How to Pray

A Simple Guide for Normal People

By: Pete Greig

Narrated by: Pete Greig

Pete Greig is a worldwide authority and the face of a generation when it comes to prayer. One of the founders of the 24-7 Prayer movement, he has seen, experienced, and chronicled amazing works of God in the world. While you might imagine him to be puffed up, Pete Greig is entirely the opposite. He is enchanting, down-to-earth, friendly, and most of all, very normal - and yet he tells preposterous tales about prayer (and they're true). He is basically a regular dude who loves to talk with God.

How to Pray is written to evoke a passion for prayer in everyone - the committed follower of Jesus as well as the skeptic and the scared. The enormous blessing of How to Pray is that it is accessible, full of surprising stories of answered prayer, and tremendously engaging. The basic idea is that prayer is a conversation between you and God. Pete Greig demystifies and reenchants prayer, helping you to find prayer achievable and enjoyable, and ultimately life-giving and life-changing.

How to Pray is designed to be used together with The Prayer Course (a free video curriculum associated with the Alpha course), making it useful for personal and group or church-wide use.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Pete Greig (P)2019 eChristian

As simple as it is profound

This book is the essential work on prayer. My life has been changed by hearing this audio book. I highly recommend this material to everyone who believes prayer is important.

Five stars

Just listen …and be changed.
Pete himself narrates and brings the book alive.
No matter how many books on prayer you’ve read, this one is different and powerful and full of grace.

Helpful for a lost soul

Pete has a soothing voice and his words resonated with me as I was a very lost soul. I desire some sort of faith and this has helped me learn in a simple but powerful way. Pete didn’t throw in too much heady things and gets right down to the bare bones of it all.

Understanding the Lord’s prayer

I love the breakdown of the Lords prayer where everything was in that prayer. It helped me recognize each sentence of the prayer as it relate to life every day and prayer was total in praying for whatever in our life.

Content is absolute gold

But the delivery is kinda slow and the accent is distracting (for me). I earned a lot about the gift of prayer, how God reveals himself by giving us this gift, and the anecdotes he gives are really heartfelt and relevant to his point.

Pause, Rejoice, Ask, Yield.

Pete Greig is the founder of the 24/7 prayer movement. As a movement that has been around for over 20 years and replicated all around the world. In an interview with the Renovaré Book Club, Greig said that he finally feels capable of writing this type of book after writing several previous books on disappointment with God, unanswered prayer, and facing his wife’s cancer.

I have had both positive and negative interactions with forms of the 24/7 prayer movement. Aspects take God’s power seriously, and devotion and parts seem to focus on thinking about prayer in ways that seem more akin to magic. There also elements of the 24/17 movement that dabble in Dominanist theology and are more like Christian Nationalists than I am comfortable with.

That being said, I did not see the negative aspects of 24/7 prayer in this book, although I would not have phrased some parts of prayer as he did. I am a real believer in the importance and power of prayer, even if I am reluctant around many abuses of prayer. The point of prayer for me is a relationship with God. To focus on power of prayer places the result of a relationship before the relationship. It is not the same, but it feels related to sex outside of marriage. Sex is designed for marriage as a bonding agent and procreation. But sex outside of marriage changes the purpose and instrumentalizes sex to distort the relationship over the long term.

In a not dissimilar way, focus on prayer and the use of prayer outside of the relationship with God orients prayer toward what we can get from God. Many talk about the lack of miracles as primarily about a lack of faith or a result of secularism and disbelief of the possibility of miracles. While I don’t want to dismiss that concern, I think the more significant problem may be a culture of viewing relationships more through the lens of utility and instrumentality than through the idea of the good of the relationship in and of itself.

All of that to say, the primary purpose presented here is prayer as relationship building. The rest of prayer is an outgrowth of that. Pete Greig tells good stories and creates a sense of possibility with prayer. And for me, the biggest test of the quality of a book about prayer is whether it encourages me actually to pray. This book did.

As part of prayer exploration, he covers nine types of prayer: Centering, Adoration, Petition, Intercession, Listening, Confession, and Spiritual Warfare. I am for exploring prayer and thinking about it well, but prayer will always be more about learning by doing more than learning through theory and academics. How to Pray is practically focused and helpful in ways that I think that prayer books should be. It is easy to read about prayer and not pray. Still, there are many useful suggestions here and many online tools referenced if you want to go into more depth on particular interest topics.

Easy to listen, lots of practical tools

Such a simple, practical, and engaging book full of practical tools and inspiring examples. This is a perfect book for someone just exploring prayer, a new believer or someone who’s been walking with the Lord for a long time. This will be my new recommendation for someone wanting to learn about prayer!

Great!

A great and diverse book on prayer. Such a helpful guide for anyone wanting to learn to PRAY. P- Pause, R- Rejoice, A- Ask, Y- Yield

Loved the simplicity and manner in which this book presents directions on praying.

Loved the manner in which this book unfolds and delivers directions in understanding and applying the principles of prayer. I found it so helpful that I ordered the paper copy to go through again more meticulously as well as to utilize the prayer course online tools for building my own prayer tools.

Just overall great !

Such a great book, easy to follow, great resources! Love that it was read by the author ! Overall great experience and learned a lot and ready to keep Praying