MAYOR'S PRAYER BREAKFASTS
The promo material for the Turlock Mayor's Prayer Breakfast has arrived. The featured speaker this year (May 12th -- although I'll be in Chicago that day) is Michael Reagan.

This annual Turlock event is extremely well organized and supported by the community -- although most attending appear to be Anglo Protestants. I'm not sure that we'd have a large enough venue if the Roman Catholics or the Hispanics showed up en masse.

I suppose that the Turlock breakfast is pretty typical of the events in other cities around the country -- wonderful for bringing some people together. But I've always wondered a bit about the formula for these things. Rarely have I heard of a community bringing in a speaker who is an expert at prayer. Most of the speakers are drawn from the Evangelical Christian version of the motivational speaker circuit. And most of them are conservative political figures. But none of them really have much to say or teach about prayer (no criticism of the current speakers intended -- they are experts in other areas). And if the purpose of a prayer breakfast is truly prayer... It leaves me wondering if in spite of all the good that happens the concept needs tweaking. We might re-energize the whole prayer breakfast movement if we started inviting people such as Eugene Peterson, Richard Foster, David Hansen, Dallas Willard -- or even Bill Hybel if we need a popular name.