PBPC Announcements

PBPC Family, During Sunday's sermon discussion, we further explored how the Canaanite woman persisted in asking Jesus to heal her daughter. She did not let up but kept asking, kept pursuing, kept at Jesus until he healed her daughter. One person shared how this story reminded them of the parable of the widow and the unjust judge (Luke 18:1-8). Jesus tells the story of a woman who, in her desire for justice, kept knocking on the judges door until he finally got so fed up that he gave her what she wanted. This widow is another example of persistent prayer, of continually knocking on heaven's door until God finally responds. It is an image of perseverance in the face of silence and a thousand "no's". I've been thinking of this parable as we are grieving yet another school shooting, this time in Nashville. 6 people have died, three of them children. It's been less than a year since the Uvalde shooting and a week since the shooting at a school in Denver. School...

PBPC Family, Last night at Session, we spent some time sharing with one another our prayer practices. As members of Session shared, they simultaneously spoke of their current forms of prayer and a desire to have a deepened and more disciplined practice of prayer. I was reminded that we are a praying people. This is something that is both true of us and that we aspire to in our common life. Much of our life together is prayer and we are looking for ways we can deepen and strengthen our life of prayer. To that end, we are going to keep a running record of our prayers. Below is a Google Doc that we will keep updated and will be at the bottom of this email each week. This will allow us to lift up the prayers that are shared on Sunday morning throughout the week and keep track of our prayers over time. My sense is that, in listing our prayers and keeping record of them, we will see more clearly the ways that God has met us in and through our prayers. This list will only be shared in our wee...

PBPC Family, Eugene Peterson, in his book "Working the Angles" gives a counter-intuitive word of advice when it comes to prayer: be slow to pray. "Be slow to pray. This is not an enterprise to be entered into lightly. When we pray we are using words that bring us into proximity with words that break cedars, shake the wilderness, make the oaks whirl, and strip forests bare (Ps 29:5-9). When we pray we use words that may well leave us quavering, soul-shattered, on our faces: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am one of unclean lips...!" (Isa. 6:5). When we pray we have a more than average chance of ending up in a place that we quite definitely never wanted to be, angrily protesting, preferring death to the kind of life that God insists on recklessly throwing us into: "O Lord, take my life from me, I beseech thee, for it is better for me to die than to live" (Jon 4:3). We want life on our conditions, not on God's conditions. Praying puts us at risk of ...

PBPC Family, The following is an excerpt from Richard Foster's book, "Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home." I commend it to you as a wonderful resource on the many forms and practices of prayer. The section below is a description of what he calls "Simple Prayer." "God receives us just as we are and accepts our prayers just as they are. In the same way that a small child cannot draw a bad picture so a child of God cannot offer a bad prayer. So we are brought to the most basic, the most primary form of prayer: Simple Prayer. Let me describe it for you. In Simple Prayer we bring ourselves before God just as we are, warts and all. Like children before a loving father, we open our hearts and make our requests. We do not try to sort things out, the good from the bad. We simply and unpretentiously share our concerns and make our petitions. We tell God, for example, how frustrated we are with the co-worker at the office or the neighbor down the street. We as...