Why Do I Cringe at Praying with Someone on the Phone?

Honestly I’m not altogether sure why, when someone offers prayers and intercessions in the midst of a phone conversation, I get the uncomfortable sense that something is wrong here. I will say up front that certainly there are times when praying with someone over the phone may be a perfectly acceptable option, say, when that person may need prayer and there is no other way to do it. Or perhaps there are other scenarios that would lend themselves more easily, at least in my mind, to the notion of praying by phone.

But there’s also something about, shall we say, routine praying by phone that has me wondering. Why do I get uneasy about it? Is it just me?

After all, isn’t it good to pray at all times? Isn’t everything sanctified by the Word of God and prayer? Yes, certainly. So maybe there’s nothing wrong with it, then? I guess I’d agree that this question does not rise to the level of doctrinal divisions and unacceptable worship practices such as are rampant with the contemporary worship crowd.

But still, it makes me uneasy, and I have learned to trust my instincts on these matters, so I will venture to ponder the question some more.

Perhaps my instinctive recoil has something to do with the fact that when I am on the phone with someone, I am in the midst of having a conversation with that person. He or she is on one end of the line and I am on the other. Launching into a prayer is thus a bit jarring, because suddenly the person is not conversing with me, but with God, and I am reduced to listening in. Admittedly this is what happens in church too, or in a private visit, when, in person, a prayer is offered by me or by someone in the same room. But in a phone call, the other person is generally talking to me, and so it sounds to me as though he’s still talking to me when he begins to pray. He’s speaking into his phone, and I am listening on mine. But now he’s speaking to Someone else.

When on the other hand this happens in church, the pastor will turn to face the altar, and this movement makes it clear that he is not talking directly to me. And even if the pastor offers a prayer from the pulpit, or in person in a private setting, he will certainly not be looking directly at me when he is praying (that would be jarring indeed; I may have to rend my clothes, and say with Paul and Barnabas, Why do you do these things? I also am a man of like passions with you!). The phone has a disadvantage because there is no visual indicator that the other person is not talking directly to me.

But maybe that’s not it either.

Maybe it has more to do with the fact that while Christians do have an underlying need for prayer, even communal prayer, this need should ordinarily be satisfied in person. And cyberspace just does not count. It’s artificial; it’s part of the reason I have also insisted that virtual worship, online worship, live-streaming worship does not count either.  Part of the COVID curse has been the creeping and demonic thought that the use of the internet for connecting with the people is a brave new world that might be thought to suffice as a new normal (pardon even my negative use of that horrid term). Speaking of Brave New World, maybe Aldous Huxley was onto something very important, with the dreary dystopia he presciently envisioned in 1931. We cannot—we dare not—fall victim to a cyber society that starts to replace our humanity, howbeit in small and seemingly acceptable increments. We are human beings created in the image of God. We are body and soul. We are en fleshed Pandemics take away our togetherness, and that is unquestionably bad and in quick need of reversal.

Maybe that’s it. Or maybe it’s something else. Honestly, as I said, I’m really not sure. I’m just wondering why I would rather not pray with you on the phone.