Book Review: “Imaginative Prayer” by Jared Patrick Boyd

Jared Patrick Boyd seeks, with Imaginative Prayer: A Yearlong Guide for your Child’s Spiritual Formation, to provide a groundwork for practical, imaginative prayer life that parents can experience alongside their children.

The book’s format provides a year of imaginative prayer for parents and children. After a few brief introductory chapters, Boyd gets to the meat of the book, which is a series of practical applications of strategies and ideas to prayer imaginatively. What exactly does that mean? Boyd argues that humans are impacted through their imagination, and not engaging the imagination means we miss a lot of possible formation for ourselves and others. Rather than providing a simple definition of what it means to pray imaginatively, Boyd walks readers through a series of ways to do just that.

There are 6 parts to the yearlong guide, focusing on God’s love, loving others, forgiveness, Jesus is the King, the good news of God, and the mission of God. Each has activities, questions, and ways to reflect throughout the time spent on each activity. The format of each is approximately similar, beginning with a reflection on a biblical story, followed by a question and answer, a written-out prayer with built-in pause cues, and further questions and reflections for parents to integrate. I particularly enjoyed examples like checking out a book of natural history to look at the various creatures God made and talk about the creations God loves and how much God has created. Other examples include using water to show how sharing provides greater abundance, reading the Bible and trying to imagine how the characters themselves would have felt in the context of the stories, etc. Essentially, every parent should be able to find at least a few activities they feel comfortable and even excited about sharing with their children. Many will benefit from using every single one over the course of a year.

If there is one complaint I have, it is how very specific some aspects are. Especially in the prayer sections, where Boyd even maps out the specific length of pauses between certain lines. It just seems like a bit too much specificity in a resource that is intended to encourage imagination. However, it could also be helpful for those who are really concerned about how to begin.

Imaginative Prayer: A Yearlong Guide for your Child’s Spiritual Formation provides a unique way to pray and do devotions with school-aged kids. The book seems an excellent way to encourage spiritual growth for children–and their parents.

The Good 

+Helpfully concrete
+Many, many varieties of activities, questions, and reflections to choose from
+Use of diverse sources for citations and quotes

The Bad

-A bit overly specific on some aspects

Disclaimer: I was provided with a copy of the book for review by the publisher. I was not required to give any specific kind of feedback whatsoever.

Links

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What options are there in the origins debate? – A Taxonomy of Christian Origins Positions– I clarify the breadth of options available for Christians who want to interact on various levels with models of origins. I think this post is extremely important because it gives readers a chance to see the various positions explained briefly.

Origins Debate– Here is a collection of many of my posts on Christianity and science.

SDG.

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