Starting the New Year in Missional Enterprise

Happy New Year!

As we begin this new year, it’s a good time to renew our commitment to prayer in the context of the enterprises we lead. Today, we feature some thoughts on prayer, drawing from a previous post on prayer from the summer of 2022.

Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase of the scriptures gives this rendering of Paul’s admonition to Timothy in 1 Timothy 2:1-3:

The first thing I want you to do is pray. Pray every way you know how, for everyone you know. Pray especially for rulers and their governments to rule well so we can be quietly about our business of living simply, in humble contemplation. This is the way our Savior God wants us to live.

If prayer is a part of everyday life for every follower of Jesus, then it must be part of our working life, where we spend a significant portion of our waking hours.

And it certainly must be central in the daily lives of missional enterprise leaders who have been entrusted with the stewardship of a work environment.

Pastor Tim Keller, in his excellent book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, makes these comments about the importance of both continuous and regular prayer.

Paul said we should “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17), meaning that we should, if possible, do everything all day with conscious reference to God (1 Cor 10:31). There should be background music of thankfulness and joy behind every incident in our day (Col 3:16-17). This kind of spontaneous and constant prayer during the day should be a habit of the heart. We will never develop it, however, unless we take up the discipline of regular, daily prayer.

Extended Time in Prayer

Here are a few other resources you can consider, specifically related to prayer for the enterprise you lead:

• A Faith-Driven Entrepreneur podcast, featuring Kim Avery, author of The Prayer-Powered Entrepreneur. In the podcast (click here), Kim shares her own journey in discovering the importance and power of prayer as a business leader, as well as some ideas for building a prayer culture in the organizations we lead.
• From the team at BAM Global, a series of articles about Prayer in the Business provides insights, encouragement, and examples of prayer in business as mission.
• For a quick (less than two-minute) insight, check out this clip on “Building a Prayer Culture” from the podcast mentioned above.

Verse(s) of the Week:

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray . . . Luke 11:1 (NIV)

Perhaps, for many of us, our prayer needs to be that of Jesus’s disciple, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Let’s pray that for ourselves this week as we lead the enterprises God has entrusted to us.