DISCIPLESHIP
East Indian evangelist K. P. Yohannan says he will never forget one of his first prayer meetings in an American church. He had come to the United States eager to meet some of its spiritual giants and leaders. One man in particular held his interest, a preacher known even in India for his powerful sermons and uncompromising commitment to the truth.
More than 3,000 people attended services on the Sunday Yohannan visited his church. The choirs were outstanding and the preaching was everything he’d hoped it would be. But he was especially taken by an announcement the pastor made about the midweek prayer meeting. He said there were some things lying heavy on his heart—would the people come and pray about them? Then he announced the name of a certain chapel on the church campus. Excited, Yohannan determined he would attend.
When he arrived later that week, he brought with him some definite assumptions. The most basic was that prayer meetings are essential, of primary importance. In India, and in many other parts of the world where Christians are persecuted, the prayer meeting is the centerpiece of the church’s life. Everyone comes, the meetings often last long into the night, and it is not unusual for believers to arise daily before sunup to pray together for the work of the church.
Fearing a huge crowd, he came early to get a seat. But when he arrived he was surprised to discover a chapel with a capacity for only 500—that was empty! A few people eventually came in, but there was no leader, no songs or worship, just chit chat about news, weather, and sports.
Forty-five minutes later an elderly man, the leader, but not the pastor, walked into the chapel to offer a few devotional thoughts from the Bible and give a brief prayer. The meeting was over, and as the seven attendees filed out of the chapel, Yohannan sat in stunned silence, his mind filled with questions: Was this it? Weren’t they going to stay and wait upon God? Where was the worship? The tears? The cries for guidance and direction? Where was the list of the sick, and the poor, and those in need? What about that burden the pastor said was heavy on his heart? Weren’t we going to intercede for a miracle? And where was the pastor?
That meeting became a paradigm for his experience of prayer meetings in America. In all his travels here, Yohannon saw the same pattern repeated in hundreds of midweek meetings. Almost anything happens but prayer. There are announcements, singing, homilies, but few prayers—and that’s in the churches that actually have prayer meetings in their schedules. Many more make no pretense.
Church leaders who think nothing of spending days planning programs or of spending thousands of dollars to hire consultants to help them do it, blanch at the thought of spending even one whole night to wait on the Lord to show them what to do.
If it is true that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12), then we must pray, mustn’t we? Can there be any other way to reach a lost world? Do we really think our plans and programs can bring down strongholds of spiritual evil in the heavenly realms?
Misplaced confidence
Yohannan attributes our prayerlessness to a false sense of self-sufficiency. The Laodicean church is deja vu all over again in the so-called Christian West. That was the church that said of itself, “I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.” But Jesus had a different opinion: “You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”
And worst of all, he saw himself as standing outside the church, not inside; knocking on the door, asking to be let in. “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:14-22). To pray would be to open the door. But our sense of self-sufficiency paralyzes the hand that would turn the knob.
Secularization, the process by which things like prayer are losing their practical social significance, is at the root of most of our difficulties with prayer. For many of us, on an almost subconscious level, there is a lack of confidence that something like prayer can actually get anything done. Therefore, since our lives are full of things that need to be done, prayer naturally gets pushed out to the edges of the day. Prayer may have some therapeutic value; for instance, it can give one a sense of inner peace, but we think it can do little to raise money for the operating budget.
The logic of secularization makes us frenetically over-committed and so full of blind activity that we become too busy and too tired to pray. As P. T. Forsyth warned, the inability to pray is the punishment for the refusal to pray.
God said it would be that way: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. You said, ‘No, we will flee on horses.’ Therefore, you will flee!” (Isa. 30:15-16, italics mine). Flight is a good image of the kind of activity that dominates prayerless people and churches.
Along with secularization, American individualism has taken its toll. If churches fancy themselves self-sufficient, it’s because their members share the same conceit. We like our lives to be self-contained. For many, the prayer meeting is unnecessary as long as individuals are praying in their own homes on their own time. What is missed is that most of what the Bible says about prayer is addressed to groups, people meeting together, to pray. The Bible’s great book of prayer, Psalms, was written largely for use in the congregation of Israel.
Even the individual prayer of a man like Ezra had the effect of moving all the people to pray together. For “while Ezra was praying and confessing, weeping and throwing himself down before the house of God, a large crowd of Israelites—men, women and children—gathered around him. They too wept bitterly” (Ezra 10:1).
Unforgettable is the prayer life of the young church in Jerusalem, as “they all joined together constantly in prayer,” and who, when threatened with persecution, raised “their voices together in prayer to God” for him to show his power against her enemies (Acts 1:14; 4:23-31).
