This highly accessible guide explores how to start, renew and expand your prayer life. It provides an ideal companion for new Christians and those wishing to go deeper with God through prayer. Previously published as Praying through Life.

Stephen Cottrell

Cover

Title

How to Pray

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Preface to the Third Edition

Copyright Acknowledgements

Introduction: Seeing the Possibilities

Part 1 What is prayer? Unclenching the Fist

Prayer is Relationship with God

Prayer is Relationship with Others

Prayer is Relationship for God

Prayer is Relationship with God for Others

A Pattern for Prayer

Part 2 How to Pray Opening our Hands to God

First Steps

At Home

Through the Day

With Children

With Teenagers

With Others

At Work

Wherever You Happen to Be

In Silence

In Penitence

With Our Whole Being

Through the Week

Through the Year

When It Seems Impossible

Ten Golden Rules

Part 3 Catching Fire

Prayer and Evangelism

Becoming Ourselves

A Prayer

References

By the Same Author

Copyright

How to Pray is a basic primer on prayer. It will get you started, keep you going and uses every stage of life and its varied events to renew and expand your understanding of being alive to God. Completely honest about the struggles and difficulties everyone encounters, it will help you discover how natural prayer is, even when you least feel like it. With his characteristic humour and realism, Stephen Cottrell offers a guide 'from an experienced beginner' for those starting out on the Christian journey and for those who feel there is more to discover. Full of stories and examples from the Christian tradition and daily life, simple principles to follow, some prayers to use and helpful insights from spiritual writers through the ages, this is a book to inspire over and over again. A great gift for confirmation or adult baptism. Previously published as Praying Through Life.

STEPHEN COTTRELL is the Bishop of Reading and is one of today's most popular religious writers.

\["Struggling with how prayer works?","This honest book tells it like it is, and helps you pray wherever you are","A great resource for giving to new Christians still finding their feet "\]

The Good Book Stall

First published as Praying Through Life in 1998 Bishop Stephen Cottrell asks in his introduction whether we really need yet another book on prayer, and whether he, ‘a muddled beginner’, is the person to write one. I’m glad he did decide to produce this little book, as it will greatly help beginners and refresh old stagers in that relationship with God, which is prayer, woven into all of life. He has lots of helpful things to say, for example about praying with other people, prayer at work, many styles and situations, silence, difficulties with prayer, a weekly pattern and prayer over the year. He devotes considerable space to prayer withrather than for children and teenagers, which he feels have been ‘terribly neglected’ areas in Christian formation’. Now, I don’t think you can reduce prayer to a set of rules. So what do I make of Chapter 15, ‘Ten Golden Rules’? Well, I admit they do provide an eminently sensible and positive ‘check list and yardstick for our developing life of prayer’. And more than once, Cottrell does quote Chapman’s sound and popular advice, ‘Pray as you can, not as you can’t’. I recommend this book for starters and more experienced types alike.

How To Pray

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How to Pray

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This highly accessible guide explores how to start, renew and expand your prayer life. It provides an ideal companion for new Christians and those wishing to go deeper with God through prayer. Previously published as Praying through Life.

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