Biography
Rosalind Rinker was born in 1906, in the United States, in a family of Christian background. She grew up in the American Midwest and was educated in Christian schools. She was a thoughtful young woman who felt a call to the mission field. She studied at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles and trained as a teacher. In the 1930s, she went to China as a missionary with the Presbyterian Church. She worked in a school and in evangelism, in a land that was in turmoil from civil war and then from the Japanese invasion. She learned to speak Chinese and loved the Chinese people.
She was forced to leave China in the late 1940s, as the Communists came to power. She returned to the United States and took up a ministry as a writer and speaker. She worked with the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and became known as a speaker to students. She had a gift for speaking simply and warmly about the Christian life. She traveled widely to campuses and conferences. She was a woman with a sense of humor and a talent for friendship.
She is best known for her teaching on prayer. In the 1950s, she became convinced that many Christians were hampered in prayer by a sense of formality. They thought of prayer as a long speech to God, with fine words. She came to see that prayer is simply a conversation with God. She developed the idea that prayer in a group should be conversational, with each person speaking briefly and naturally, in turn, on one subject at a time. She tried it with groups of students and found that it opened the way for many to pray aloud for the first time. She called it conversational prayer.
She wrote about the method in a book, Prayer: Conversing with God, published in 1959. It was one of the most widely read books on prayer of the century. It sold over a million copies and was translated into many languages. In it, she described how she had learned to pray as a friend speaks to a friend, and she gave practical advice on praying in groups. Her book influenced a generation, including Evelyn Christenson, who took up her approach. She also wrote You Can Witness with Confidence and When You Pray.
Her approach was criticized by some who thought that it was too casual and that it neglected the praise and the majesty of God. She answered that her aim was to help people to pray, not to set aside the historic forms. She had a deep respect for the Scriptures and stressed that prayer should be rooted in the Word. She held that conversational prayer was a way to make room for the Holy Spirit.