Thoughts on Prayer Meetings
If I were to ask the average church goer what he or she thought the most important ministry of a local church might be I suppose I would get all sorts of answers. Some would say ministry to children. Others would say ministry to the elderly. Some would advocate for ministry to teenagers while others would espouse reaching young families. Others would get closer to the center and say preaching, discipleship, or evangelism are most important. Certainly, these latter things matter more than the former. In fact, we would not be functioning as a healthy church if such things like preaching, discipleship, and evangelism were ignored. But if I pressed us further and further into the very core of a church’s life, and demanded a clear, simple view of the church’s most important ministry, how long might it take for us to realize the answer?
The answer is as obvious as it is true: the most important thing a church can do is pray.
“Wait a minute, pastor,” some would say. “How can prayer be more important than preaching or evangelism?” The question is not unmerited nor unheard of, but it does reveal our shallow understanding of prayer and the necessity of prayer meetings.
No ministry of the church, even the good ones like preaching, will bring the fruit of heaven if they are not of God. Men may stand and preach, members may go forth with the gospel, older women may train the younger women, but if God does not bless it than it will be of little more than human efforts done with a Christian spin. In other words, we are wholly, entirely, and comprehensively dependent upon God. This reality is expressed in no better way, and this need is met in no other way, than in the church’s prayer meeting. For prayer, at its most basic level, is the expression and embrace of our dependence on and faith in God.
And yet, most pastors lament the attendance of prayer meetings. They are, in my experience, the worst attended meetings of the church even though they are the most important.
The reasons for this abound: there is no structure in such meetings, I'm not sure how to pray, I can pray at home, they are boring, they are filled with gossip, they are hard to attend, I just want Bible study, I’m out of peanut butter, and so on. The truth is more simple than all of that. Too many simply don’t realize the power of praying together with the church.
Such views coupled with the ever-increasing pressure to attract crowds has led churches to do away with the prayer meeting entirely. It has been replaced with other ministries - much to the detriment of those ministries. Apart from the inherit blessings of a prayer meeting - the example of others praying, learning how to pray, communing together before the throne of God, care for one another, learning of prayer priorities - there is no single voice of God's people crying out for His help and blessing on the ministries that we do have if there is no prayer meeting.
In Spurgeon’s day (if you are unsure of who Charles Spurgeon is then google him), his Metropolitan Tabernacle in London had hundreds attending the weekly prayer meeting. Not only were the members of the church coming together to pray and seek God, but their prayers were so powerful that unbelievers were being saved during the prayer meeting! In fact, it was this commitment to prayer that Spurgeon credited for the impact of the Tabernacle’s ministry. A Wesleyan minister once said that he was never more surprised in his life than when he dropped into the Tabernacle, and found the ground-floor and part of the gallery filled at a prayer-meeting. He believed that such a thing was almost without parallel in London, and that it accounted for the success of the ministry.
Once, Spurgeon was asked about the success of his ministry and the cause of it. After a brief pause he responded, “My people pray for me.”
Prayer is what gives life to the rest of a church’s ministries. All our work is done in vain if God isn’t filling it. This filling and enabling of God comes as the people of God plead for His blessing and work to be done in and through them. If a church is to be truly engaged in the work of heaven then it must be a church built first and foremost on its knees in prayer. Until then, it may work, but not do heaven’s work.
Speaking to his congregation, Spurgeon once said, “It feels my heart with gladness, and my eyes with tears of joy, to see so many hundreds of persons gathered together at what is sometimes wickedly described as ‘only a prayer meeting.’ It is good for us to draw nigh unto God in prayer, and specially good to make up a great congregation for such a purpose. We have attended little prayer meetings of four or five, and we have been glad to be there, for we had the promise of our Lord’s presence; but our minds are grieved to see so little attention given to united prayer by many of our churches. We have longed to see great numbers of God’s people coming up to pray, and now we enjoy this sight. Let us praise God that it is so. How could we expect a blessing if we were too idle to ask for it? How could we look for a Pentecost if we never met with one accord, in one place, to wait upon the Lord? Brethren, we shall never see much change for the better in our churches in general till the prayer meeting occupies a higher place in the esteem of Christians.”
