Praying for The World
An Interview with Rose Dowsettby urbana.org ed.
Rose Dowsett is a World Christian, but her various leadership roles have always involved Prayer, Missions, and Scripture. In 2001 she wrote a book called The Great Commission. On a recent trip to the United States, she sat down with Urbana.org.
Tell us a little about your background
My Husband Dick and I have been OMF Missionaries since 1968 and 1969, respectively. Prior to that, we were InterVarsity staff workers in the United Kingdom for three years, and we went to Asia at the invitation of Dr. Isabelo Magalit, who was then the General Secretary of InterVarsity of the Philippines, to work with the staff there.
Unexpectedly, my role became training staff of the Philippines, and of other Asian countries who were sent to live with us and the staff team.
We had links through this network with IFES-related movements throughout Southeast Asia, and before I had gone to Asia, I had already been sent as a young staff worker to Norway and Denmark, to help women staff workers get off the ground.
When we went back to the U.K. in 1977 because of health issues, we continued to have ongoing connections with IFES movements; Dick went in and out of Eastern Europe quite a lot, we still worked with Asians from different parts of the world. Dick was often asked to do either student conferences or staff work in different places; we still do that with great love. I think when you get tired of being with students, it's time to call it quits.
Unexpectedly, in December 2001, I was asked to act as interim General Secretary of UCCF in the U.K. during a period of transition and reorganization. I completed that assignment in January 2003.
Would you say a few words about your journey in and out of Marxism to Christ?
When I was thirteen, my Classics teacher introduced me to Plato's Republic. I was fascinated by ideas, and she probably thought that was a safe and sanitized work. But I very quickly started moving into other areas of philosophy - anything I could find. I found [the world of ideas] almost intoxicating. Having exhausted our school library, I went to the public library and started reading everything that was available. At that time - the late 1950s - was the beginning of the publication of Marx' works in English.
By the time I was fourteen, I was reading Marx, having decided, because of problems in my family, that Christianity was hypocritical, and turning my back on that. I was occasionally taken to the Anglican church as a child, when it suited one or the other of my parents. But sadly they had very little understanding of what it really meant. My parents were basically casualties of the Second World War.
Marxism is a very coherent system, and I still profoundly understand its appeal in poor and unjust situations - I don't think we should underestimate that. Even more so, because today many people in the non-Christian world equate Christianity with the West, which is very unjust, very manipulative, and very immoral - all sorts of things. I thing the appeal of Marxism is absolutely tremendous. Its fatal flaw is that it operates on the assumption that human nature is not fallen. But as a theory, it is extraordinarily attractive. I find it absolutely fascinating.
When I was sixteen, one day at school, a Christian girl started talking about [Jesus'] resurrection. I said, "That's absolutely rubbish." She said to me, "Rose, you're ignorant." She gave me a New Testament in a modern translation and told me to run away and read it, and when I knew what I was talking about I should come back and talk. So I went away, and read the New Testament. At the end, I thought there were a few loose ends I needed to sort out, so I read it again, all the way through - no cheating. I ended up reading it three times in three weeks.
The second time through, I was quite rattled, because there were all these things that kept popping up and hitting me. By the third time I had finished reading it, I knew that Jesus was alive and I needed to do something about it.
The interesting thing was, as I came to the scriptures out of that Marxist background - Marxism is profoundly global and missionary - one of the things I found extraordinary in the New Testament was the challenge on every page, that if Jesus is who he says he is, he has to be known and worshipped globally. So right from the beginning, I had this world sense of the implications of the gospel. I could not for the life of me understand how people could call themselves Christians and not understand that. What was the church doing?
So long before I was ever "churched" in any normal sense of the term, I knew there was a world out there and I had to do something about it. I could really say when the tough times came, and they did, that I wasn't socialized into missions, I wasn't there as a response to some emotional appeal, but out of a profound conviction. I still find it incredible that people for years can read their Bibles and somehow miss it. I can't get my head around that.
