I Have Become A Prayer Walker

Beware what you make fun of. You may someday find yourself having to eat your own words and attitudes – much to the amusement of your observant spouse. There are many things in Christendom I used to judge, things that I ironically now find wise and helpful for my current season of life and ministry. Prayer walking is one of these things.

I don’t know exactly when it became popular to prayer walk in evangelical circles. It first came onto my radar when I was a college student in the late 2000’s. Like many things that have become vogue in missions circles, I felt like I had missed the important initial conversations where everyone hashed things out and demonstrated that this was something biblical, healthy, and strategic. Instead, I started hearing all of the sudden about prayer walking as if it were a long-established Christian tradition that everyone knew how to do. I learned of prayer walking opportunities locally and even short term teams that traveled to other countries mainly to prayer walk the streets. I was a bit skeptical.

Are those people actually praying as they walk? Isn’t that a lot of money being spent on airline tickets for prayer trips when the beauty of prayer is that you don’t have to be geographically present for prayer to be effective? Does prayer walking become an excuse for not sharing the gospel?

Some of these questions still remain. And I still haven’t had that Introduction to Prayer Walking class that everyone else seems to have had. But I have myself stumbled into becoming a prayer walker over this past year. And I have found it remarkably helpful for my spiritual life.

The first step was coming across a one hour prayer plan on The Cripplegate blog. I was intrigued by this practical prayer plan from the 1970’s that I had never heard of. One hour divided up into twelve portions of five minutes, each a different kind of biblical prayer. I knew my prayer life was in need of some fresh structure and vision, so I filed the plan away in hopes of returning to it in the near future.

It was some months before I came back to this plan and decided it was time to actually try it out. As I experimented with it, I tweaked a few of the categories, cutting out some areas that felt like reduplication and adding in some new categories, such as lament. Here are my twelve.

1. Praise and Worship + honest assessment of my soul.
2. Waiting on the Lord in silence
3. Confession of guilt, sin, and shame
4. Praying Scripture
5. Lament, Burdens, and Brokenness
6. Intercession
7. Petitions
8. Thanksgiving
9. Song/Poem
10. Contemplation/Meditation
11. Listening/Watching
12. Praise for what’s true + renouncing lies and unbelief

My former prayer life was heavily weighted in favor of petition, intercession, confession, and thanksgiving. This more holistic prayer structure breathed fresh life into my prayer rhythms and gave me a place to put biblical practices that weren’t really taking place elsewhere – things like lament and silence. Sometimes a new structure is all that’s needed to spur encouraging growth.

This prayer hour worked decently well for me when I was trying to do it alone at home, but eventually I had a hard time staying focused. I was also needing to incorporate more physical activity into my day – and learning that I had a woefully underdeveloped theology of the body. Truth be told, for many years I lived as if I was a disembodied spirit, not an embodied creation with a good, but limited physical body. I pushed hard for the sake of ministry, not really believing it was that important to take care of my physical health. Because of realizing all of this, I was chewing on whether or not there were ways to better glorify God with my body, and not merely with my mind and my relationships.

I had other questions. Why is walking with God the language the scriptures uses to describe Adam and Enoch’s spiritual disciplines? And is this only meant to be a metaphor? What effect would moving feet have upon focus and meditation? And what loss would come by not being able to easily write things down? What about the brutal Central Asian summer heat?

Sometime after returning to our region this past autumn, I decided to pull the trigger and try an hour prayer walk. Armed with my recently purchased Fitbit, I set the countdown for five minutes and walked out my front gate of my Central Asian row home.

The first day saw my soul deeply encouraged, and my body more tired than I had expected. My ability to focus with my eyes open and my feet moving was much better than I had expected. This was extra noticeable in the meditation on scripture portion – a fun surprise. Who knew that some degree of physical movement would be highly compatible with gleaning insights from a Bible verse? To be honest, I find I’m better at meditating on a passage when walking than I am when sitting down.

It’s now been nine months or so that I’ve been seeking to do this almost daily. And I continue to find it good for both soul and body. My current practice is to walk and pray in the bazaar, mixing up the empty streets with the more crowded. Because of the time of year, I try to stay on the shaded sidewalks as much as possible. An hour walk in 110s degrees Fahrenheit (44 degrees Celcius) sun is no joke.

A few practical notes on what each of the twelve sections tends to look like:

1. Praise and Worship + honest assessment of my soul – This usually starts off sounding like, “I praise you because you are fully alive and the source of life itself… and I do not feel fully alive today.”
2. Waiting on the Lord in silence – Focusing my mind on the presence of God and on one simple true thought, such as “God is with me” or “I am in Christ.”
3. Confession of guilt, sin, and shame – Not just sin and guilt, but where am I struggling with shame as well? That also needs to be brought to the cross.
4. Praying Scripture – This is one of the trickier parts of the prayer walk. Using a Bible app on my phone has been key for this working. But sometimes I will find a spot to sit down so that I can better read scripture and pray it as I do so.
5. Lament, Burdens, and Brokenness – One of my favorite new additions to my prayer life. It’s a daily chance to bring the things to God that are just hard for me personally (or have been in the past), as well as things like societal sins and tragedies. Five minutes a day of this has been remarkably life-giving.
6. Intercession – Praying for others.
7. Petitions – Praying for daily bread and things impossible.
8. Thanksgiving – Remembering to rejoice in God’s specific and faithful provision.
9. Song/Poem – A chance to engage my affections with truth put to music or verse, either by singing something myself or by listening to a favorite song.
10. Contemplation/Meditation – Chewing methodically on a small passage of scripture to see what insights emerge, usually a couple verses at a time as I work through a book.
11. Listening/Watching – More silence, listening to the sounds of God’s creation and anything else he might impress on soul or mind. Not demanding a certain type of clarity or word. Paying attention to the visible beauty of creation.
12. Praise for what’s true + renouncing lies and unbelief – A daily chance to recognize the particular lies I’m wrestling with that day, and to apply God’s truth against them. “Lie: I feel like God is disappointed in me. Truth: He delights in me today and for all eternity.”

I decided not to write about this prayer walk rhythm until I had actually done it long enough to know I would stick with it and could vouch for it. Coming up on nine months of this now, I’m happy to commend this prayer structure as one good method among many for carrying out biblical prayers in all their diversity. It’s no silver bullet. You may find prayer walking through a structured hour like this not that helpful for you. But this method has been life-giving for me, so I share it here in hopes that it will be helpful for others also.

Photo by Balkouras Nicos on Unsplash