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Pray without ceasing: revitalizing pastoral theology

Author:	Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger
Published By:	Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge UK)
Price:	£9.99
ISBN:	0 8028 4759 5

Reviewed by Philip Clements-Jewery.

Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger is associate professor of pastoral theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and a minister in the Presbyterian Church USA. She has written a substantial volume which is more a manual of pastoral care than it is a book about prayer. The challenge of the book, however, lies in its call to place prayer at the centre of the minister's pastoral work.

The author grounds her thought in a theology of koinonia, and then underlines the importance of listening to God through spiritual reading, of listening to others, and of listening to oneself through self-reflection. She then considers prayers of petition, intercession, confession, lament and thanksgiving. In a substantial addendum she provides suggestions for groups, based on the content of each chapter, and in three appendices she provides an analysis of a pastoral conversation, a pastoral case study, and a record of another pastoral conversation. For each of these three there are suggestions for further reflection and discussion. There is an index, and footnotes, commendably, at the bottom of the relevant page, but no bibliography. The predominant works quoted are Barth's Church Dogmatics and Bonhoeffer's Life Together.

However, this reviewer found this a bit of a hotch-potch of a book. It took a while to get into it, and I found the first chapter (on koinonia) rather tedious. To me the whole book read as if the author had prepared a preliminary sketch of each chapter, and then looked around for whatever might seem relevant to fill out the outline. So, for instance, to take a couple of examples at random, the chapter on Listening to Others becomes a kind of mini-manual about listening skills, with sections about the nature of empathy and examples of pastoral conversations. Similarly, the chapter on prayers of confession contains sections on the theology of human sinfulness, on justification by grace and the Alcoholics Anonymous model of confession. There is little in this chapter about introducing prayers of confession into a pastoral conversation. Even the relevant part of the addendum fails to offer such advice, confining itself to helping group members become more deeply aware of their own sinfulness. And the chapter on prayers of petition contains little more than a run-through of the Lord's Prayer which repeats familiar points and fails to say anything new about it.

Similar things could be made about most of the chapters. In short, this book does not really fulfil the task that its title and sub-title would lead one to think. It’s not clear whether this book is intended as an exhortation to pastoral care givers to pray more themselves, or as a manual to help them in the offering of prayer in the pastoral situation, or simply as another book about the ministry of pastoral care. Personally, as contributor to the debate about the theology of prayer, I was also saddened that the book has little to contribute in that area.

A disappointment, then. There is still out there a book to be written that really grapples with the art of pastoral prayer.