Author: Matthew C. Bingham

The Irreplaceable Value of Prayer in Your Spiritual Formation

If Christians confess that God is personal, both capable and desirous of real relationship with his creatures, then to talk to him should be as natural as it is necessary.

April 25, 2025 by: Matthew C. Bingham

What Is Prayer?

What exactly is prayer? The simplest and most straightforward way to define prayer is as a person talking to God. The English Reformer Thomas Becon (1512–1567), whom scholars have identified as having authored the very first English Protestant treatise devoted exclusively to prayer, published a catechism in 1548 in which he defined prayer as “an earnest talk with God.”1 If Christians confess that God is personal, both capable and desirous of real relationship with his creatures, then to talk to him should be as natural as it is necessary.

As Campegius Vitringa helpfully noted, “It is a characteristic of God to ‘hear prayer’ (Ps. 65:2).2 We read in Genesis 4:26 that shortly after the fall, “people began to call upon the name of the Lord,” and throughout Scripture the faithful are described as both hearing from God and speaking to him in return. The Psalms overflow with cries to God such as “Give ear to the words of my mouth” (Ps. 54:2) and corresponding praises such as “On the day I called, you answered me” (Ps. 138:3). Scripture assures us that “when the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears” (Ps. 34:17). The connection between inclusion among God’s people and confidence that God will hear one’s prayers is very tight: it is precisely because “the Lord has set apart the godly for himself” that David can immediately conclude, “The Lord hears when I call to him” (Ps. 4:3). Indeed, the entire Christian life itself begins with hearing God’s word and responding back with words of repentance and faith: “When they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ’” (Acts 2:37–38).

God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers. Or as William Ames put it, “In hearing the word we receive the Will of God, but in Prayer we offer our will to God, that it may be received by him.”3 Scripture and prayer thus work together to create a conversational, or “dialogical,” dynamic that lends structure to our communion with God and growth in grace.4

As with our ordinary conversations, our conversations with God in prayer will vary in length and intensity as our changing circumstances dictate. The English Puritans thus distinguished between “two kindes of prayer”: there were times of set and focused, or “solemne,” prayer—what happens, say, during our quiet time—and then there were also short, spontaneous prayers uttered throughout the day, “the secret and sudden lifting up of the heart to God, upon the present occasion.”5 The latter sort of spontaneous praying was understood to be a necessary part of a Christian’s spiritual life and often understood as both a means to and a mark of a more general spirit of prayerfulness that would begin to permeate one’s entire life and outlook. Indeed, it is spontaneous prayer, as the Puritan John Downame (1571–1652) explained, that helps the believer “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17):

It is not enough that we use daily these set solemn, and ordinary prayers, but we must, as our Saviour injoyneth us, Pray always, and as the Apostle speaketh, continually, and without ceasing. That is, we must be ready to pray, so often as God shall give us any occasion, . . . craving God’s blessing when we undertake any businesse, and praysing his name for his gracious assistance, . . . craving his protection at the approaching of any danger, and his helpe and strength for the overcoming of any difficulty which affronteth us in our way.6

Moreover, these two kinds of prayer were understood as mutually reinforcing. They went together, and either one would quickly wither in the absence of its counterpart. Spontaneous prayer, it was said, should supplement and enhance our settled prayer “as salt with meat.”7

God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers.

As we read the various definitions of prayer scattered throughout the Reformed tradition, we find elaborations on the idea of prayer as talking to God, even as we don’t find anything fundamentally at odds with it. Thus, William Bridge defined prayer as “that act and work of the soul, whereby a man doth converse with God.”8 Likewise, according to John Calvin, to enter into prayer is to “enter conversation with God,” a conversation “whereby we expound to him our desires, our joys, our sighs, in a word, all the thoughts of our hearts.”9 Such communication is not overly formal and impersonal, but rather, it is an “intimate conversation” in which believers find the living God “gently summoning us to unburden our cares into his bosom” and inviting us “to pour out our hearts before him.”10 Sometimes the metaphor was slightly tweaked, as when Matthew Henry (1662–1714) described the Bible as “a letter God has sent to us” and prayer as “a letter we send to him,” but the emphasis was always on prayer as a way for the believer to communicate and dialogue with the living, personal, and ever-present triune God.11

