The following is an excerpt from “A Praying Church,” by Paul Miller, published by Modern Reformation. This excerpt is part 4 of a four-part series in which Miller addresses the importance of a praying church. Here, Miller writes about what a praying community looks like.
Read Part 1: Understanding the Problem of Prayerlessness in Church Leadership
Read Part 2: Prayer and the Spirit
Read Part 3: History of a Praying Church
So what does a praying community look like?
Let me give you several case studies interspersed with seven principles of beginning a praying community.
After Dad’s visit to L’Abri, he realized how prayerless his ministry was. He was particularly bothered that in the churches he’d pastored, prayer meetings had floundered. He wondered, “Who killed the prayer meeting?” Then he realized, “I killed the prayer meeting!” How? By talking too much. In other words, his unbalanced training (study of the word but not study of prayer) led to good teaching eating up space for good praying. So, Dad began to pray at prayer meetings!
Starting to pray isn’t much different from throwing a soccer ball out to a bunch of people who’ve never played soccer before, telling them the rules, and then saying, “go play.” It’s a mess! You need to endure, to push through that early stage of floundering to learn how to pray together.
In the fall of 1970, we saw the Spirit begin to move in new ways. Revival broke out in our little church. Prayer meetings and Bible studies were jammed with hippies, drug addicts, and all sorts of people. Then in 1973, when Dad started New Life Church, he began with prayer. First the prayer meeting, then the church. For the next twenty years, the heart of the church was a four-hour weekly prayer meeting, which was led by the pastors, but anyone could attend. That was the engine that drove a sustained renewal that lasted over fifteen years.
So before you launch something, take time to ask God for wisdom, grace, and humility. If I have concerns about a staff member, I will quietly begin to pray for them—sometimes for months—before I speak to them. Often, I see God begin to do things without me saying anything.
Dad’s decision to pray at prayer meetings was the outworking of his realization that the Spirit, not his teaching or ministry, was at the center of the church. He decreased so that the Spirit, who brings us the risen Christ, could increase.
So what happens when you pray as a community? If I had to summarize it in one word, I’d say “surprise.” Unexpected things happen. Paul mentions this as he closes his prayer in Ephesians: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us…” (Eph. 3:20).
One evening in 1973 at a local church, Dad said, “The gospel can change anyone.” After a psychiatrist in the congregation challenged Dad, he went home wondering, “Do I really believe the gospel can change anyone?” He decided to find the toughest people in Philadelphia to see if the gospel could change them.
And who was tougher than the Warlocks motorcycle gang? He knew they hung out at a local ice cream stand, so he went there with one of his seminary students. He bought an ice cream cone and walked over to a gang of rowdy teenagers who regularly gathered there to drink and share drugs.
With ice cream dripping down his hand, Dad gave one of his memorable opening lines, “I’m Reverend Miller. Are there any Warlocks here?” When they started taunting him, Dad made it worse by saying, “Actually, I’m Dr. Miller.” Just as the mocking was increasing, a tough-looking red-head—a thief, drug addict, and an alcoholic—said to the gang, “Shut up. I know this guy. He picked me up hitchhiking. We should listen to him.”
His name was Bob Heppe. Over the next six months, Dad befriended Bob, even listening to his drunken calls in the middle of the night. Dad patiently pointed Bob back again and again to Christ. Bob now serves as a missionary to South Asians in London.
At my own ministry, “seeJesus,” the life of our mission orbits around our prayer meetings. We have three prayer meetings a week for our twenty-five staff members: thirty minutes on Monday and Wednesday, an hour on Thursday, and two hours on Friday. That comes to four hours of prayer each week. It’s open-mic time for the first fifteen minutes, when anyone can ask prayer for anything, and then we get into the work of prayer. Those meetings are the center of our life together. It’s where individual burdens become everyone’s burdens.
A kind of divine community forms around so much time in concentrated prayer. We are all aware the Spirit is the One who does all the big things (and many of the small ones) in our work. So corporately, we are frequently celebrating surprise—the unexpected activity of the Spirit.
