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 three thousand 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 special emphasis at 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 at the chapel later that week, he brought with him some definite assumptions about prayer meetings. The most basic was that they are essential, of primary importance. Where he came from in India, and in many other parts of the world where Christians are persecuted and harassed for their faith, 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 five hundred—that was empty! Surely he heard the pastor wrong and had come to the wrong place. He was worried, so he went outside to double-check the name of the chapel. Then a few people came into the room at 7:30, but there was no leader, no songs or worship, just chitchat 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, K. P. 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 that the pastor said was heavy on his heart? Weren't we going to intercede for a miracle? And where was the pastor?1
False sufficiency
That meeting became a paradigm for his experience of prayer meetings in the American church. In all his travels here, he saw the same pattern repeated over and over again in hundreds of midweek prayer meetings. Almost anything happens but prayer. There are announcements, singing, homilies, and a few prayers offered, but usually only by the leader—and that's in the churches that actually have prayer meetings in their schedules. Many more make no pretense even to have a church prayer meeting. There seems to be time for everything else—to study, to fellowship, to preach, but not to pray. Church leaders who think nothing of spending two or three days to plan programs or of spending thousands of dollars to hire consultants to help them do it, blanch at the thought of spending even one night to wait on the Lord to show them what to do.
How can this be?
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 dark strongholds of spiritual evil in the heavenly realms?
Yohannan attributes our prayerlessness to a false sense of self-sufficiency. The Laodicean church is deŒja`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. Au contraire: "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.
This, of course, is nothing less than blatant idolatry: "My people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols"—buildings, machines, technology, programs, money. "They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water" (Jer. 2:11-13).
Earlier in this book, I identified some of the reasons for this apostasy. 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.
Believing there is not time to pray is a self-fulfilling prophecy; for the logic of secularization is to make us frenetically busy, overcommitted, and, finally, 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 peoples and churches.
But the demise of corporate congregational prayer needs some special treatment. Along with secularization, American individualism has taken its toll. If churches fancy themselves self-sufficient, it's because their members share the same conceit about themselves. 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 of people, meeting as groups to pray. The Bible's great book of prayer, the 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 individuals.
Corporate shalom
Corporate prayer has a special place in God's heart because he desires that his people be one. Typically, Christians call the "Our Father" prayer the Lord's Prayer. But strictly speaking, that prayer should be called the disciples' prayer. The real Lord's Prayer is found in the seventeenth chapter of John where Jesus prays to the father, "I in them and you in me. 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 does not have to come from philosophers and theologians and apologists. It can come from the simplest believers who will live together in the unity of the Holy Spirit!
Why does unity have this kind of power? One reason is that when we live together in love and harmony, it can mean but one thing: that each of us has ceased being his own lord and has submitted himself or herself to the Lord. In such a state there can be no place for isolated individualism, the attitude Archbishop William Temple penned when he said, tongue-in-cheek, "I believe in one holy, infallible church, of which I regret to say that at the present time I am the only member."2 The lordship of Jesus Christ is meant to start in the church and to radiate out to the rest of the world. When Jesus is truly Lord over his people, his power is released.
There comes with this unity a quality in the church that only can be called precious. Jesus adds to its power to convince the world of who he is, the power to convince it of who we are. "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" In other words, he also claims for unity the power to persuade the world that we are indeed his people, precious co God and dearly loved by him. 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.
"How good and pleasant it is," says Psalm 133, "when [kindred] live together in unity!" My friend Roderick Caesar likes to say of this psalm that most things are either good but not pleasant—like cleaning a toilet—or pleasant but not good—like eating too much apple pie. How few things are both good and pleasant!
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 other brothers and sisters in his family? It can't be done. When we are less than one with each other, our oneness with Jesus is broken and incomplete. So then are our prayers. That's why Paul says to Timothy, "I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer," and then adds, "without anger or disputing" (1 Tim. 2:8).
Søren Kierkegaard said Jesus does two things when he sees a crowd: The first is to disperse it and isolate each individual one-on-one with himself. Having done that, the second thing he does is to reintroduce all these individuals to one another as brothers and sisters, making a crowd into a community. A true Christian community is always a community of prayer.
Our failure at corporate prayer is first a failure in Christian community to truly agree in the Lord. 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 harvest or "ingatherings" of souls, in which there would be a number of new believers 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!3
In times of intense spiritual conflict, simple, unified corporate prayer can be literally the difference between life and death.
