Prayer: Conversing with God
“Prayer is a dialogue between two persons who love each other.” — Rosalind Rinker, Prayer: Conversing with God, Chapter 2
When Christianity Today surveyed half a century of evangelical writing in 2006, the book they named the most influential of the era was not a systematic theology or a magnum opus by a celebrity preacher. It was this small autobiographical book by a single woman, a former missionary, written in plain Midwestern English and published in 1959 by Zondervan. Dallas Willard’s recollection captures why: “Group after group were brought to life as they learned to listen to God.”
The author, Rosalind Rinker (1906–2002), spent fourteen years in China as a missionary with the Oriental Missionary Society — sailing for Shanghai in 1926 at age twenty, serving until 1940 as secretary and later as itinerant evangelist. She watched the Chinese church through the same years that produced Brother Watchman Nee. After returning to America she joined the staff of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, where for thirteen years she sat in college dorm rooms with American students and discovered, almost by accident, that the most natural form of group prayer was the form least practiced in the evangelical churches of her day.
What This Book Argues
Rinker’s argument is that what passes for prayer in most evangelical settings is not actually prayer — it is performance. Believers gather in a circle. Each waits his turn. Each delivers a small speech to God in a tone different from his normal voice, using language his children would not recognize, often watching out of the corner of his eye for the approval of others in the room. God Himself, if He is in the room at all, is the audience for a series of monologues. The book’s thesis is that this is not what Jesus had in mind when He said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” — and that returning to actual prayer means returning to actual conversation with a Person who is actually present.
The book is largely autobiographical because, as Rinker says in the preface, “there was no other way to describe the intimate experiences through which God took me in learning the true meaning of prayer.” She tells the story of three prayer meetings spread across her life — a girlhood breakthrough in a North Dakota cottage, fifteen years of dutiful imitation on the mission field, and an afternoon in Peiping, China when she and her friend Mildred Rice stumbled, mid-prayer, into something that changed both of their lives. That afternoon she identifies as “merely an unexpected turning back to the kind of childlike communion with Him which God intended in the first place.”
Major Themes
Prayer as dialogue with a Person who is present. The single conviction running through every chapter is this: when believers gather in His name, the Lord Jesus is actually there. Not figuratively, not theologically, but actually. The change that comes over prayer when this is taken seriously is the burden of the entire book. “We had become conscious of His presence with us.” Once that consciousness arrives, the special voice goes, the King James English goes, the formal phrasing goes — and what remains is the simplicity of a child talking to its father. Rinker takes care to defend the older language for those who love it; her point is not the pronouns but the posture. The question is whether the One being addressed is a Person in the room.
Praying by subjects. The book’s most concrete contribution is a small change in practice that produces a large change in experience. Rather than going around a circle of seven people, each praying about whatever comes to mind in his turn, the group stays with a single subject — one person, one situation — and prays back and forth about it until the Spirit moves on to the next. This sounds trivial; in practice it is revolutionary. Going around a circle, Rinker observes, can “quench the Spirit” by following a set pattern that prevents Him from moving anyone as he prays. Praying by subjects creates room for the Spirit to lead, for the prayers to build on one another, and for the group to actually touch God on the matter at hand before moving on. The same teenagers who could barely fill ten minutes of prayer found themselves praying conversationally for an hour and a half and not wanting to stop.
To whom are you actually speaking. A chapter that has surprised readers ever since asks a question most never pause over: when you pray, to whom are you actually praying? Rinker tells of timing a college student’s prayer and counting the word God thirty-three times in sixty seconds — used as a punctuation mark, not as an address to a Person. The remedy is simple. Speak to Jesus Christ as a Person. Use His name as you would use the name of someone you love. Rinker is not making a theological argument about the order of the Trinity; she is making a pastoral one about how prayer goes flat when the One we address has become an abstraction.
Faith-sized requests. The chapter on faith-sized requests is the book’s most practically useful and, handled carelessly, its most easily misused. Rinker counsels Christians to pray not for the size of the answer they want but for the size of the answer they can really believe God will give in a given time limit. Don’t pray that your neighbor will become a Christian this year if you can only honestly believe he will accept a cup of coffee this week. Take the step, get the answer, then take the next step. The example she walks through — Mary and Jack’s six-step prayer journey to lead their neighbor to Christ — is the book at its most concrete and most pastorally wise. Done carelessly, this can collapse into name-it-and-claim-it; done well, it cures both prayerlessness and presumption in one stroke.
