This past Saturday, my boss Dave and I were given the opportunity to speak to the Men’s Breakfast group at our home church about the work of Mission Resource. Since I had fresh photos from my recent trip to Ghana, Dave let me do most of the talking.<\/p>\n\n\n
The breakfast is held at 7:30 am on the first or second Saturday of each month. Almost 40 guys showed up, the majority were in their 60s, 70s, and 80s.<\/p>\n\n\n
I took the opportunity to survey this unique group about their spiritual disciplines.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
They tended to be strongest in their prayer lives. Nine described their prayer lives as being at least relatively “consistent”. Most reported spending 10 to 15 minutes daily in prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n
Two of the oldest men pray an average of 2 hours each day!<\/p>\n\n\n
(That’s a good use of the retirement years, right?)<\/p>\n\n\n
Not surprising to me was the relative weakness in daily Bible reading. Fewer claimed consistency in personal study of Scripture and fewer were able to report a particular number of minutes per day spent in the Bible.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I have a growing interest in promoting the benefits of personal time in the Bible. I think it is crucial to spiritual health.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
But the really steep drop off was when I asked about fasting. Only one claimed to do any sort of fasting, and that was only “occasionally”.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
This did not surprise me. Fasting is the one spiritual discipline which seems almost universally neglected by modern American Christians.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
\u00a0Why is that?<\/p>\n\n\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This past Saturday, my boss Dave and I were given the opportunity to speak to the Men’s Breakfast group at our home church about the work of Mission Resource. Since I had fresh photos from my recent trip to Ghana, Dave let me do most of the talking. The breakfast is held at 7:30 am […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3651,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3650\/revisions\/3651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}