Review: To Change the World for Good: exploring and applying the Lord’s Prayer

The following is an unedited review written for Evangelicals Now newspaper and published in their September 2019 edition: https://www.e-n.org.uk/2019/09/reviews/the-state-of-our-prayers/?search=1

To Change the World for Good: exploring and applying the Lord’s Prayer
John Belham
Charenton Reformed Publishing, 136 pages, £6.99
978-0992946579

The worn aphorism “don’t judge a book by its cover” comes to mind when examining To Change the World for Good by John Belham: the book’s contents are done a disservice by the poor aesthetic of the volume itself, including the dated cover design, various editorial decisions, and frequent abuse of ellipses.
Nonetheless the book does have good, edifying things to offer as an accessible, succinct exploration and application of what is popularly known as “the Lord’s Prayer”. Comprised of 17 short, warm and worshipful chapters that each examine a phrase or line from the Lord’s Prayer, To Change the World for Good is clearly written with a view to fostering scripturally informed and God-honouring prayers applied across all areas of life. Each chapter concludes with a model prayer drawn from the chapter’s contents, several questions for reflection or discussion, and a list of Scripture references – features that make the book ideal as a study guide for small group use.  

Unfortunately the book at times betrays the blind-spots of a white English middle-class evangelical Anglican perspective, theologically and culturally. Belham claims a historical “striking link” between “Britain’s standing among the nations and our national concern for the things of God”, but friends from around the globe will have trouble seeing such concern in the warmongering, colonising imperialism of their ancestral memory. Similarly, Belham simplistically claims America’s “founding” demonstrates the same principle - “individuals are valued, the weak are protected” and so forth; I daresay the indigenous nations and African slaves would have a different perspective. Furthermore, though I am in agreement with Belham’s biblical encouragements to pray for world leaders and am sympathetic to his longing for leaders of integrity, I cannot as a Baptist Christian agree that a role of the state is “the maintaining of true faith and godliness”. Our nation as it is today is the sad product of such spiritual outsourcing: Christ is the head of the church and he has entrusted such maintenance to local churches ordered not by the State but by the Spirit through Scripture. 

Nonetheless, for the discerning reader, such disagreements need not necessarily consign what remains a broadly helpful volume to the dustbin.