Such prayer, by its very nature, encompasses the entirety of the Christian life, shaping and being shaped in turn by the breadth and depth of redeemed experience. “I understand prayer in a broad way,” wrote Campegius Vitringa. “It refers to everything we communicate to God.”12 Such communication includes our praises, our petitions, and our thanksgivings. It includes expressions of joy, lament, and anger. As we communicate to God in prayer, we confess our sins, intercede on behalf of others, and cry out to God for his miraculous intervention amid trial and storm. In response to the question “For what things are we to pray?” the Westminster Larger Catechism (1647) suggests that the scope of our prayer should be as wide and deep as life itself: “We are to pray for all things tending to the glory of God, the welfare of the church, our own or others’ good.”13

Sometimes our communication with God is eloquent and profound, as when we take the lofty expressions of the Psalter as our own; at other moments we “do not know what to pray for as we ought” and must lean on those Spirit-wrought “groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). Yet in all moments, our prayers communicate the full range of our Christian experience and represent an ongoing conversation with the God in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Notes:

  1. Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 99.
  2. Campegius Vitringa, The Spiritual Life, trans. Charles K. Telfer (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), 116.
  3. William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1639), 244.
  4. This dynamic also characterizes corporate worship. For a discussion of the “dialogical principle” in worship, see D. G. Hart and John R. Muether, With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 95–97.
  5. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge, 1606), 282.
  6. John Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse(London, 1629), 209–10.
  7. William Gouge, quoted in Ryrie, Reformation Britain, 147.
  8. William Bridge, The Works of the Rev. William Bridge (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845), 2:102.
  9. Calvin, Institutes, 2:853 (3.20.4); John Calvin, Instruction in Faith, trans. and ed. Paul T. Fuhrmann (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949), 57.
  10. Calvin, Institutes, 2:854–55 (3.20.5).
  11. Matthew Henry, Directions for Daily Communion with God (London: William Tegg, 1866), 12.
  12. Vitringa, Spiritual Life, 115
  13. “Westminster Larger Catechism,” in Van Dixhoorn, Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, 402 (q. 184).

This article is adapted from A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation by Matthew C. Bingham.

Matthew C. Bingham (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is vice president of academic affairs and associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is the author of Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution and has served as a pastor in the United States and Northern Ireland. Matthew is married to Shelley, and they have four children.

 

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Ex-Evangelicals and the Search for a Deeper Faith

Why do evangelicals become ex-evangelicals? The answers vary: some leave because they have been wounded by unwise or even abusive leaders, or maybe there is just a long, slow drifting away.

April 16, 2025 by: Matthew C. Bingham

Modern Christianity

Why do evangelicals become ex-evangelicals? The answers vary: some leave because they have been wounded by unwise or even abusive leaders; others depart because they come to doubt the truthfulness of Scripture; for still many more, there is no one obvious reason, just a long, slow drifting away. But for a significant number of ex-evangelicals, their disillusionment is not about religious apathy or aversion but, rather, quite the opposite. The ex-evangelicals I am thinking of here are those who hunger for something more in their religious experience—more depth, more seriousness, more spiritual engagement—and become convinced that such things are not to be found within the evangelical tradition. They want genuine spiritual formation but fear that the evangelical cupboard is bare. So instead of becoming agnostics or joining liberal mainline Protestant churches, they turn to other traditions—notably Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy—convinced that these traditions foster the sort of spiritual growth that had eluded them as evangelicals.

This phenomenon was recently highlighted in a widely shared article in the New York Post, which profiled converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. One such individual is Elijah Wee Sit, who was raised as an evangelical but now dismisses “modern Christianity” as unacceptably “watered down.” Reflecting, presumably, on the evangelicalism that he experienced growing up, he describes this “watered down” faith as follows: “People go to church on Sunday, they sing a few songs, they listen to an hour-long sermon that seems more like a TED talk, and then they go home, and they just go on with their lives.”1

Similarly, in his recent book Living in Wonder, bestselling Eastern Orthodox author Rod Dreher muses on the experience of American Christians who become dissatisfied with a felt lack of spiritual depth and begin wondering whether the ancient and medieval traditions of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy might point toward a more excellent way:

On summer vacations, Americans sometimes venture to Europe, visit the great medieval cathedrals, and wonder about the kind of faith that could raise such temples to God's glory from societies that were poorer than our own. We read old tales of miracles, visions, pilgrimages, and religious feasts and feel the poverty of our own religious experience. We dutifully drag ourselves to church on Sunday, we read our Bibles, we follow the law, we work to serve our nation or our community, we stay current with our reading, but we still may wonder, Is this all there is?2

That last question captures the sense among some evangelicals that there is something lacking, paltry, and underdeveloped within the evangelical spiritual tradition: Is this all there is? Does evangelicalism actually possess the resources and tools to support a robust and sustained experience of spiritual formation and Christian growth?

