About This Site
These Longer Reads are about exploring deeper communion with God.
They’re about moving beyond prayer as conscious mental dialogue alone, toward an all of life friendship with the Father of our being. Toward ceaseless prayer and a more ancient faith.
Here I write about my own journey of discovering beholding prayer, the church fathers and mothers, and what it means to life a God-soaked life.
If you’re looking for a more enriching Christian spirituality, a greater awareness of God in your ordinary living, a beholding life, then here I hope you’ll find the tools and inspiration to do it.
Consider yourself invited to the journey.
Much love,
Strahan.
About The Author
Strahan is a writer, award winning folk musician and spiritual director from Aotearoa, New Zealand. He founded Commoners Communion in 2017 to explore what it means to become a deeply prayerful people in our times. Since then, he has written three prayer books - Prayer Vol. 01, 02 & 03 that offer poetic prayers, contemplations and reflections that help the reader deepen their own communion with the God of their hearts.
His work has been featured in the Bridgetown Daily Podcast, Ekstasis Magazine and his poem Never Alone from Prayer Vol. 01 was performed by Amanda Cook and the Cageless Birds during a live worship and prayer recording in 2020.
Strahan’s work helps people to grow a deep friendship with God, seeing prayer as far more than conscious mental dialogue but as way of existing with God in our every day ordinary lives. His prayers and poems are invitations toward an honest, rested and open life lived in the Spirit and his dialogue around how we can incorporate ancient prayer forms into our modern lives has helped give language to a generation longing for a deeper living experience of God.
His music has been described as psalmic, ‘[making] the tension between heaven and earth that much more palpable’. His music has featured Josh Garrels and John Mark McMillan and his debut album Posters won New Zealand’s Gospel Album of The Year Award as well as being named in The Gospel Coalition’s ‘Best Christian Albums of the 2010’s’.
Today he runs spiritual retreats that both teach and embody a more contemplative life, teaches Online Prayer Schools and publishes the Commoners Communion Podcast, a space to further explore the devotional works of his books and what a contemporary christian spirituality can look like in our times.
Strahan is finishing his study as a spiritual director through Spiritual Growth Ministries and is working on his first non-fiction book Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God which tells his story of moving from a working relationship with God to a friendship and invites the reader to give up consumer christianity for a more beautiful and rich life of seeing and being seen by God.
‘Beholding’ releases early 2023 with David C Cook publishing.
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