Moravian Pentecost
The story of the Moravian Brethren is a similar one. When the Christians of various and disparate traditions— Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, Anabaptist, and many others—gathered together on the Von Zinzendorf estate in Moravia, in the early 1700s, they saw themselves as pilgrims in spiritual unity. The Reformation had gone sour in many ways, with the church splintering into still more divisions, and all at war with one another. These people purposed to live together in such a way as to answer Jesus' prayer in John 17:23, and be brought to complete unity. They also had a mission motive, for they believed that such unity would persuade the world that Jesus was who he said he was. With many other Europeans of their era, they had a new and heightened sense of the vastness and diversity of the planet, and they wanted Christ to be confessed by every nation as Lord.
But within a few weeks, they were at each others' throats, fighting as badly as everyone else. Von Zinzendorf and the elders of the community were heartbroken. In desperation, they called for concerted prayer that God would send a new Pentecost to their community and heal their divisions and make them one, so the whole world would know that Jesus is Lord. To this end, they instituted a twenty-four-hour prayer vigil—two women and two men praying each hour. Their prayers were answered as a powerful Pentecostal experience came on their community, and they were brought to repentance and harmony with one another in the Holy Spirit. Like the churches of Ipswich, the Moravians continued to pray twenty-four hours a day, with no break, for one hundred years! Wherever a Moravian community was established, twenty-four-hour concerted prayers was also established. During this time, two thousand missionaries went out from their communities to almost every corner of the earth.
It was in a Moravian prayer meeting on Aldersgate Street in London that a failed and discouraged missionary named John Wesley felt his heart "strangely warmed," and the Wesleyan revivals were birthed.
In a less dramatic, but no less profound way, Benedictine monks have carried on for centuries the same ministry of prayer in the unity of the Spirit. In chapter 2, I narrate the story of how my wife and I, while on a long and boring drive across the plains of North Dakota in 1975, discovered a Benedictine monastery. We poked around the grounds until we met one of the brothers who kindly took us on a tour. The monks carried on a vital ministry of prayer and worship as they farmed, conducted spiritual retreats, made crafts, and offered spiritual counsel to people from the region.
When I got home I found out a little bit more about the Benedictines. Founded by St. Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century, the order was formed as a creative response to the worldliness he saw that had crept into the church of his times. The first monastery was built on Monte Cassino in Italy. St. Benedict believed that the chief end, the chief work of man was to worship God, and that his community should therefore make worship and prayer central to its life. But he also believed that if prayer were the chief work, then work itself could become prayer, thus giving meaning to common labor. Rene Dubos, the French biologist, thinks that if environmentalism needs a patron saint, St. Benedict, much more than St. Francis, is the man.
I have believed ever since that the church should make the uncommon practice of the Benedictines common. There must be a way for all believers to integrate prayer and work in a community of love and unity. For what other reason would Jesus command it? These three, the pilgrims in Moravia, the Protestants in Ipswich, and the monks on Monte Cassino are but a few models of that earnest hope.
Good conversation
I was raised in a tradition that believed the man alone on his knees in the closet is the pinnacle of great prayer— one person one-on-one with the Almighty. Like Moses on Sinai. I still think that is extremely important. But the cutting edge of my personal prayer life lately has been in corporate prayer. I didn't understand this very well when I was growing up. I grew up in a church that had midweek prayer meetings, much like the one described by K. P. Yohannan. I hated them. Now I realize that good corporate prayer can demand more of us spiritually than individual prayer does. When I'm alone with God, I don't have to deal with other people. Frankly, I like God a lot more than I like some people. But the Lord is clear: if we love him, we must love others. Thus joining my heart with others before the throne of his grace is a way of loving God.
In many ways, the same rules that apply to good conversation apply to good corporate prayer. When our kids were young, it was a big deal just to get them to wait their turn to speak in dinner conversations. When that happened we were pleased, but we still had a long way to go, for then the conversations, though orderly, were a string of non sequiturs. Dan would go into excruciating detail to tell us his dream of the night before. Joel would politely wait his turn to tell us, immediately after Dan was done, that he had a yellow T-shirt in his closet. Andy would sit sucking his fingers, with a faraway look in his eyes, and when his turn came would grunt that he wanted a slingshot for his birthday. By the time Mary came along, we had advanced beyond chat (somewhat!).
Some group prayer meetings are like that kind of conversation. We come together to the throne of God, or do we? Are we more like children waiting in line to speak to a department store Santa? We're occupying the same space, but we're not together. I've prayed countless times with adults and found myself just taking my turn, along with the rest of them, to say to God the things I wanted to say, without much thought for what others were praying.
Good corporate prayer is like good conversation. Through my wife's involvement in the Mom's In Touch prayer movement, I have learned a method that we call "agree, vector, and build." The method is to listen, really listen to a person's prayer, and to let it sink into my mind and heart before I move onto my particular concerns. For instance, someone may pray for a family member's health. As I mull over that prayer, I will add a kind of amen to it, agreeing with it, verbally or silently, thus entering more deeply into the concern. Sometimes when I do that, I may find myself moved to add my own prayer, a nuance, to the prayer I heard. Others may do the same, vectoring in their prayers and building on the original prayer.