Then I started reading the Old Testament. It was quite a long time before I was able to be part of a church, and it wasn't until I went to the university that I became part of a Christian community. When I did, it was absolutely instrumental in my life.
Just after I became a Christian, I had older brother, three and a half years older than me, who was at Oxford as a student. We were very close, much closer than either of us were to either parent. Of course I told him what I had found. He then was converted through the Christian community at Oxford. A few months later, he went on an Oxford university cartographic expedition in Norway, and was killed in an accident.
The night before we got the phone message that he had died, I had got in my Bible to 1 Corinthians 15, and went to bed that night with [that passage] ringing in my mind - the great affirmation of the resurrection and of the fact that the dead would rise again.
I woke up the next morning and learned he had died. I think going through that gave me a great sense of the value and the insecurity of human life. You just never know.
How did you become a woman of prayer? Tell us about your prayer journey that led you to pray for the world.
Before I went to the university, I had no community to pray with. If you had said to me, "Rose, you need to pray," I would have assumed you need to talk in a dialect - like out of the prayer book. And that was not what I wanted to do, because that didn't seem authentic. But if it was the question of talking out loud to the Lord who was there, that was fine.
When I went to the university, it was my first experience of being with other Christians, and being socialized into the conventions of prayer. As students, we had a lot of different patterns of prayer, and in my particular university, we used to meet every weekday over lunchtime for prayer. In the residence hall where I lived, we met every morning before breakfast to pray. At that time there were a lot of missionary prayer groups, focused on different parts of the world. I joined the Asia prayer group. Almost all of my contemporaries in that group became career missionaries. There was a very strong understanding within Inter-Varsity in those days, that God expects you to think about your responsibilities to the lost.
There was quite a long period when a lot of my prayer life revolved around praying with other people. We had a slogan as students, that we know something about everywhere, and everything about somewhere. I had a map, and in our daily prayer meetings we would pray for different parts of the world, where there was no known Christian witness.
I also had a number of international student friends who helped me to understand the situation in their countries. Some were Christians and helped me understand a Christian perspective of their countries, and some of my international friends were not believers, and that gave me the chance to learn to pray for people of other faiths.
Somewhere along the line, I began to use the scripture of my daily readings as the basis of my praying for people, so that there is always something fresh to pray for. You can be very self-centered in the way you read scripture - you know, "Lord, speak to me, give me a promise, or encouragement or whatever." But if it's true truth, then if it is true for me, then it is true for other people as well, and it can be the basis of how I pray. So as I think about people, and as I encounter people, that's the framework, within which I would see them - like a grid through which I would think about them on subsequent days. I find that immensely refreshing, because every day there are true and relevant things you pray for, seen and unseen, around the world.
If this is how you pray, then, in the context of the regular avalanche of letters you get requesting prayer, how do you approach the question of whom to pray for?
I suppose most of us have concentric circles, with those immediately around us - family and friends - who we want to pray for every day. There will be people I make a commitment to pray for every day, and there will be others that I don't pray for every day, but I do pray for regularly, and then there are others I pray for rather infrequently. I love getting news, letters, and specific information, and some of that will become the focus of how I pray - particularly when people request prayer for particular things. Often it becomes part of my understanding of that person and through that understanding I pray out of scripture.
Scripture tells us to pray for all people everywhere, and especially those in the household of faith. As I read the paper or listen to the news, I ask myself, "What are the implications of this for believers in that situation?" At times there may be individuals I know; oftentimes not. I'm sure the Lord can hear and answer that prayer as well.
You've said that a priority in student work today, must be to have an attitude of prayerfulness and dependence on God. How do you help people grow in those two areas?
Particularly in the West, we've become very enamored of what we can do. Sometimes we've become too clever for our own good. It is easy for us then to be very confident about what we can do. I think what scripture tells us to do, is to look out for what God works into us. I love that passage in 2 Corinthians 4, where Paul likens the birth of faith in anybody - he parallels it directly with the creation of light at the creation of the world. In other words, the creation of new life in anybody, their enlightenment not in the Buddhist sense, but in the Biblical sense, is for every individual as wonderful as the first creation of light in the darkness. I can't do that. You can't do that. God alone can create light in the darkness. We have too shallow a view both of the darkness of human beings, but also too elevated a view of human activity.
