Most addicts can pinpoint a moment at which they “hatched” from the addiction and left it behind.
Stanton Peele1
Once convinced of the need for prayer, how does someone form the habit of prayer? Is it a slow gradual process? Or does commitment come quickly, like a flash of insight?
Psychologists who study habit formation say that sometimes habits are made, or broken, in moment-of-truth experiences. Stanton Peele, after studying the problem of addiction for more than a decade, says that more often than we’d expect alcoholics, for example, simply decide a life of drinking is no longer worth it, and quit. No long drawn out withdrawal, no professional help—just a sudden realization that drinking is not what they want to do anymore.2
Peele admits, however, that these “moments of truth” can be identified only in retrospect. They cannot easily be predicted, and they cannot be manufactured in a one-two-three-step process. They seem to be the result of several needs and factors coming together in a person’s life at one point so the weight of making the decision becomes compelling. Psychologists have noted that often one need by itself is not enough to stimulate action toward a good goal, but if two or three needs are recognized that could be satisfied by the same goal, change is not only possible but likely. Is it possible that our “bad habit” of prayerlessness can be overcome by a moment of truth?
Alec Rowlands, pastor of First Assembly of God in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had an experience like this with his prayer life. Perhaps some elements of his story will be helpful to those of us still hoping to be struck by a blinding flash of light, or at least have our darkness illumined by the light of a steadily burning candle.
Rowlands wanted revival for his church. He prayed for it. He read and reread the first fifteen chapters of Acts, searching for clues to the first-century church’s secret of Spirit-filled growth. He instituted new programs, and even though the church was growing at a steady 10 percent yearly rate, true revival eluded them. Alec couldn’t help thinking he was doing something wrong.
One night at home, while getting ready for bed, he pulled out a book that had been lying under his bed for six months in his I-must-read-this-one-of-these-days stack. The book was Paul Yonggi Cho’s Successful Home Cell Groups, and Alec decided to read the first chapter to help put himself to sleep: “I started about 10:30 and read the first chapter. Then I decided to read the second chapter, then the third and the fourth. At three in the morning I finally finished the book, and I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. I got up and put in a telephone call to Seoul, Korea.”3
The result was an hour-long conversation with Cho’s private secretary and a plan to attend one of Cho’s leadership seminars the following October.
He thought a good preparation for the trip would be to visit some churches in the States that had experienced revivalistic awakening. One such church was the Church on the Rock in Rockwall, Texas, which in three and a half years grew from a nucleus of twenty people to a congregation of 4,200 using Cho’s principles. It seemed a good place to examine cell-group theory away from the Korean hothouse. So he and his wife flew to Rockwall for a Thursday-to-Sunday visit.
“The church was everything I’d heard it to be,” said Rowlands. “Six hundred people at midweek prayer service. Vibrant, fun worship. Well-organized cell groups and care networks. I learned a great deal. But the key to the visit came from a direction I never expected.
“On Thursday evening the pastor came up to me and said, ‘Why don’t you join us for our prayer meeting tomorrow morning?’ I said ‘Sure,’ and asked when and where. They met at six a.m. I was staying thirty miles away at a motel in Dallas and mentally calculated what time I would have to get up to attend. I decided to go more out of duty than enthusiasm. I was glad I did.
“About seventy early risers met in a small prayer room. We began with a ten-minute look into the Word—an associate pastor gave a study from Ezekiel on God looking for someone to stand in the gap. Then we dismissed and spread throughout the sanctuary for individual prayer. I found a pew and prayed. In five minutes I was done. Everyone else kept going, and I knelt there wondering what to do for the next forty-five minutes. Finally, at seven o’clock we joined in a group prayer and song and dismissed.
“I didn’t feel anything spectacular happen that Friday morning. But all through the rest of that weekend as I asked questions about the church’s ministry, the words I heard were about methods, but the melody was always prayer. The Holy Spirit began to convict me that I was trying to pastor my church in my own efforts and energy, and my commitment to prayer was marginal at best.
“Sunday afternoon the senior pastor, Larry Lea, took me to lunch and asked me what the first thing I was going to do back in Cedar Rapids. I didn’t even have to think about it. ‘I’m going to become a praying pastor,’ I told him. That was what he wanted to hear. It was what they had been subtly trying to tell me all weekend but resisted saying outright because they are always afraid someone will view prayer as just one more magic program to turn a church around instead of the essence of a Christian’s existence. I came back to Cedar Rapids resolved to become God’s man in the gap at this church, knowing that the only way one can become that is to pray with all the force you can muster.