It was in a congregational prayer meeting that a missionary movement was launched in Antioch: “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off” (Acts 13:1-3).
When Paul urged the churches to pray for him, he was urging congregations to pray as congregations, not only as mere individuals.
Corporate shalom
Corporate prayer has a special place in God’s heart because he desires that his people be one. Jesus prays to the Father, “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:23). Note that Jesus claims for Christian unity a power he gives only to the Holy Spirit, to nothing and no one else—the power to persuade the world that he is indeed the One sent from God “to let the world know that you sent me.” The greatest argument for the authority and identity of Jesus comes not only from theologians and apologists. It can come from the simplest believers who will live together in the unity of the Holy Spirit! There is a blessedness, a shalom, among those who are one in Christ that is so extraordinary and miraculous that it is visible to nonbelievers.
What does this have to do with corporate prayer?
There can’t be one without the other—no genuine corporate prayer without unity, no real unity without corporate prayer. If prayer is the deepest communion we can have with our Father God this side of heaven, how can we have this intimacy if we are at loggerheads with his family?
Taking his cue from the words of Jesus in Matthew 18:19, Jonathan Edwards urged the churches of eighteenth-century New England to see prayer as a kind of concert. “Again I tell you, that if two of you agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.” The word for “agree” is the Greek sumphoneo, from which we get our word symphony. Edwards proposed that churches pray in concerted agreement for two things: the revival of religion in the church and the spread of God’s kingdom in the world. The Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were birthed in this kind of prayer. With them came spiritual renewal and profoundly beneficial social and political changes.
That kind of praying required a level of Christian community most churches know nothing of.
Bob Bakke of National Prayer Advance tells of churches of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and their experience of this kind of prayer. After the first Great Awakening, three churches in this community covenanted to follow the pattern suggested by Edwards.
In each congregation, cell groups would meet weekly to agree in prayer. Monthly, the separate congregations would then gather the cells and conduct all church prayer meetings of agreement. Then quarterly, all three would come together for the same kind of praying.
This pattern was followed faithfully, without interruption, for a century. Two remarkable things happened during this time. All three churches reported periodic harvests or “ingatherings” of souls, in which a number of new believers were brought into the congregations, about every eight to ten years. Also, during this time, all of New England was being swept by Unitarianism. But not these three churches. They remained firmly true to the faith while apostasy swirled around them, but not over them.
Around the time of the Civil War, the prayer meetings ceased. Within five years these churches all capitulated to Unitarianism!
In times of intense spiritual conflict, simple, unified corporate prayer can be literally the difference between life and death.
Launch into the Deep
Since the best teacher of prayer is the Holy Spirit, the best way to learn to pray is by praying. Whether, and how much we pray is, I think, finally a matter of appetite, of hunger for God and all that he is and desires.
As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory: “We are far too easily pleased.” We have become satisfied with mere church, mere religious exertion, mere numbers and buildings—the things we can do. There is nothing wrong with these things, but they are no more than foam left by the surf on the ocean of God’s glory and goodness.
There are things way out in the depths that only God can give us. They can be ours only if we launch out in our little prayer boats and learn to sail, even one day walk, on those waters.
Bon voyage, my friend.
This article is excerpted from Deepening Your Conversation with God: the Life-Changing Power of Prayer, the seventh volume in LEADERSHIP’s “Pastor’s Soul” book series.
Ben Patterson is dean of the chapel at Hope College P.O. Box 9000 Holland MI 49422
Hand God the Gavel
If business before pleasure, then prayer before business.
Prayer can make a difference when the church gathers for business. I saw this work to great effect in my last two congregations, where elder meetings tended to go long and late.
I proposed that we devote the first hour to prayer. At first the elders balked. That would add an hour to the meetings, they said. I argued that it would produce the opposite, that praying would help us get our work done faster, that instead of ending at our baseline time of 11 p.m., our meetings would end sooner.
They did—not always—but more than ever before. It wasn’t long before we also found ourselves stopping for prayer in the midst of a meeting, whenever we came to a point where we couldn’t agree.
We began recognizing that the church is God’s, not ours. Like so many in the Western church, we had been leading as practical deists, acting as if God had given us a package of resources—brains, Bible, finances, and facilities—and had walked away, leaving us to figure out what to do with it all.
But the church is Christ’s body, not his legacy. And we pray not for the sake of efficiency (to get the work done better), but for the sake of Christ, our head.
—Ben Patterson
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