When I speak of dependence on God and prayerfulness, that's the recognition that yes, God calls me in obedience, and in fact to be active. Paul can use the agonist words in relation to "wrestling in prayer" - really hard, sweaty labor. Prayer is not about feeling comfortable, it's hard wrestling. But at the end of the day, I can wrestle, but God has to bring life. God has to give the increase.
If I profoundly believe that, it will set my strategies, my programs, my patterns and my activities into this humble relationship. "I'll pour my life out, but God in your mercy, will you do this which is humanly impossible" - I need to keep on, day in and day out, reminding myself. Otherwise, despite the fact that we are Christians, our fallenness is constantly trying to boost our egos. You can boost your ego but in so doing you diminish the glory of God and it seems to me we need to encourage each other all the time.
How did you help people do that, and to pray, and to grow in prayer, not only prayer for each other and for the work, but also prayer for the world?
You model it. You talk about it. You teach about it from scripture. You show them the ways our fallenness is there, and show them the limitations of human ability alongside the greatness of God. You encourage people to prayer.
I arrived in the States [thirteen days ago], and I've been in a succession of homes, and I've seen a succession of contexts, and apart from formal prayer, not once has someone taken the initiative to say, let's pray about something. I find that quite alarming.
I think it would be true to say, we'd expect much more naturally to turn to prayer in the course of conversation in InterVarsity back home. Certainly in our movement.
How have you developed a heart for the world in yourself and in others?
If you have a biblical theology, you have to have a theology rooted in the character of God, who throughout history is a missionary God. He comes to seek and to save the lost. All the way through, from Genesis 3. So if we're going to reflect the character of God, we have to keep the same heart. I can't see any other way.
In UCCF, in formal training of staff, we would have all staff, at the end of the their first summer vacation on staff, would be part of the team going cross-culturally somewhere in the world. Normally in their first summer they would go as a co-staff person who'd already done an overseas trip with a group of students. For some that might be their first cross-cultural encounter. Later, they would go for another. We get all out staff doing that, which for some of them is quite an eye-opener.
We build a lot of world prayer and world thinking into our conferences, our student conferences and our staff training conferences. We try to make sure there are IFES folks or folks from other movements around for staff conferences. We deliberately invite them to be there, talking to people at dinner tables and having them be sharing publicly.
We have several mission agencies who would second somebody to be part of InterVarsity during their year of home leave, and to be available to move around to student groups. I believe this is absolutely critical to discipling students.
You have talked about how prayer is work. People like to let this work be done by people who characterize themselves as intercessors or prayer warriors. How does the theology of the Trinity come into encouraging people holistically about thinking about prayer - whether for the world or their neighbor - beyond their selves?
I am very uncomfortable when people use terms like "world class intercessors" or things like that. I do not find any evidence in scripture that prayer is a spiritual gift. Different people are given different spiritual gifts for different purposes. But there's no indication in scripture that prayer is a spiritual gift. It is simply the outworking of the life of the Spirit of God in the believer. And since we are all called to be global Christians, global prayer has to be the perspective and the parameters of our praying. I think that this very concept that there are some people who specialize in prayer, has been absolutely damaging to the church.
My security and identity as a person is because I am a child of my heavenly father. I am so valuable, that the Son of God gave his life for me. And incredibly, we are the home of the Holy Spirit. Everything else may change, and your human circumstances may be an absolute blizzard, but if you're rooted in that, all these other things can happen.
If we don't have that form of Trinitarian relationship, we become terribly vulnerable. Prayer springs out of that security in relating to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and knowing I can talk to my Father, through the new and living way made by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. I can talk to my Lord. I can talk to and through the Holy Spirit. I have the wonderful, humbling truth that God is not just out there, waiting for me somehow to dream up the right words, because he knows that I simply don't know what to say that's adequate. He is both listener and initiator of prayer in my heart and soul. What a wonderful thing!