“I came home on a Monday and on a beautiful, sunny Tuesday I cleared my schedule at church, took my Bible and Paul Billheimer’s book, Destined for the Throne, and went to Ellis Park to pray and meditate.4 I sat in a secluded parking spot overlooking the river and read and cried and prayed from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. It was a very mild version of Jacob wrestling with the Lord. The Holy Spirit told me clearly that I was at a crossroads in my ministry. If I would begin to see myself as a praying pastor and lead this church to a ministry of intercessory prayer, he would do abundant things beyond what we could imagine. I read Exodus 16 where the Israelites do battle with the Amalekites, and as long as Moses has his hands lifted in prayer, they win the battle. When he drops them they begin to lose. I decided that would be the paradigm for my ministry. I wanted to be a praying pastor and trust the Lord to bless us here.
“I came down off my mountain and gathered the elders and told them of my decision. I told them I was going to start setting aside large blocks of time for prayer and Bible study, times I wouldn’t be available to anyone. They supported me 100 percent. Next, I presented my experience to the congregation on Sunday morning. I told them I believed prayer was the trigger mechanism for exploding the gospel in our community, both as a fellowship and as a community. They supported me fully.”
Changes began to happen. In order to make Rowlands’s prayer resolve easier, the deacons rented him a small office away from the church that he used for prayer in the mornings. Growth started almost immediately. Church had been averaging about 450 in Sunday morning worship attendance. After twelve months it was running slightly above eight hundred. The intensity of worship increased dramatically.
Individuals began to make commitments to the ministry. Harold Tyler, a silver haired, long-time member of the congregation, walked up to Rowlands after one morning service and with tears in his eyes handed him a check for $40,000. “If things keep on going this way around here, we’re going to need a new building,” he said. “Here’s the down payment.”
Rowlands hopes he is seeing the beginnings of revival. It’s certainly nothing on the scale of what we read about in Finney’s autobiography. Yet something is happening, and the city of Cedar Rapids is aware of it. Can this be a bellwether of what happens when church leaders begin to see themselves as men and women of prayer?
Alec Rowlands himself is cautious in talking about what has happened for fear it will be misinterpreted as egoism or as premature announcement of what he really longs for: fullscale revival. He has seen too many church leaders claim far more for their personal experiences than is justified. So why does he tell his story at all? “Because I can trace all the changes that have taken place at this church and in my life to a moment of truth when I decided to pray. At that moment, I began to see significant growth in my personal Christian walk.”
Alec Rowlands doesn’t claim to be a prophet and admits that his decision to become a praying pastor hasn’t been a cure-all. A large, black bearded man, he speaks with a clipped British accent that exudes honesty and realism. When the phenomenal growth of the first twelve months slackened somewhat, he questioned his continuing commitment—was growth slowing because of the mornings he missed his prayer time or because he wasn’t being sincere enough? Even with his strong commitment to prayer, Alec knows the first thing that gets curtailed when schedule pressures arise is his devotional time. Yet his commitment to seeing himself as a praying pastor has not changed.
Can we learn anything from Rowlands’s experience? Are we witnessing a unique working of the Spirit here, or are there principles we can learn to help us become more effective prayers? Rowlands’s experience is a moment-of-truth decision to commit his life to prayer. Is that the kind of thing that can happen to any of us, and if it can, is there a way to increase the chances of it happening?
Looking back, Rowlands sees four interconnected needs coming together in his decision to become a praying pastor, things that have changed the character of his ministry:
1. He finally, fully connected God’s anointing with prayer. Rowlands’s call to ministry was not an occasional thing. He felt a strong call from very early in his life. He was born and raised in South Africa where his grandfather was a freehold farmer in the late eighteen hundreds. His father and grandfather, a Quaker, did some evangelistic work among the South African Indians, and his dad pastored a Baptist church there for ten years before taking a Full Gospel church in South Africa.
“When my dad took that church, he didn’t know it was corrupt to the core. The Sunday school superintendent was sleeping around, the church treasurer had his hand in the till, and attendance had slipped to fifty. My dad worked at the church for three years and ended up in the hospital with an ulcer.
