical thinking, why not come along next year to either Tyndale or EPTA?

(P.S. And for my Apostolic pastoral colleagues, I’d particularly encourage some of you to think about coming to EPTA next year, as it sounds like the theme will be particularly interesting for thinking Pentecostal pastors and those involved in missions in a changing world. Plus, it’s being held in our Bible college in Kolding in Denmark.)

‘If you try to pray without ceasing because you want to be very pious and good, you will never succeed,’ warns Andrew Murray. There is only one way to a life of unceasing prayer, and it is not found in us, but in Jesus. ‘Christ makes us partakers with Him of His prayer-power and His prayer-life.’ And so it is Jesus who is ‘responsible for our praying without ceasing.’

Murray comes to prayer without ceasing in the last chapter of his classic With Christ in the School of Prayer. There he tells us that in this school:

Christ teaches us to pray by showing us how He does it, by doing it in us, and by leading us to do it in Him and like Him. Christ is everything – the life and the strength – for a never-ceasing prayer life. Seeing Christ’s continuous praying as our life enables us to pray without ceasing.

It is only because Christ’s life is now our life that ‘praying without ceasing can become the joy of heaven here on earth,’ for ‘never-ceasing prayer is the manifestation of the power of the eternal life where Jesus always prays.’

Prayer without ceasing depends entirely upon our union with Christ, and ‘in union with Him’ ceaseless prayer can become ‘a reality, the holiest and most blessed part of our holy and blessed fellowship with God.’

What is a life of ceaseless prayer? Murray writes that it’s a life where ‘the inmost life of the soul is continually rising upward in dependence, faith, longing desire, and trustful expectation.’


You can read the previous posts in this series here:

• Part 1 - Praying Always: A Pentecostal Perspective
• Part 2 - Praying Always: D.P. Williams on Communion with God in the Life of Prayer

Christians are called to a life of prayer. And, D.P. Williams explains, that life of prayer is a life of ‘deeper communion with God.’ Yet, we cannot climb up to communion with God, but can only be welcomed in by God’s grace to us in Jesus and by His Spirit. So, the life of prayer is not our accomplishment, but God’s gift. 

That we spend time with Him in prayer behind the scene and that every child of God should be a vessel for the Holy Ghost to intercede, and to pray inwardly, and to liberate the inner man into deeper communion with God in the life of prayer, until you lose your words, not because you have not got words, but because your words are lost in the end in groans and sobs unto Him.

The Bible tells us to ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thess. 5:17), ‘praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit’ (Eph. 6:18). Jesus Himself taught ‘that men always ought to pray and not lose heart’ (Lk 18:1). Perhaps, though, we are tempted to skip over the words ‘without ceasing’ and ‘always.’ Surely that’s just impossible anyway, we might think. And yet, it is the plain teaching of God’s Word. Those who trust in Christ are called to ‘pray without ceasing.’

The early Pentecostals saw the importance of this. Ps Arthur Lewis compared prayer to breathing in an article in the Riches of Grace in 1936. ‘Our breathing is normal under ordinary conditions,’ he wrote, ‘but when extra bodily effort is demanded, it deepens, becomes abnormal.’ Ps Lewis used this difference between all-the-time normal breathing and specifically needed abnormal breathing to explain the difference between two types of prayer (which he called prayer and supplication).

‘Prayer is our normal breathing … but Supplication is our abnormal breathing,’ he wrote. This prayer that he compared to normal breathing is prayer, which like normal breathing, should be going on all the time. ‘Pray always (or else we cannot live).’ The supplication, which is like the abnormal breathing when extra bodily effort is needed, is the prayer needed at specific times and on specific occasions, whether set daily prayer at home alone, or a prayer meeting together with the church. Supplication is necessary and very important, but, Ps Lewis says, it depends on the normal breathing of constant prayer. ‘Our ordinary prayer, if real, opens the way for our supplication to be effectual, and with thanksgiving.’ Our ‘natural prayer’ during the day ‘will prepare our “lungs” to make the special effort’ of supplication.

The possibility of prayer without ceasing – of praying like breathing – depends entirely upon ‘the glorious consummation of Calvary.’ It is only as we look to Christ crucified for us that we can know ‘a restfulness’ which enables a vital life of prayer. Such restfulness in Christ ‘enables us to bear the burden of need, however great it may be, before His Throne with thankfulness.’

As we grow in a life of prayer without ceasing, we will grow in the confidence that the Father hears our prayer, not only by the visible answers to prayer He gives, but also ‘as evidenced by that quiet assurance in our hearts’ which He provides by the Holy Spirit.

So, as we grow into a life of prayer without ceasing, we are growing in a life of conscious fellowship with the Holy Trinity: with the Father, to whom we prayer and who hears us; with the Son, in whose name we pray, and in whose merit we trust; and with the Holy Spirit, by whom we pray, who lifts our prayers to heaven, and who brings the assurance of heaven to our hearts.

1. Before praying for anyone, or any cause, the spirit must be free towards God and Man.

2. We should not talk about any person, without being able to pray for such at the same time.

3. When praying, we should be on our guard not to be the accusers of the brethren. Avoid the spirit of condemnation while praying. It is the devil's work to accuse the brethren.

4. While praying, we ought to know how to deal with the cause of the wrong, then with the effect.

5. While praying, we must be always open to be searched by the Spirit as to our narrow-mindedness, and let Him enlarge our hearts towards all. The throne that we approach is universal. The Holy Spirit in His divine agency is universal, so we much be possessed with a universal heart. We are indebted to all.

6. Prayer must not be pointed at persons, but about persons for their good.

7. Prayer must be definite; never pray at random.

8. We must be prepared to fulfill our own prayers, when the Will of God had revealed in prayer what our part is.

9. The hills before us may appear clear and near, but the valley between may be dark and isolated. To climb to its summit may be very difficult. The visions of truth on the hills of revelation seem beautiful, admirable, and attractive, but to reach the heights requires perseverance and faithfulness to climb. To go down the dark valley of subjection and nothingness demands humility.

10. If we will allow God to humble us, He will not allow others to do it.

11. What appears to man to be our humiliation can, in the Will of God, be our exaltation in His due time. The way to the Throne is the Cross.

12. We cannot scold nor dragoon men to love Christ. It is not by dogs and sticks that the Good Shepherd leads the flock.

13. Christian influence is like the dew, refreshing; like the dawn, illuminating and invigorating.

14. It is like the light penetrating through the dark.

15. It is like salt purifying all with its influence, counteracting putrefaction. These agents all do their work quietly.

16. People that have their own schemes very often shut God out.

17. Troubles and trials are the goads to drive us to prayer. Prayer is the goad to drive them away.