And at the end of it, just as in the best relationship between a child and his or her earthly father, you don't have to think about the words. They can say, "Abba Father" - "Daddy, Daddy!” So I don't have to think all these fancy grammatically constructed sentences in pulpit speak, in order to pray.
Today I love – but I haven’t always - Thomas Cranmer's prayer book. It's full of majestic language, and I can use it - but I don't have to speak like that. I can speak to the Lord like "Lord, what am I ever going to do about this?" If we are walking with the Lord, there will always be this dialogue inside our heads. I'm a visual person, so it's almost as if the Lord is sitting beside me, or walking there beside me and there's this conversation going on. "What am I supposed to do right here?" "What am I supposed to say with this bunch of people?" Do you know what I mean? This kind of inner dialogue all the time that you're talking to other people. And sometimes the other people aren't there, and it's just internal.
How do provide prayer support for an student event today?
It is important to avoid becoming formulaic or mechanistic in our corporate prayer structures - like "I put my penny in the box and out comes the chocolate bar." "If we have five people in a room around the clock praying during the convention it will keep the demons away and God will do something" etc. It's very easy for it to become that kind of humanistic strategy. Of course, I believe that the more the Lord's people give themselves to prayer, and are really understanding that that is what they are doing - that they are calling in helplessness and weakness, that God will do what he sovereignly wishes to do.
We would have prayer teams particularly at bigger occasions, or when there was some urgent issue on hand, but it may sometimes be from quite unexpected quarters. One of the people who was most significant in my husband's generation at Cambridge was an old woman who had dropped out of school when she was twelve. She was in her eighties, she had never had any formal education, she lived in a tiny little house in Cambridge and God gave her this sense that she should pray for generation after generation of undergraduates. She would turn up at the Saturday night meetings. She was usually the only non-student who was there. People recognized she was one of the most discerning people. But every day, she would have a group of two, three or four students to tea. And then she would give herself to praying for these people. I have now idea what she poured into the spiritual well-being of that generation of Cambridge students. And people still speak with great affection of her.
If you are part of a church that has no impulse to mission, how would you go about getting prayer for mission going?
You should find one or two people who would pray with you, you might find one or two Christians from other parts of the world, and bring them into the congregation as part of their missionary life to help your people think beyond the box of their own immediate environment. They can be very important in helping people accustomed to focusing on themselves, broaden the geography of their spiritual concern.
Find somebody who will sit with your pastor and show him how, as he teaches the word Sunday by Sunday, missions is popping out in all directions, from scripture after scripture. You know, it's not just four verses at the end of Matthew's Gospel, stuck on like a pimple you'd like to get rid of.
You can't understand the structure of Matthew's Gospel if that's the way you regard it. The Great Commission at the end of Matthew's Gospel precisely balances, structurally, the genealogy at the beginning. The whole of that Gospel is a series of concentric circles, and you have the genealogy at the beginning, and the forward-looking genealogy of faith at the end of it.
Bang in the center you've got Peter's confession of faith: you are the Christ, the living God. And everybody knew that the Messiah, actually, if you really went back into Old Testament terms, was the Lord anointed for the world, and not just for Israel.
Here is that confession in the middle of that, and the whole of the Gospel builds up to that point, and immediately after that point, Christ starts talking decisively about his need to die and the rest of it. You have to see the whole of Matthew's gospel as a unity - it's a beautifully crafted book that has mission at the heart of it. Here is this most Jewish of writers writing to the Gentiles, over and over again. It's amazing.
You can go to any part of scripture. I defy you to show me a part of scripture that does not have missionary dynamic. It has to, because God is by nature and character a missionary God. He can't deny his character. He has to be a missionary God all the way through scripture. We have just got to open our eyes and see it. If we want to be remade in the image of God, we have to missionary people.
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