When I have done this kind of praying in a group, it is remarkable the way we have experienced the leading of the Holy Spirit—not only in how to pray for a matter but in what to do about it after we have. Along these lines, I have also heard my friend Bob Bakke urge prayer groups to make their prayers short and many. Long, sonorous prayers by the "adept" usually have the effect of stifling the participation of those who don't feel so adept at group prayer. So each should pray shore prayers, many times in the course of a prayer session, thus leaving space for everyone to agree with, vector in, and build on the prayers of others. It can be a wonderful way to practice the sumphoneo the Lord commands.
Good corporate prayer in a large group also requires planning, at least as much as would go into any other well-planned service of worship. Many prayer meetings fail precisely at this point. For some reason the idea is out there that a prayer meeting should simply "flow" spontaneously in the Spirit, meaning that there should be no planning, since planning would somehow stifle the flow. That's not spontaneity, but what Thomas Howard calls the myth of spontaneity. The result is that the "adept" dominate the praying and the whole focus of the gathering sinks to the lowest common denominator. Our experience in other areas of life tells us that not much good comes from mere spontaneity. Ask the Mozarts and Einsteins of history if mere spontaneity had anything to do with their accomplishments, and they'll say hard work, yes; discipline, yes; but mere spontaneity, no. Perhaps their insights came in a flash that was experienced as spontaneity, but it was built on years of hard work and discipline. For that reason, I think it is a good idea for all-church prayer meetings to be significant worship events, taking place perhaps only monthly, rather than weekly, with small groups filling that slot.
Beyond meetings where the church gathers specifically for prayer, prayer can also make a difference where the church gathers specifically for business.
I saw this work to great effect in my last two congregations. In both churches, elders' meetings tended to go long and late. So I proposed that we begin the meetings with the first hour devoted to prayer. At first the elders balked, reasoning that an hour of prayer would add an hour to the meeting. I argued that it would produce the opposite, that praying would help us get our work done faster, that instead of our meetings ending at what had become the "baseline" time of 11 p.m., they would end sooner.
They did, not always, but more than ever before. One reason may be because we were recognizing that the church is God's, not ours, and that since he's the head of the church, shouldn't we check in with him and sit in his presence before we presumed to conduct his business? 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. Like so many in the Western church, we had been leading as practical deists, acting as though God had given us a package of resources—brains, Bible, finances, and facilities—and had walked away, leaving it to 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, because it gets the work done better, but for the sake of the truth, because he is its head.
If a church is going to become a praying church, the pastor must take the lead. He or she must be the most visible prayer in the congregation. The leadership cannot be delegated to others, for the people of the church will regard as central what the pastor leads, and as peripheral what he does not lead. The pastor should announce to the church the time and the place in which he will begin to pray, invite all to come who will come, and begin the prayer time with whoever God gives, until the kingdom comes. Quite literally.
And no complaining over how few may come at first, only rejoicing over who has come!
Launch into the deep
After his experience in that disastrous, and all too common, midweek prayer meeting, K. P. Yohannan said he feared we were in danger of fathering an Ishmael. Ishmael, you will remember, was a child born of practical deists. When Abram and Sarai didn't see God's promise fulfilled in the time they expected, they cook matters into their own hands, and Abram had intercourse with Hagar. They opted for the child of human calculation over the child of God's promise. Ishmael was the result, "a wild donkey of a man" (Gen. 16:12), at war with everyone.
I think prayerless churches have fathered many Ishmaels in their history, with the most visible result being their shameful divisions. As Ishmael mocked Isaac, the practical deists will mock those who prayerfully wait for the child of promise as ethereal and impractical, hopelessly out of touch with the real world. God was patient with all who were involved in the fiasco then: Abram and Sarai, Hagar and Ishmael. He waited until they learned to wait, and finally gave them what he had promised. I pray he will continue to do so with us.
I have written this book in the hope that somehow I can whet your appetite to read more, and above all, to pray more. 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. C. S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory: "We are far too easily pleased." That, in the end, is the reason we do not pray more than we do. Nothing less than infinite joy is offered us in God's kingdom of light. He has promised that we will one day shine like the sun in that kingdom (Matt. 13:43).
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.
Ben Patterson is dean of the chapel at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He served Presbyterian (PCUSA) pastorates in New Jersey and California before going to Hope College and then to Westmont. He is the author of Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent.
Source unknown R. H. Tawney was speaking in the same tone when he wrote, "The man who seeks God in isolation from his fellows is likely to find, not God, but the devil, who will bear an embarrassing resemblance to himself."Source unknown
Bob Bakke, from a personal conversation.
Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson
