Tyler Staton

Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools

Tyler Staton's Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools begins with an honest confession: prayer is the thing Jesus talked about most confidently and most of us practice most awkwardly. As national director of the 24/7 Prayer movement and lead pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, Staton writes from both the heights of contemplative tradition and the mess of ordinary life. His thesis is deceptively simple — prayer is not a spiritual discipline to be mastered but a relationship to be inhabited, and the postures of historic Christian prayer (silence, lament, confession, persistence, wonder, and more) are not techniques for the advanced but gifts for the desperate. The title captures the tension at the heart of the book: monks pray with radical intentionality, fools live with radical trust, and Jesus calls his followers to both.