Hindered prayer and the forgiveness problem. Rinker draws a sharp distinction between unanswered prayer (where God in His wisdom withholds what we asked) and hindered prayer (where something on our side blocks the line). The chief hindrance she names is unforgiveness, and her line on this is unforgettable: “I will love God only as much as I love the person I dislike the most.” The Christian who refuses to forgive cannot pray with confidence, because the same New Testament that promises answered prayer ties that promise to a forgiving heart. The cure is not greater effort at love but bringing the resentment to Christ — for in His presence, she writes, “all the fruits of the Spirit are sins transformed. Resentment is changed to love. Sadness is changed to joy.”
The discipline of silence. Almost the last word of the book is about silence. “It is in the silences, between prayers, that He speaks to us, and that our communion with Him purges and renews us.” Conversational prayer is not chatter; it is taking turns, and turns require pauses. The group that cannot bear ten seconds of silence cannot hear what He is saying. Rinker’s instruction is direct: “We need to learn to be quiet, and to be consciously aware of Jesus Christ.”
Where This Book Sits in the Stream
The book belongs to the InterVarsity campus prayer-meeting world of mid-century American evangelicalism, with roots in the Keswick holiness movement (Rinker tested her material at Mound Keswick, Cedar Lake, and Cannon Beach Bible Conferences) and clear affinities with the older devotional tradition of Brother Lawrence and Hannah Whitall Smith. Where Brother Lawrence taught the practice of God’s presence in solitary work, Rinker teaches the practice of God’s presence in a group. The same conviction animates both — that the Lord is actually here.
No direct connection between Rinker and the Lord’s recovery is documented. Her years in China (1926–1940) overlap exactly with Brother Watchman Nee’s most active ministry in Shanghai, and her acknowledgments include “the missionaries with whom I worked in China,” but no record places them in the same room. The kinship is one of parallel convictions rather than of direct influence. Brother Watchman Nee’s teaching on praying with the spirit, exercising the spirit, and being in the Lord’s presence moment by moment — and Brother Witness Lee’s later teaching on calling on the name of the Lord — operate in the same territory as Rinker’s “praying by subjects” under the Spirit’s leading, “to whom are you praying,” and the consciousness of Christ’s actual presence in the group. Recovery readers will find more familiar than foreign in this small book.
Honest Assessment
Rinker is at her strongest where the book is most practical — the actual mechanics of how to pray with another person, the four conditions for real conversation, the six steps of faith-sized requests, the dozen concrete pointers for a group prayer meeting in the closing chapter. A pastor or small-group leader could read the last chapter alone and find the equivalent of a short workshop on prayer.
She is weakest where the book ventures into doctrinal exposition. The Trinity chapter offers an illustration that has not aged well: the analogy of H₂O appearing as ice, water, and gas is in fact the classical analogy for modalism — the ancient heresy that the Father, Son, and Spirit are not three distinct Persons but three modes of one Person. Rinker is not personally a modalist; she elsewhere insists that the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Spirit. But the illustration she chose to clarify the doctrine actually obscures it, and readers without prior catechesis can come away with a confused Trinitarianism. Read her on prayer; do not read her on the Godhead.
The “faith-sized request” framework also needs careful handling. In Rinker’s hands it is a counsel of honesty — pray for what you can actually believe, then grow. In less careful hands the same teaching slides toward “your faith determines what God does,” which is not the New Testament’s picture. The biblical believer prays large and is willing to receive small; Rinker’s framework, taken alone, can produce a prayer life that is honest about its current capacity but never stretched by the size of God.
And the book is, finally, a book of its moment. The 1959 American campus, the references to Mrs. R and Mrs. O and the women of Winnetka Bible Church, the unhurried prose — these belong to a world before megachurches and before the internet. The pastoral instinct is timeless; the cultural housing is not.
Who Should Read This — and When
Read this book if your prayer life has become formal, performed, or carried on in language that is not the language of your daily speech — and especially if you lead or participate in a group that prays together. Don’t read it for a doctrine of prayer; read it for a recovery of the experience of prayer. For Chinese believers in churches where prayer meetings have become performances of spirituality measured by length, volume, or vocabulary, Rinker’s quiet correction is exactly the right medicine: the prayer that touches God is the prayer where God Himself is being addressed, in the simplest words, by one Person to another.
“We are not there primarily to ‘get things’ but to realize God’s presence. This is the greatest answer to prayer, that we are consciously aware of the Great Shepherd and His unchanging love for us.” — Prayer: Conversing with God, Chapter 11
The lasting contribution of this little book is the recovery, for ordinary believers in ordinary rooms, of the simplest fact about Christian prayer: that He is here, that He is listening, and that He will speak if we will stop performing long enough to let Him.