And whatever one makes of the varied answers given in response, one cannot dismiss the significance of the question itself. One of the most basic biblical assumptions about the Christian life is that it will be a growing life. Whether depicting the blessed life as that of “a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season” (Ps. 1:3) or portraying believers as “newborn infants” who “long for the pure spiritual milk” of God’s word so “so that by it” they “may grow up into salvation” (1 Pet. 2:2), the Bible assumes throughout that authentic spiritual life is marked by development, maturation, and growth.

The How Question

But as clear as that might be, what sometimes feels less clear is the how question: How do I nurture and sustain the sort of spiritual formation that the Bible clearly calls me to? Among evangelical Christians, answering such questions about personal spiritual growth has sometimes been complicated by the movement’s frequent emphasis on growth of other kinds, namely numerical growth and geographic spread. Rooted in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, evangelical Christianity has always prioritized a zeal to see the gospel spread to more people and more places. Innovative evangelists like John Wesley (1703–1791) and George Whitefield (1714–1770) took their sermons outside the church walls to reach constituencies that their more traditional contemporaries were neglecting. And in our own day, evangelicals continue to work tirelessly and creatively to reach ever-wider circles with the gospel.

This, of course, is a good thing. The risen Jesus told his disciples, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Evangelical Christians have taken that mandate seriously, and we should thank God for their witness. And yet, as is so often the case in a fallen world, even insights that are good and right and true can fog up our windows when they are emphasized to the exclusion of other insights that are likewise good and right and true. In the case of evangelicalism, the movement’s zeal for expansion and outward growth has sometimes come at the expense of discipleship and inward depth.

One of the most basic biblical assumptions about the Christian life is that it will be a growing life.

The famed evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) captured an important aspect of evangelicalism’s historic DNA when he declared, “It makes no difference how you get a man to God, provided you get him there.”3 Surely one can applaud the evangelistic passion in that statement while still recognizing that an unrestrained and ultimately counterproductive pragmatism lies close at hand. When pragmatism pushes out principle, the result is a Christianity long on excitement and short on spiritual maturity. As evangelical theologian and author David Wells has put it, “What results, all too often, beneath all the smiling crowds, the packed auditoria, is a faith so cramped, limited, and minuscule as to be entirely unable to command our life, our energies, or, as a matter of fact, even much of our attention.”4 If that description accurately reflects the evangelical experience of the ex-evangelicals who now seek spiritual depth through Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, then one can’t help but sympathize with their decision to leave, even if we ultimately disagree.

I don’t question that some expressions of evangelical Christianity lack depth. But what I do question is the assumption that such shallowness is in any way intrinsic to the logic of the evangelical tradition itself. My confidence on this point comes not from surveying current practices among contemporary evangelicals but, rather, from looking backward to the Protestant Reformation tradition out of which evangelicalism arose and to which evangelicalism is theologically indebted.

The Reformers and their heirs were committed to reforming not just theology but also their approach to the practice of the Christian life. They sought an approach to spiritual formation that was deeply rooted in Scripture, understanding both that any God-honoring spiritual practices must be derived from Scripture and that God’s word itself is the primary means through which the Lord shapes his people. Over and against a medieval tradition that effectively sidelined personal engagement with the Bible in favor of pilgrimages, relics, and a host of practices that were, at best, extrabiblical, the Reformers understood that living, growing faith was a word-based affair: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” (Col. 3:16).

In support of this end, Reformers like John Calvin (1509–1564), post-Reformation pastor-theologians like the English Puritans, and later exemplars like the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) all wrote extensively on the how question that sometimes feels so elusive. Our problem, then, as evangelicals is not that we lack a tradition of spiritual formation but, rather, that we often have failed to notice that it was there. As the secular culture becomes increasingly hostile to the historic Christian faith, believers who wish to stand firm will need to become more intentional than ever in their pursuit of authentic spiritual formation. For some evangelicals, this desire for depth will sadly lead them away from Protestantism and towards religious practices that find no basis in Scripture. But for those who wish to find it, there is a rich heritage of word-based spirituality right here at home.

Notes:

  1. https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/us-news/young-men-are-converting-to-orthodox-christianity-in-droves/
  2. Rod Dreher, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2024), 10.
  3. William G. McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 158.
  4. David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 14.

Matthew Bingham is the author of A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation.

Matthew C. Bingham (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is vice president of academic affairs and associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is the author of Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution and has served as a pastor in the United States and Northern Ireland. Matthew is married to Shelley, and they have four children.

 

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