Posts Tagged with Prayer

The phone rings and the caller asks… “I’m looking for a new church and I have a few questions to ask about your church.” I try my best to respond with kindness. I think the caller will soon be asking some questions with sincerity so I try to be as helpful as I can.

I can almost predict the questions. They will go something like this..

• “What time does your worship service start?” I respond by telling them first of all on Sunday mornings we have a bible study for everyone at 9:15 followed by our corporate worship service at 10:30AM
• “What kind of music do you have?” I respond by saying that we strive to use music that speaks of the holiness of God and man’s great need for Him.
• The next set of questions are music related, always….
• “OK, but what kind of music is that? Do you use a hymn book?” my reply, “Yes we sing songs from hymn books.”
• sometimes the question is “do you have a drum set?”

If I make it through the music questions without a dial tone, I’m usually then asked about children and youth ministry.

• “Do you have children’s church?”
• “Do you have an active youth group?”
• “Do you have AWANA?”

These are fair questions. After all the church culture has conditioned us to think like this when we talk about church. As I commence explaining this to the caller about how we do children and youth ministry, I get what I’ve learned to describe as confused silence. It’s a distinct sound on the phone. It’s hard to explain really, but the caller usually comes to some kind of understanding of what I’ve just tried to explain.

But two questions I don’t hear asked by the callers strike me as most complex.

Maybe they don’t ask because they’ve already done their research and visited our website and know the answer to these unasked questions (then again, if they’ve visited our website they would know the answer to most of their questions they’ve been asking.)

These two questions have unique things to say about the nature of the caller, what people have grown to think about the local church, and what the weekly prayer gathering has become.

• First: I’ve am rarely asked what I believe about God. I’ve been asked about what translation I preach from or if I’m a Calvinist or not. I’m usually asked how long the preaching service goes, but rarely (by rarely I mean I can recall one caller a few years ago that inquired beyond preferences of style and length of services) have I ever been asked if I believe in the God of the bible. (It’s likely they have some kind of idea.)
• Second: I can say with a high level of certainty that I have never been asked, “What time do your prayer gatherings start?” But then again, many of the regular attendees couldn’t even answer that question.

I pray for a day when those are the two most asked questions. But so long as church continues to be viewed as a consumer product to be decided by what man thinks as most important then I will continue expecting that these questions will rarely be asked.

So, since you’ve read this far, let me go ahead and let you know what time our prayer gathering starts. Wednesday nights at 6:30PM. We gather, read some Scripture and pray.

What ever happened to the gathering of the saints called ‘the prayer meeting’?

Many (I should really say most) in the church in America would be quick to blame the downfall of America on the removal of prayer from public school. I think there are legitimate and historic parallels to how America was in general before 1963 (50 years ago) and how things are today. But what would a believer from another country think has happened to prayer at the church house if he were looking for a place and time to gather to pray tonight?

When I examine the attendance at nearly any prayer meeting in many churches, it might even appear as if freedom to gather to pray has been removed from the church house. Not from the state, not that it’s illegal, not that there is danger of attendees losing property if they show up to pray, it’s really like many professing believers have abandoned this beautiful privilege altogether and replaced it with Wednesday night school sponsored events, network and/or cable programming, or the internet forum debating the doctrines of God while we disobey His command to be devoted to prayer.

The western church has largely replaced her mid-week prayer meeting with burdensome programming that puts a strain on church budgets and performance expectations on staff members if numbers drop from the event.

If there is anything that is most alarming to me since the supreme court abolished state sponsored prayer in 1963 is that the church has exchanged the power of God for a fan powered bounce house.

Did you hear what I just said? Not about the bounce house; What evangelical Christian would want a state sponsored prayer anyway? Isn’t that part of why America became America, so we would not be forced to participate in state sponsored religion?

Don’t get me wrong; it is a tragedy that the American public rarely humbles themselves for prayer. That 1963 supreme court ruling has been a battleground issue for many conservative Americans while at the same time the church house began hearing crickets during the prayer meetings of the free church.

American Christians have forgotten to anticipate God’s pouring out of His Spirit among us. He may just decide to pour out His Spirit tonight for the last time in our land… You don’t want to miss that, do you?

Oh, if only God’s people would humble themselves…