MY KIND OF PRAYER MEETING
"I believe that speaking to God in each other’s presence helped all of us more than if we had spoken to
each other in God’s presence"
What kind of pastor hates prayer meetings?
My kind, I guess.
I became a committed follower of Jesus in the ‘70s and was ordained to the ministry in
1980. And in those dozens of years, I have attended many prayer meetings—hundreds, perhaps even thousands—in my own church and at other churches. And I hated almost every one.
Why? Because most of them were not “prayer meetings.” They were “talk-about-prayer meetings.” You arrive, maybe pour a cup of coffee or tea, and sit with the others in the room. Soon, someone speaks up. He or
she may read from the Bible or may begin the meeting with a prayer. And then the sharing begins. Someone in the group asks everyone to pray for a health concern or a wayward child. Someone else catalogs an array of financial problems and family concerns. Another asks for prayer support in finding a job, and so on.
And the whole time the “sharing” is going on, I am thinking, Let’s
pray, then. But most of the prayer meetings I attended—and even led, at times, to be honest—involved a lot of “sharing prayer concerns” and only a few (often awkward) moments of actual praying. Sometimes the sharing went on so long that the person leading the meeting encouraged attendees to “continue in prayer” after the meeting ended. And, almost invariably, I would leave frustrated, even aggravated.
Don’t get me wrong—I felt true compassion for and empathy with the burdens people shared in those moments, and sometimes even “continued in prayer” beyond the meeting time. But I wondered why we usually settled for “talk-about-prayer meetings” instead of “prayer meetings.”
So one day, as a lead pastor in a growing church, I decided to set an example. We had
always started our weekly staff meetings with prayer, but I took a different tack. I scheduled...READ MORE
