Gather the Children to Play - Christianity Today

We were wrapping up Vacation Bible School with family night. That year, 1981, our pastor Jim Cymbala had invited the parents to come on Sunday night. Nicky Cruz, a former gang leader, was sharing his testimony, and we took the children, about 200 of them, next door to the Upper Room. As we watched a Christian movie, I felt in my spirit that the Lord wanted the children to pray. I didn’t know that the next 30 minutes would change our work dramatically, from ministry for children, to ministry by children.

Pastor Cymbala had called the Brooklyn Tabernacle to be a praying church when he became pastor ten years earlier. “Nothing happens without prayer,” he told us often. So we prayed, faithfully, fervently, every Tuesday night, and what has happened because of God’s answers to prayer is astonishing. But our children’s ministry was still mostly one of Bible stories and songs and games. Until that VBS.

I asked the children whether any of them wanted to come and pray in another room. A dozen said yes. Without any prompting they knelt, and for the next half-hour they prayed spontaneously for their families who were in the service downstairs. It was amazing. When it was over, I remember God speaking in my heart, “Gather the children to pray.”

After several weeks searching for workers to lead a children’s prayer meeting, I complained to the Lord. And he repeated what I had heard earlier: “Gather the children to pray.” He was speaking to me. So the Tuesday night children’s prayer meeting began and has continued, uninterrupted for more than 20 years.

Almost immediately we had more children than space for them. Today we have capped attendance at 70, and there’s a line outside the door every week as they try to sign in before all the places are taken. God soon brought another leader who shared my vision for the prayer ministry of children, and today we have three teams of adults who share leadership. Some of them have served more than ten years.

On Tuesday nights, while the adults are singing and praying in the sanctuary, the children are next door in the basement classroom and in the Upper Room, singing and praying. Our meetings last two hours or more.

Not just kid stuff

When someone says, “Oh, how cute. Look at the children praying,” I tell them, “They’re not cute. They’re powerful.” The church needs a new view of children and of their importance in the kingdom. We tell the children, “You’re not too young to pray.” We are convinced of the power of prayer, and the power of kids who pray.

Children are unpretentious. Their prayers are honest and sincere. They pray things some adults are scared to pray. But they are also strong warriors. Their prayers shake heaven and rearrange the kingdom.

The younger children pray simple prayers. We teach them to praise God and to pray for the lost. The older children often pray for unsaved friends and family, and for their own safety in school and on the streets. The battle for their souls seems so much stronger today than when we started.

Our faith was tested in the attacks on the World Trade Center. We lost four of our church family. In the weeks afterward, the children prayed for the victims and their families, and for their own relatives who work in Manhattan. Many children expressed fear, but every week we brought that fear to the Lord.

Pastor Cymbala has said this is harvest time, when people are more open to the gospel, so we are praying for their salvation. One boy reminded us to pray for Osama bin Laden.

“That man needs to be saved, too,” he told us all. And we prayed.

Prayer is at the center of all we do in children’s ministry—teaching, singing, activities—it all comes through prayer.

For more on the children’s prayer meeting, read “Let the Children Pray” by Eric Reed.

Nancy Martinez is director of Christian education at the Brooklyn Tabernacle in Brooklyn, New York.

Pint-sized but powerful: The untold story from the Brooklyn Tabernacle is the children’s prayer meeting.