L. Roger Owens and Mary Clare Owens: There’s no right way to pray

During a car ride four years ago, L. Roger Owens asked his 12-year-old daughter, Mary Clare, “Do you want to write a book with me?”

Roger, a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, is the author of numerous books on pastoral care and spiritual life. He and his wife, the Rev. Ginger Thomas, live in Pittsburgh and have three children.

Yet despite his experience teaching and writing about faith, Roger realized that he didn’t always know how to translate the lessons he shared in classrooms and churches at home. He thought Mary Clare could help.

In the Owens household, bedtime is more than just a nightly routine. For many children, bedtime signals the end of the day’s fun, but for Mary Clare, it was something to look forward to.

It was a time to play with stuffed animals, reflect on the day and talk. She often asked about life after death, how the world came to be and other big questions that don’t have simple answers. Roger began wondering how he could encourage his daughter to have a prayer life where she felt comfortable bringing her questions, doubts and feelings before God.

Mary Clare already was wrestling with big questions by writing her own meditations on them. Rather than seeing the book project that her father proposed as intimidating, she saw it as both a challenge and an opportunity to grow her skills as a writer and thinker.

“Praying Their Way: 24 Prayer Practices for Kids and the Adults Who Love Them” combines personal storytelling with practical spiritual guidance, inviting young readers to see prayer as a natural part of everyday life.

In 2007, when he was a young pastor at a church plant in Salem, Oregon, the Rev. D.J. Vincent noticed that a group of unhoused people had been living in Cascades Gateway Park. He and his parishioners wanted to do something to help them out and settled on a simple idea: They’d host a potluck.

That impulse to share a single meal started a ministry that has grown into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit called Church @ the Park. It now offers outreach services, workforce development, emergency shelter and permanent housing to the area’s unhoused population. In 2024 they served nearly 2,000 people across six locations.

As Church @ the Park evolved, so too did Vincent’s approach to ministry. From his conversations with unhoused folks at the meals, he gained a new perspective about dignity, humility and relationships. He felt he needed to change the way he was thinking about his service work; in looking for guidance he came across Street Psalms, a faith-based organization committed to developing strong community leaders.

The organization, a network of more than 40 organizations in 100 cities around the world, was formed to help create “communities in mission” that foster human flourishing in urban spaces. Street Psalms is based on “theology from below” — that is, learning alongside people at the margins rather than imposing solutions from above. This approach aligned with Vincent’s experience at the potlucks.

“Street Psalms created a bubble of belonging for us,” Vincent said. “They value connectedness and relationship, and our organizational values are the Street Psalms values. We aren’t just a place for people to get resources, but where they can find value and dignity and responsibility.”

Learning to be peacemakers

Street Psalms calls itself a “sodal” expression of the church, as opposed to a more traditional “modal” one. “Sodal” comes from the Latin “sodalitas,” meaning “companion” or “partner.” The organization uses this description to explain how it seeks to develop leaders who are embedded in vulnerable urban communities, people who are trying to enact meaningful change in their cities.

“We’re an urban monastery without walls,” said Sarah Moore, Street Psalms’ senior fellow for applied research, who came to the organization after a career as a psychology professor. “We prepare people for the challenges they face out in the real world of service.”

Forming leaders who serve communities

Thompson has been with Street Psalms since it was founded in the 1990s. The organization initially served urban youth workers in Philadelphia and was an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trust. Kris Rocke, the current executive director, had written a curriculum for World Vision, a youth mentorship organization, and he realized that the leadership skills it cultivated could be applied to anyone looking to share the “good news in hard places.” In 2023, Street Psalms officially became a religious order.

“Our charism has crystallized, especially over the past eight years,” Thompson said. “We’re committed to the formation of leaders who are serving their communities. It takes a special kind of spirituality to do this work, and we realized people weren’t getting the training they needed in a more formal seminary.”

