"More things are wrought by prayer than this world

dreams of," according to Tennyson. I agree. But like many

other people, I have to admit that as great as prayer is, it

does not come easily.

Jill and I were talking about this one day, and we both

came to the conclusion that we needed to look into the

whole matter of prayer to see if we could get it out of the

realm of piety and into the world of reality. That we ought

to pray more and better was beyond debate, but how to do

so was a problem.

Prayer is a key concept in the Bible, so we had little

difficulty deciding that we ought to get into the Bible to

find out what it has to say on the subject.

Then something interesting happened. As we consid-

ered our own difficulties in this area, we thought of many

of our friends in the church. They, like us, were having

problems with prayer--not with the idea of prayer, the

necessity of prayer, or the advantages of prayer, but with

the matter of just getting around to doing it. In fact, we

came to the conclusion that although the church in which

we work was flourishing in many ways, it had some glar-

ing weaknesses in the area of prayer. That s when Jill had

one of her brainstorms. She decided to start an exploration

of prayer--not on her own, but with a group of volfinteers

who would invest an hour a week studying the subject and

doing what they studied.

The class was announced, and the response was instant

and great. Sixty people signed up and over one hundred