Prayer: Possibility & Potential 

Author:  John Schofield is a former Principal of an Anglican Ministerial Training Scheme

I have recently been thinking more and more about prayer, in particular about a question which arises for me as to whether there a distinction, when we are thinking about ‘what prayer does’, between possibility and potential. I have come to believe that our prayer, rather than asking for God to intervene directly into a situation about which we are praying, is actually about contributing to the release of (either or both) possibility and potential into any given situation, If so, can we distinguish these two similar terms by positing that possibility is about what God can do and potential about what we can do (or God can do in and through us)? 
 
Of course, the focus here is on intercessory prayer. But if intercessory prayer is not about telling God what we want to happen and expecting God to do something about it (preferably what we want), then it has to be more straightforwardly about holding a situation open to the possibility of what God can do, recognising that though we (may) know what the situation is, we cannot at all discern what range of possibilities opens up as the shaping of the past meets in the present moment with the possibilities of God. 
 
Over the past few months I have been responding to my own quest for the presence of God in some form of contemplative prayer by writing down what emerges. In one such piece, I wrote:
 
What does it mean to pray to God who is 
Source and Ground and Purpose of Being?
A different approach, 
sideways to the norm we have been taught,
seeing God in the process,
aligning with God in the process,
and understanding call
as being God’s lure, part of the outworking of the process,
of the purpose,
because God is not static being
but active, purposeful, relational Being
seeking fulfilment through the process,
into the purposes, the intention, 
that is God’s for each of us
and for the whole of creation. 
 
In what follows, I’m working with blending two theological sources which are apparent in what immediately precedes this and which have increasing importance for me: the more existential appreciation of God as Source, Ground and Purpose of Being, and the insights of process theology, which recognises that God is not a remote philosophical idea, but ‘active, purposeful, relational Being, seeking fulfilment through the process’. 
 
So I want to expand my suggestion that possibility is more about God and potential more about us. 
 
In prayer, whether or not we know the situation about which we are praying in all its fullness, what we are doing is at a very profound, yet simple, level opening up the situation, the person, or whatever, to what we cannot know (even if we might have hopes): that is to the range of possibilities that love can bring to bear.
 
There is a striking assertion of Jesus as Matthew records it: 'for God all things are possible'. In its context this is about individual salvation, a response to the disciples' astonished exclamation 'then who can be saved?' after Jesus has said that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 19. 26).
 
But is the scope of Jesus' statement confined to individual salvation, or can we take it into other situations without doing it violence? In other words, can we say that when we are opening up or holding up a situation to God we are not talking just about individual salvation as this has commonly come to be understood, but rather about an underlying, all-encompassing concept of salvation, wholeness, reconciliation, the range of whose possibilities we are unaware of. 
 
In other words, the intercessory act is plugging into something within the love of God that is about the shalom of salvation, and this can only be expressed as endless God-possibility, because each situation, each person, is unique and uniquely loved by God. But possibility is not the same as our hope. God's possibilities are beyond our imagining and knowing, and we must be willing to change our perception when God's possibility does not appear to coincide with our initial hope. 
 
What then of potential? It may be that we could substitute the word potential for every use of possible in the last paragraph. But that would be to limit God in some way, as potential is more bounded than possibility. The potential in each of us is a latent quality or ability that may be developed. But to say such a thing of God is to misunderstand the nature of God. God is much more than qualities which may be developed. Whereas human beings, even though made in the ‘image and likeness of God’ are not unconstrained possibility but rather untapped potential.
 
So what happens in intercessory prayer is that there is a double action on the part of the person or people praying: we are opening up the situation to God’s possibilities – while not knowing fully what these are. And we are opening ourselves and others to an opportunity in which, in the response to the meeting of past shapings and future possibilities, the potential that is in the actors to move in the direction of the love, the lure, of God is let loose.
 
This represents a moment when unactualised potency changes to actuality. It is important to recognise that in this way of understanding God, and of correlating my understanding of God as Ground, Source and Purpose of all being and of our being with God’s presence in the process, I am rejecting that understanding of God which Christians assimilated in the early Christian centuries into theological speak from the world of Greek thought, an understanding which says that God is unchanging, immutable and impassible. By doing so I recognise that I distance myself from much mainstream, classical theology (though many recognise that such ideas began to die in the trenches of the First World War). It also means that I am doing the same in relation to the notion of God’s omnipotence and omniscience, both of which have over time died the death of a thousand qualifications. Instead, taking my cue from a recent neologism coined by the American theologian Thomas Jay Oord, I see God as ‘amipotent’, as all-powerfully-loving. And when considering what we are doing in intercessory prayer, our response to the moment, or movement, of prayer is about the potential, the potency, the possibility of our active collaboration with that power of love that can be, and (if our prayer is true) is, released in the interaction of past and future, as we align more closely with the working of God and others in the response to prayer. God works by persuasion, not by coercion or predetermination. We have the power of self-determination as part of what it is to be in the image and likeness of God, and it is to this that God in God’s persuasive love appeals. This is often spoken of as the lure of God, God persuading us towards the good, the purposes of God (who is the Purpose of our Being).
 
This is, I think, a pretty optimistic account of 'how prayer works'. But at the same time as finding it a cogent understanding of prayer, I also find myself asking about the other side of the coin. What happens when we are blind to God's possibilities in any given situation, or when we deliberately ignore the direction to which God is calling us? If we accept the idea that God is not omnipotent and omniscient, it's fair to ask how do God's purposes play out, whether we are in situations of hopelessness, darkness or despair, or when events around us seem to be in conflict with our deepest beliefs and hopes? Of course, this is no new or unique situation, regardless of how bad it appears in the moment. The truth is that God’s purposes are constantly being subverted. But if we hold to the plenitude of God’s love then we must be aware that it’s not just about remodelling our perceptions, because with God there are multiple possibilities. So God will not stop reaching out to us to draw us into a different but no less godly possibility. This does not happen in a mechanistic way. But the end purpose, the good, that is the ultimate shalom of salvation, means that we discover that God is constantly coming back with new possibilities, calling on us, offering us grace, to recognise and utilise our untapped potential. 
 
So God will continue to call, to yearn, to hope, even when the pray-er(s) is not aligned with God’s loving purposes, be this within the life of an individual, a church or a nation. Even now, as throughout Christian history, Christians are often effectively praying ‘against’ each other in praying for different outcomes to the same situation. And God listens to all of these contradictory prayers, these places of oppression, and responds (if we have ears to hear) by opening us up to the best God can for where each of us is.
 
In our impatience we forget that God's time is not our time – and to say this this is not to take an easy or lazy way out. For God keeps coming back with further unconstrained possibilities to challenge our untapped potential. We will have done all we can by holding the situation, or person, or church or nation, in the embrace of God, while at the same time we ourselves continue to try and fulfil God's potential in us, living by the grace and love of God.
 
This holding in prayer (and I have long seen prayer as consisting of four elements – resting, hoping, trusting and holding) is truly the holding of others in God's embrace. And what more than that can we do or want to do? It opens everything up to God's possibility working with our potential in the outworking of love in being.    
 
John Schofield
November 2024