While Street Psalms has always mentored leaders in their specific contexts, its programming and curriculum has become more formalized and refined over the years. Its nontraditional seminary is not affiliated with a denomination and does not ordain pastors for local churches. Instead, it trains people to lead communities in mission. It ordained its first cohort of leaders in 2010.

“We say we’re joyfully unaccredited,” Moore said. “While we do not believe, not at all, that this replaces formalized and accredited seminary training, we do believe that this offers the type of transformational experience that prepares leaders to serve the sodal form of the church.”

Street Psalms offers a one-year novitiate program that ends in ordination. Through daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms and practices, as well as synchronous and asynchronous classes and workshops, ordinands learn the Incarnational Framework and how to employ it in their communities. Nearly 40 people around the globe have been ordained. The organization also has a one-year fellowship program that finances specific community projects. Funded by grants from large and small benefactors, it gives all of its materials away for free.

The program is rooted in a specific hermeneutic, a way of reading the Bible that prioritizes and centers the most vulnerable people in Bible stories and parables.

“What you practice with Street Psalms is a way of reading Scripture from below, from the perspective of the marginalized,” Thompson said.

“During my formal training for my M.Div., nobody helped me see that the context of Scripture is about people who were oppressed,” she said. “It’s written to tell that story, but you very rarely hear that. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, came about during the context of the Roman Empire. When you think about it like that it gives it a new resonance.”

Learning to read with this lens prepares leaders in urban communities to ask questions of the text that might unlock new significance for its constituents and to be open to new and surprising interpretations.

“One of the big things the church doesn’t talk enough about, that Street Psalms does talk about, is violence,” Thompson said. “It’s not just physical violence, either. It can be the political thing and the pressure to pick sides.

“With Street Psalms, we want to curate the kind of conversations that don’t create enemies on the other side. I don’t know where I’d be as a preacher or as a spiritual leader if I didn’t have this framework.”

Building ‘communities in mission’ around the globe

Street Psalms trains leaders to love their city and seek peace in it, which entails learning how to listen to their city’s “sacred song”— the literal meaning of “psalm.”

“With the name, you have two images coming together and resonating,” Thompson said. “’Street’ says, ‘I’m here,’ ‘I’m with my community.’ And ‘Psalms’ is all the joy and lament that you find there. All the raw ways history shows up through our people.”

The organization takes different forms with all its partners; every mushroom that blooms from the network is unique. These partners do many kinds of work, from homeless outreach to after-school programs to helping survivors of domestic abuse and walking with people coming out of prison. And they’re all over the globe.

When an organization commits to following the Incarnational Framework, it becomes a “community in mission,” which in the simplest terms means that it shares the See, Do, Be, Free philosophy and can tap into a web of support when it needs help navigating challenges that can arise when doing things with people and not just for them.

“We’re kind of like the wholesalers,” Moore said. “And our partners are the retailers.”

Changing the way leaders engage with the world

In addition to the seminary, Street Psalms runs a design studio that functions as a kind of incubator for innovative social change. Partners can put their ideas through their paces before testing them out in the world.

One idea that came out of this is the Preaching Peace Initiative. At gatherings called “Tables,” partners tackle issues that pertain to their communities using the Incarnational Framework and the “theology from below” hermeneutic. Thompson visited a Table at one of Street Psalms’ partners in Kenya.

“In Nairobi there was a Preaching Peace Table with Christian pastors and Muslim clerics, and they took a common theme and discussed it from their different perspectives,” she said, adding that there had been violence between these communities in the past.

“The theme was: ‘What does it mean to love your neighbor?’ So you get in this room and you see the kind of conversation about peace. It helped foster these ideas of abundance and peacemaking and asked what it would look like for that to exist there, in that community.”

Thompson likened that work to what Vincent is doing with Church @ the Park.

“They have a clear picture of what it means to serve the most vulnerable,” she said. “They have a common language of scarcity and abundance and what it means to work across difference for the sake of the poor.”

