The guilt most Christians carry about their prayer life, that it isn't deep enough, consistent enough, disciplined enough, may say less about them than about the world they're living in. In this episode, Dwight Zscheile talks with the Rev. Dr. Wesley Ellis, pastor of First Congregational Church in Ramona, California and author of Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age, about what a culture of optimization has done to the Christian prayer life and what might be recovered when we stop treating prayer as one more project to manage.

Wes argues that prayer is primarily something God does, and that we are less its practitioners than its recipients. Drawing on philosopher Charles Taylor's account of the secular age and sociologist Hartmut Rosa's work on social acceleration, he makes a case that the exhaustion so many church leaders feel is bound up with a way of thinking about prayer that puts all the weight on us. The conversation moves from personal guilt to pastoral practice to the deep grammar of grace: that the most important things have already been done, and that amen means something closer to "I trust you" than "we're finished."