“When he got out of the hospital, he called the family together for a conference and told us he was ready to quit. He and Mom had decided to go away for a month-long retreat of prayer and fasting. If things didn’t turn around after that, he would resign.
“He came back a month later, and nothing happened for three weeks. Then one Friday night at a youth prayer meeting, God acted. We had a normal time of prayer and then gathered around the front in a circle to conclude the meeting. Those in the circle suddenly felt the power of God in their prayers, and they began to cry and confess sin. I was only twelve and didn’t know what revival was, but when I read today about the Wesleyan revivals, the descriptions fit perfectly what happened in that church. By Sunday the church was full of praying people—the church held one hundred fifty and there were people standing around the walls and sitting in the aisles. Within eighteen months over five hundred people were attending, and we had a new building. For three years the church continued to grow before it leveled off in the early nineteen sixties.
“I trace my call to ministry and my commitment to revival to those early experiences. But somehow over the years I lost the direct connection between revival and prayer. My strong need to see revival here, coupled with that need for prayer forced me to it.”
2. He recognized his need for brokenness. Since his prayer experience, the sense of brokenness, that attitude that Roy Hession in My Calvary Road calls an “indispensable precursor of revival,” is more and more present in his life.5 Hession wrote about the Christian and Missionary Alliance revivals of the late forties and early fifties and concluded that we can’t have revival unless we are willing to admit we are as Ezekiel’s dry bones.
Brokenness is one of the hardest things for church leaders to attain. After all, aren’t we already giving our life to service? Doesn’t the sweat of our church-building and people-nursing count for anything? Yet God is quite clear about the relative values of service versus holiness: “Listen you leaders of Israel.… Listen to the Lord. Hear what he is telling you! I am sick of your sacrifices. Don’t bring me any more of them. I don’t want your fat rams; I don’t want to see the blood from your offerings. Who wants your sacrifices when you have no sorrow for your sins? The incense you bring me is a stench in my nostrils. Your holy celebrations of the new moon and the Sabbath, and your special days for fasting—even your most pious meetings—all are frauds. I want nothing more to do with them.… From now on, when you pray with your hands stretched out to heaven, I won’t look or listen.… Oh, wash yourselves! Be clean! Let me no longer see you doing all these wicked things; quit your evil ways. Learn to do good, to be fair and to help the poor, the fatherless, and widows” (Isa. 1:10-17, tlb).
Brokenness is our recognition of our creaturely status before God. It is the realization that we are not able to make it on our own. It is the beginning of all good things in Christ.
Rowlands traces at least part of his recognition of his brokenness to when he became a head pastor for the first time. “I wasn’t ready for the weight of responsibility that falls to the head man. If the ship had gone down in San Diego where I was an associate, it would have been Dick who took the brunt of it. Here I’m the person responsible. Add to that the strong feeling among the people here that something should be happening in this church soon, and you can see the reasons for the pressures I put on myself. It finally resulted in my recognition that only God can make a ministry work. We only obey him.
“I remember what Moses said: ‘If your presence doesn’t go with us then don’t take us from this place.’ There were times in my ministry where I operated as if I thought, ‘If your presence doesn’t go with us, it doesn’t matter because we can still make it on our own.’ I blush to think about my ministerial arrogance of years past.”
3. He felt a need for a bedrock organizing principle in his life. In addition to ministerial arrogance, Rowlands often felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume and diversity of tasks a pastor must perform in a growing church. This is not an uncommon feeling. When church leaders are asked to name the greatest hindrance to their prayer life, time pressure ranks number one. Rowlands’s longing to simplify his life was always at loggerheads with his internal demands to accomplish great things for God.
Prayer has changed that. Prayer has become the greatest time management “technique” Rowlands has discovered. Prayer has become the standard against which everything else is prioritized. “I don’t feel as if I’m running in a hundred different directions all at once anymore,” he says. “I’m committed to the idea that I can do everything else exactly right and still be dead wrong in God’s eyes if I’m not praying. Prayer has simplified my life, even though I’m doing as much, if not more, than before.”
Several dynamics are at work in Rowlands’s experience. Psychologists have long recognized the need for consistency in our minds between what we believe to be true and what we do.6
For Rowlands, the change has not made him an organized efficiency expert. He still has to be flexible. For example, when his office away from the church had to be given up due to financial pressures at the church, Rowlands blocked time out of his schedule each morning for his devotional life. From 9 a.m. to 10:45 he is not disturbed except for emergencies. Thirty to sixty minutes of that time is spent in personal prayer, the rest in Bible study and clearing his mind.