During the early potlucks, Vincent saw problems to be solved, needs to be met, deficits to be addressed — what he regards now as classic scarcity thinking. But as he listened to the people he was serving, he learned to see differently. His perspective shifted to one of abundance and collaboration. And he understood that the community already had what it needed to flourish.

“We grew into a ministry of mutuality, where folks can find not only resources, but value and dignity,” he said. “The goal is co-creating a better reality, and we are our best selves in community, not in isolation.”

Vincent now takes all of Church @ the Park’s staff through a version of the Incarnational Framework during their training. He wants the organization to be as inclusive as possible, serving people regardless of their faith background, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other typical dividing line. More than half of the employees don’t identify as religious, but they’ve found a sense of belonging in the organization and its mission for peace and relational abundance. This kind of radical acceptance and baseline humility is what helps make Street Psalms unique.

“It’s more than a curriculum or content,” Moore said. “If you embrace the framework, it changes the way you engage with the world.”

I didn’t grow up playing sports, so when I first started running in my early 20s, it was mainly because I wanted to try something athletic that required very little equipment and hand-eye coordination. As someone entering the wide world of running without a coach or team to advise me, I mostly relied on the internet as a guide.

I learned so much. Who knew that different kinds of running shoes were better for different kinds of feet? Or that if you’re running far enough, you should eat not only before and after but during your run?

One of the most valuable — and most counterintuitive — pieces of guidance I found was this: most of your runs should be slow.

Slow?

Isn’t the whole point of running to, I don’t know, run? Not jog, shuffle, fast-walk?

But this is in fact what the experts say: a majority of your runs should be significantly below your race pace. In fact, something called 80/20 training refers to a style of preparation — used by recreational and elite runners alike — in which 80% of running workouts are done at an easy level of intensity, with just 20% done at a hard pace. Why? Among other factors, “easy runs train the cardio and respiratory systems to work more efficiently, allowing you to run with less effort during higher-intensity runs.”

As Runners World puts it, “All the evidence points to the fact that slowing down your pace for much (if not all) of your training can actually make you run faster in the long-term.”

Several years into making my running habit a more serious one, I still struggle with this. How can I really prepare to go at a faster speed if I’m not actually going that speed most of the time? What if I just want to go faster now? Maybe slowing down is a strategy that works for other people — but does it work for me?

Now look back at the list of questions in the paragraph above and raise your hand if you’ve ever asked yourself similar questions regarding other areas of your life — your career, your ministry work, etc. It’s easy to nod our heads and say amen to all the wisdom around Sabbath and self-care, but in reality, do we live our lives as though rest is something that’s not for us?

To be sure, rest is not always an option. As my colleague Prince Rivers reminds us, “Some people are busy because their survival demands it.” This kind of busyness is tied up in “doing what is required to care for one’s family.”

But Rivers also highlights a word of warning from Thomas Merton, who wrote, “There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist … most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.”

This is not the kind of overwork that survival demands. Instead, Rivers notes, Merton “makes a specific reference to ‘the idealist.’ This is the person who is changing the world, championing a cause or fighting the good fight.”

Many of us can relate to this idealist. Do we think that we simply can’t slow down, because the work is too important, the cause too great? Do the places where we work and worship convey, explicitly or implicitly, that this kind of slowing is not ideal? If we slowed down, would we ever be able to speed back up? Would others overtake us?

As with all metaphors, this one has its limits, and I want to be clear that in running, slowing down can be a valuable tool for improving the overall pace. In the context of our rhythms of work, however, slowing down should not be viewed simply as a means to be more efficient once we do speed back up again. As seminary professor and psychologist Chanequa Walker-Barnes writes, when it comes to rest and self-care, “deeply and faithfully loving and caring for [ourselves] is enough,” apart from any added productivity that a time of recharging might bring.

What interests me about this particular running image, though, is that it has something to say to us specifically about slowing down — not stopping, not taking up another sport entirely, just slowing.

