THE IMPORTANTCE OF PRAYER

In his book “Restoration: A Direction for Prayer” Kjell Sjoberg says “How has it become possible for such a decline to happen in the church? It is because churches have become activity houses instead of prayer houses; everything happens except prayer”.

In my 28 years in Australia, I have found this to be true. The last thing that most churches do is pray. One of the churches I was part of lost its minister and appointed a new one. The first thing he did was to stop all meetings for prayer.

Most of the churches had their usual Sunday morning and occasionally evening meetings. They had their meetings for woman, young people, and children. They had their church camps, youth camps, children’s outings, social events, bible studies, midweek home meetings and committee meetings. In the midst of all this activity you might have five, 10, 15 or 30 minutes of prayer, which in comparison to the hours that were devoted to activities that did not involve prayer, it was usually infitesimal.

Only one church had anything like serious prayer with two hours on Saturday evening for men once a month and that happened because I asked for it.

Contrast that with the New Testament Church, who prayed DAILY. Not for themselves and their own needs but for the spread of the gospel throughout the world. That should not surprise us as they were prepared to die for the privilege and some did.

A survey by the Barna Christian research group in the USA showed that the average pastor prays five minutes a day. No wonder churches are activity centres not houses of prayer. If the leadership does not pray, why would the membership.

Of course, prayer is not popular because it is admitting that we need God. Far better to employ a gifted communicator and motivator who can inspire the audience. With someone like that, who needs God? He can put together all the programmes we need to attract the middle class couch potato Christians who have the money.

With enough money, we can build impressive looking meeting places, which are not scriptural, put on impressive sounding song sessions, provide impressive and comfortable seating arrangements and install the latest high tech equipment to produce professional quality CDs and DVDs of our professional output.

The end result of all this activity is that we tend to spend most of what we generate on ourselves to make us feel good and leave meetings with a warm, fuzzy feeling, often describes as the moving of the Spirit. In fact 95% of it is spent on ourselves research shows.

Contrast that with the New Testament Church and we find that they had no buildings, only homes, no paid priests or pastors, only the priesthood of all believers, a caring community that looked after those in need and that devoted itself to the ‘go’ of the gospel to ensure as many people as possible heard about Jesus the Messiah.

It was a missional church that did not spend any time naval gazing. For them the time was short so there was only one objective…to make themselves available to the Holy Spirit for signs, wonders and the preaching of the gospel.

The sacred and the secular were one and the same thing. Whether they were in the home, the market place, the prison, before the Jewish rulers, the first thing was to preach the gospel. If they died as a result so be it.

Obviously they took Jesus words and commands seriously. My impression is that the modern day church does its best to explain them away so that we can avoid commitment at all costs.

If it wants to prove me wrong there is one simple way it can do this and that is to make sure amidst all its activity there is more time committed to praying that all the other programmes put together. Then and only then will they become a powerful testimony to the risen Lord.