Rowlands is not fanatic about keeping a minute-by-minute schedule: “The church secretaries are glad we’ve got a computer now because I keep changing my schedule. What I’ve tried to do is prioritize broad responsibilities: prayer first, private study of the Word second, sermon preparation third, corporate prayer fourth, administrative tasks fifth. Every fourth week or so I total up the time I spend in each of those areas and make sure they rank in that order. If they don’t, I make adjustments.”
4. His people relationships have also improved. “One problem in particular had been nagging our staff. I finally decided I couldn’t put off confronting the staffer any longer. Yet on the day I chose for the confrontation, the Lord very clearly told me, ‘I’ll take care of this, Alec.’ Sure enough, that staff member came in and told me he recognized his bad attitude, and we worked it out. It was a beautiful resolution of a problem.
“People in the congregation tell me they’ve sensed a change in me. (It makes me wonder how bad I was before!) They seem more than willing to follow my leadership. They are very warm. I trace my increased sensitivity to the fact that I pray for them more diligently now. You can’t pray for someone and not increase in your appreciation for that person. As Billheimer says in Destined for the Throne: nobody can be saved unless someone is praying for them.
“Since we’ve started our focus on prayer, people come up and say, ‘I’ve never been so hungry to study the Word since we started praying together for that hour at church on Friday morning.’ And people are always talking about how their private family lives have been revitalized through their commitment to prayer. Just last week we had a couple who had been unfaithful to each other come to the church for a marriage rededication ceremony, complete with tuxedos and all. It was a moving experience.
“People on their lunch hour come and pray in the sanctuary. It’s been tremendous. It’s made me feel closer to them and them to me.
“I don’t want to paint an unreal picture. We still don’t have unanimity on every decision. I have come to not expect it. I agree with Peter Drucker that if you have unanimity you haven’t looked at the question accurately. Until you uncover some disagreement and process it, you haven’t looked at the question thoroughly enough. I’ve come to accept the fact of carnality in the congregation. Not everyone is at the same place on their spiritual journeys.
“Perhaps my biggest comfort came from talking to Paul Yonggi Cho on that trip to Seoul. His is a magnificent ministry, but what I remember most is Cho looking at me once during our visit with very tired eyes and saying, ‘You know, some mornings my flesh is just unwilling to endure the hours of work and prayer necessary to be faithful to this ministry. I get very tired. To not see answers to prayer and to still persist—that’s the real test of faith.’ That meant more to me than anything else I saw in Korea.”
On the desk in Alec Rowlands’s office sits a computer terminal where he writes sermons, letters, an occasional article. Leaning next to the desk is an eight-foot shepherd’s staff, used once a year in the youth department’s Christmas pageant. The old and the new symbols of ministry, perhaps.
But what characterizes Alec Rowlands’s ministry more than either of those is a plaque that hangs by the side of his desk, a gift from his father by whose desk it hung for years in South Africa. It reads, “Prayer Changes Things.”
Alec Rowlands pastors the way he does because he believes that is true. His personal decision to be a praying pastor made the difference.
Stanton Peele, “Out of the Habit Trap,” American Health (September/October 1983), 42ff.
Stanton Peele, Love and Addiction (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1975), 36.
Paul Y. Cho and Harold Hostetler, Successful Home Cell Groups (South Plainfield, New Jersey: Bridge Publications, 1981).
Paul Billheimer, Destined for the Throne (Fort Washington, Pennsylvania: Christian Literature Crusade, 1975).
Roy Hession, My Calvary Road (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1978).
Leroy Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, Illinois: Row, Peterson, 1953). If we believe prayer to be a high priority item, for example, and then behave as if a score of other things are more important (by neglecting our prayer time), our satisfaction in doing any of them is greatly diminished. It is as if we become subconsciously disillusioned with our own inconsistency. Few church leaders argue prayer’s primacy; even fewer act as if that’s true. When we do bring our actions in harmony with our convictions, a tremendous weight is lifted from our subconscious which no longer must struggle mightily to balance these two discordant elements.David Johnson, “Attitude Modification Methods,” Helping People Change (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 79.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