There are certainly times to stop, to kick off your shoes and take a shower and a long nap. Yet for those of us who don’t necessarily need to do that at the moment, what might it look like to still be moving, but at what runner types refer to as a conversational pace, “a pace you should be able to hold a full conversation at — not just one or two gasped words”? How might this help us build up the endurance we need as we move through our work and world? And how might we advocate for this kind of pace whenever we can?

For a long time, my baseball team held a significant record in professional sports, but it wasn’t a fun one.

My beloved, beleaguered Seattle Mariners did not make it to the playoffs for 21 years — from 2001 to 2022. It was the longest active playoff drought in American professional sports.

And yet the voices of Mariners radio announcers, trips up to the ballpark and echoes of “maybe this year” filled my growing-up years. We cheered on our stars, from Ken Griffey Jr. to Ichiro to Felix Hernandez, without ever seeing them win that much. Blame it on bad management, bad player investments, a cheapskate mentality among Mariners ownership. Google “long-suffering” and you might just see the Mariner Moose mascot trying to hype up a crowd.

Then came 2022 and the walk-off home run that sent us into the postseason for so much longer than we thought we’d be there. After a heartbreaking second-round exit (never talk to me about the Houston Astros), we Washingtonians entered the 2023 season full of the thing we’d hardly dared let stir for all those years: hope.

We missed the playoffs by one game.

Now it’s spring again. Baseball is back, and as of this writing, my Mariners have lost more games than they’ve won. Yes, it’s early, but my family is already having conversations about how much, exactly, we should be giving of our time and energy to this team.

After all, baseball games are long, even with the introduction of the pitch clock and other rule changes designed to make the sport more engaging to a wider audience. And not only are the individual games long; there are 162 games in the regular Major League Baseball season. Your team plays nearly every day from April through September.

We Mariners fans maybe feel a bit spoiled now, having enjoyed the sweet taste of success. So if failure is looking highly likely, why turn on the TV or the radio any more than is necessary to avoid accusations of being a fair weather fan?

Is there a limit to how much you should love something that might be a lost cause?

Yes, I know, baseball is a game. It’s grown men swinging at a ball with a wooden stick. At the same time, it is so much more.

I believe there’s a reason sports metaphors show up so often in sermons, lectures and the like. These silly games teach us something about the human spirit, and following these silly teams can too. In my case, it’s led me to some gnarly questions about what is worth our devotion. Is it OK to follow the losers?

In sports, the definition of losing and winning is straightforward: the winner is whoever has the most points at the end of the fourth quarter, the second half, the ninth inning, regulation time. The fastest time for the racer, the highest leap for the jumper wins the prize. We can check a team’s record and make instant judgments about their chances of success.

Defining “winning” in much of life apart from sports, however, isn’t quite as straightforward. Those of us who follow Jesus inhabit a faith tradition that asks us to look at the normal order of things upside down: the last shall be first, the meek shall inherit the earth, and so on. What we value can be countercultural.

I recently got to sit in on a conversation with the Rev. Dr. Edgardo Colón-Emeric, the dean of Duke Divinity School. In response to a question regarding churches that are struggling or shutting down, he remarked that failure is something that we, as Christians, should not be afraid of, because “failure is at the heart of the Christian story.”

He offered a couple of examples of this confounding heart: the comments made on the Emmaus walk (“we thought he would be the one to deliver Israel”), how the resurrection didn’t take away Jesus’ wounds.

Christianity is not meant to be showy, glamorous, triumphalist. Instead, as Colon-Emeric said, it has a built-in fragility to it, a fragility that is part of our identity. The assumption that a church’s closing means the end of that church’s story is far from true. God is still up to many things.

Can we still hope that churches stay open? Of course. Can I still hope my team can turn things around in time for some meaningful October baseball? I absolutely will. There’s a certain lovely faithfulness in being unafraid that something we love might fail.