The Institutional Power of Prayer
Praying Power is Staying Power
Pray
from to day to day
to last
from year to year.
We set out to write an article encouraging leaders to strengthen their people through prayer, knowing we would have somebody screaming in each of our ears.
The guy screaming in our right ear is outraged that we would sully the purity of a divine spiritual exercise by talking about its real-world structural benefits.
The guy screaming in our left ear is outraged that we would sully the purity of organizational analysis by introducing mystical woo.
Nonetheless we persisted.
In this transmission we discuss prayer as a pillar for generational institutions such as families.
Context
The Steader’s focus is on healthy, flourishing human environments. We have called them social permaculture by analogy to agricultural permacultures.
Just as making a healthy and flourishing biosphere should begin on this planet – Terraform Earth First!-- we owe it to ourselves to make the social environment around us healthy and nourishing for human life, which it currently isn’t. We call this process humaniforming. Humaniform Society First! That process begins at the scale and scope where you have influence. Humaniform the Family First!
Organizations and institutions are on a spectrum from short-term transactional ones such as commercial exchange or a joint stock corporation that is publicly traded all the way to generational, relationship institutions for which the paradigm case is the family.
Although this transmission focuses on the family and other generational, relationship institutions, the techniques discussed here can profitably be applied elsewhere on the institutional spectrum.
Prayer
Actually pray. Speak sentences out loud or in your mind. Ask for concrete things and discuss concrete problems. Whether you see this as actual speech to deity or as just a kind of mental exercise matters but not as much as you think.
This has personal benefits, truly. To capture the institutional benefits
1. Have group prayers on issues of concern to the group. Even in quite religiously informed families and institutions that do pray regularly, the prayers are often fairly divorced from the institution’s life and purpose. In family prayer, for example, some aspects of the prayer should be addressed to the family’s quite quotidian concerns and triumphs. This can be explicit in a a non-scripted prayer tradition or can be part of the “intentions” the family discusses before the prayer in a more formal, scripted prayer tradition. Some aspects of the prayer should from time to time also be addressed to the longer term generational project. Most corporations have a “mission statement” that is a meaningless exercise in brandspeak that never comes up but once a year. Generational institutions such as families cannot afford to be that cavalier about it—their sense of meaning and mission needs to be frequently referred to and refreshed, including in times of devotion.
2. Individual people in the group should make the group enterprise part of their individual prayer. The leader especially.
3. Individual people in the group should make the individual welfare of the members of the group part of their individual prayers. The leader/founder especially. Corporations usually announce resilience goals that take the form of mandatory suicide prevention trainings and once-a-month offsite yoga, along with inspirational quotes emailed direct to the worker bees’ inbox. Generational institutions cannot afford to be so cavalier—they realize that long term human capital is what they are made of, and long term human flourishing is the major dividend their people reap.
4. Finally, we suggest an innovation that may be new to you. The group as a whole and individuals in the group, especially the leader/founder, should be praying for the success of individual goals that the constituent members of the group have, whether or not they are part of the overall group project. Corporations often have a cursory inquiry into career goals once a year in a performance review. Generational institutions cannot afford to be so cavalier—they realize that human capital and human flourishing are their heart and soul.
Some of us have been doing this as a family with considerable success. Each member of the family has a bedside notecard for the week or for the month where they have written a shorthand reminder of those goals to bring up in prayer.
If you see some success from incorporating prayer, incorporate gratitude into your prayers.
If you get some insight or direction that seems to unfold during or after your prayers, follow through.