Pablo Martinez - Praying with the Grain: How Your Personality Affects the Way You Pray

Prayer in relation to temperament

Emotional problems and prayer

Prayer a love relationship

The most frequently asked questions on prayer

A psychiatrists viewpoint

Christian prayer and Eastern meditation

Dr Pablo Martnez is a medical doctor and psychiatrist working currently at a private practice in Barcelona. He has also developed a wide ministry as a lecturer, counsellor, and itinerant speaker. He has been a plenary Bible teacher in more than thirty countries in Europe and both North and South America. He has served as President of the Spanish Evangelical Alliance (19992009) and for seven years was Professor of Pastoral Psychology at the Spanish Theological Seminary. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Christian Medical and Dental Association (ICMDA), also serving as one of the organizations vice-presidents.

He was one of the members of the founding council of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (1982) and has been a regular speaker at Word Alive and Spring Harvest.

He developed his pastoral gifts serving as an elder in his local church for almost twenty-five years. He is currently chairman of the European Christian Counsellors Network, a body connected to the European Leadership Forum, where Dr Martnez serves as a member of the steering committee. He is also a member of the Sociopolitical Commission of the European Evangelical Alliance.

He has authored two other books: Tracing the Rainbow: Walking Through Loss and Bereavement (Authentic Media, 2004), and A Thorn in the Flesh: Finding strength and hope amid suffering (Inter-Varsity Press, England, 2007).

Pablo is married to Marta, who is also a medical doctor. He enjoys bird-watching and reading.

I have enjoyed the friendship of Pablo Martnez for more than twenty years and am grateful for the opportunity to commend this book to a wide readership.

It is not difficult to pinpoint its special value. Here is a psychiatrist who is committed to Christ, knows his Bible, rejoices in Christs cross, has a lively sympathy for struggling Christians and has much wisdom born of rich pastoral experience. These ingredients together make a strong mixture!

Dr Martnez accepts the Jungian distinction between extroverts and introverts, and his classification of four main psychological types. He is surely right to insist that our temperament is a genetic endowment, and that the new birth does not change it, although grace helps us to live with it and the Holy Spirit changes us into the likeness of Christ. He urges us to discover who we are, and to accept and respect each other in the rich diversity of the human family. As we study his thorough portraiture of different psychological types, we soon recognize ourselves and our friends.

Next he comes to the practice of prayer and how our prayers are affected by our temperament and personality. There are different styles of prayer which suit different kinds of people; he is an enemy of all stereotypes. He also faces honestly some of the problems which Christians experience, and makes practical suggestions for solving them. He urges us to persevere, because of the therapeutic value of prayer.

But our author is also familiar with the contours of contemporary thought and knows about the current influences which are hostile to prayer. In his last two chapters he tackles these. He develops a robust defence both of the authenticity of Christian prayer, against the slander that it is mere autosuggestion, and of the uniqueness of Christian prayer, against the claim that it is no different from Eastern meditation.