Practical Alternative to Prayer Meetings

Is this four prayer meetings every day? Imagine how much they could be doing in the community to be an answer to prayer!

After we recognize the problems of prayer meetings, we can start taking practical steps to help people better understand what prayer is, how to pray, and how to become answers to our own prayers.

Cancel Prayer Meetings

You may want to cancel all your church prayer meetings, or at least the regularly-scheduled prayer meetings. There is nothing wrong with having a time of corporate prayer on an occasional basis in response to a deep need or issue that is facing the entire congregation. But a regularly scheduled prayer meeting is most often unhealthy for the life of the church, and leads to many of the problems mentioned above. So cancel it.

But this does not mean we cancel prayer. Not at all!

Don’t Cancel Prayer

With some targeted teaching on prayer, and modeling of a healthy prayer life, pastors and church leaders can actually unleash the power of prayer within their congregation. Rather than meet simply to pray, meet to go serve the community, and before you go, spend a few minutes in prayer for eyes to see and ears to hear the needs and issues that people in the neighborhood are dealing with.

By Jeremy Myers Filed Under Close Your Church for Good, Prayer Written on December 9, 2011

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Bad Habits from Prayer Meetings

As we conclude this chapter from Close Your Church for Good called “Let Prayer Meetings Cease” I have two recommendations for prayer meetings. The first one is below, the second will get posted tomorrow.

Look at all of these prayer meetings! Would there be a better way for these people to spend there time?

Prayer Meetings Teach Bad Prayer Habits

First, we must recognize that most of the bad habits that people use in prayer are learned not from Scripture, but from prayer meetings. Scripture teaches us that God is a friend and a Father, there by our side, wanting to have an ongoing conversation with us about what is important to Him and what is important to us. We can talk to Him as we would talk to any other person.

But the things we learn in prayer meetings would never occur to someone who had not ever attended a prayer meeting. It is in prayer meetings where we learn that prayer must be said in a certain location, using certain terminology and language, and sitting, or standing, or kneeling in a certain posture. It is in prayer meetings that people learn the repetitive use of God’s name and certain phrases and to use 1611 King James English.

By Jeremy Myers Filed Under Close Your Church for Good, Prayer Written on December 8, 2011

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Ask, Seek, Knock

Jesus taught us to be answers to our own prayers when, in the Sermon on the Mount, He told His disciples, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (Matt 7:7-8).

When reading this passage, most people think that Jesus was saying the same thing three different times: pray, and your prayer will get answered. But there may be a better way of understanding the words of Jesus.

Jesus is not simply telling His disciples to pray, but is giving them instructions on how to see answers to their own prayers.

Ask

First, Jesus tells them to ask. This is the prayer part. It is taking our requests and needs to God, and presenting them before Him. It is not that He is unaware of our needs, for He knows what we need before we ask Him (Matt 6:8).

By Jeremy Myers Filed Under Close Your Church for Good, Soteriology, Work Written on December 7, 2011

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Faith Alone is Useless

James 2:14-21 has caused lots of problems in the church over the centuries. With our preoccupation with how to get to heaven when we die, we think that when James says, “Faith alone cannot save him, can it?” James is talking about eternal life and how to get to heaven when we die.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

The Book of James

The letter of James is one of the most practical books in the entire New Testament. It is not an evangelistic tract telling people how to get to heaven when they die. Instead, it is a book about how to love and serve one another in the church. It is practical book about money, favoritism, gossip, and meeting each other’s needs. Nowhere in the entire book is James concerned about trying to determine who has eternal life and who does not. This includes James 2.

James 2:14-21

When we read James 2 with this in mind, we see immediately what James is concerned about. There are brothers and sisters in the church who have need of food and daily clothes. There are others within the church who could meet those needs by providing food and clothes, but instead, they tell these needy brethren, “I have faith that God will provide for you.” In modern church lingo, we say, “I’ll pray for you.”

By Jeremy Myers Filed Under Close Your Church for Good, Mission, Prayer, Work Written on December 6, 2011

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Answer Your Own Prayer

In a previous post, we have seen that work and prayer are both ways of accomplishing God’s will in the world.

This close connection between work and prayer as means of accomplishing God’s will in the world helps give us direction for how to see answers to our prayers, and how to go about accomplishing God’s will in this world.

Sometimes I think we confuse work and prayer, and we pray when we should be working, and we work when we should be praying. There have been times in Christian history when the church has focused more on work than prayer, but I think that for the past fifty years or so, the church has focused more on prayer than work.

And this brings us back to the subject of prayer meetings. It is far more popular in many churches to get together and pray about a need in the community than it is to get together and actually do something about a need in the community. Though prayer is a form of work, we must not think that prayer is a substitute for work.

Yet this is often what gets implicitly taught in many of our church prayer meetings.
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