Because prayer feels spiritual, as opposed to concrete, we tend not to improve in our praying skills the way we would in writing or soccer. Since it’s “the Spirit,” it is supposed to just flow naturally, but there is so much to learn about praying together. Here are some of the problems of prayer meetings:
I’m not shy about coaching our prayer meetings, suggesting ways we can pray together more effectively. It’s taken time for us to not just have a jumble of prayer requests, but to listen to one another as we pray and build on one another’s prayers—almost like a conversation.
This last point is the most important: praying together is powerful because it reenacts the dying and rising of Jesus. First, the dying. I began to pray regularly for my family twenty-five years ago because I realized that my parenting wasn’t creating Christ in them. I had failed. My sense of my own weakness over the next ten years grew as God took me through relentless suffering.
When I started seeJesus, I was weak in every area of my life. Now, nineteen years later, we are still underfunded, understaffed, and overwhelmed. Taking four hours out of the work week to pray weakens us even more because it gives us less time to work!
But we pray because we are weak. We don’t get stuck in weakness, however, because weak- ness is the launchpad for resurrection power. That’s Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 1–2. The Corinthians are doing church badly, because they don’t realize that their weakness reenacts the dying of Christ, which leaves space for the Spirit to do wonders in their midst. Dying is the launchpad for rising. When Paul mentions the Spirit, he always mentions one of these five words: power, life, hope, knowledge, and glory. The Spirit brings power and wisdom, which created new life and glory, filling us with hope.
In our little mission, we experience these real-time resurrections from the Spirit almost continuously. We’ve seen God work in so many ways that we are all aware the Spirit is at the center, working in response to our prayers to the Father. When you are aware of this as a praying community, it fuels itself. Answered prayer creates faith, which in turn encourages more prayer.
That’s why Paul and Silas prayed and sang in prison. They were anticipating and reenacting the resurrection of Jesus. The Spirit worked through the earthquake, overturning the false narrative of Paul and Silas as troublemakers. Their little praying community first transformed the prison and then impacted the whole city of Philippi. They didn’t just survive in a world where they had become powerless; God went beyond all that they could ask or think.
The post A Praying Church Part 4: Discovering a Praying Church appeared first on Focus on the Family.
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Read Part 1: Understanding the Problem of Prayerlessness in Church Leadership
Read Part 2: Prayer and the Spirit
Read Part 3: History of a Praying Church
So what does a praying community look like?
Let me give you several case studies interspersed with seven principles of beginning a praying community.
1. You Learn to Pray by Praying
After Dad’s visit to L’Abri, he realized how prayerless his ministry was. He was particularly bothered that in the churches he’d pastored, prayer meetings had floundered. He wondered, “Who killed the prayer meeting?” Then he realized, “I killed the prayer meeting!” How? By talking too much. In other words, his unbalanced training (study of the word but not study of prayer) led to good teaching eating up space for good praying. So, Dad began to pray at prayer meetings!
Starting to pray isn’t much different from throwing a soccer ball out to a bunch of people who’ve never played soccer before, telling them the rules, and then saying, “go play.” It’s a mess! You need to endure, to push through that early stage of floundering to learn how to pray together.
2. Begin Everything with Prayer
In the fall of 1970, we saw the Spirit begin to move in new ways. Revival broke out in our little church. Prayer meetings and Bible studies were jammed with hippies, drug addicts, and all sorts of people. Then in 1973, when Dad started New Life Church, he began with prayer. First the prayer meeting, then the church. For the next twenty years, the heart of the church was a four-hour weekly prayer meeting, which was led by the pastors, but anyone could attend. That was the engine that drove a sustained renewal that lasted over fifteen years.
So before you launch something, take time to ask God for wisdom, grace, and humility. If I have concerns about a staff member, I will quietly begin to pray for them—sometimes for months—before I speak to them. Often, I see God begin to do things without me saying anything.
3. Praying As a Community Decenters Us and Makes Space for the Spirit of Jesus to Lead
Dad’s decision to pray at prayer meetings was the outworking of his realization that the Spirit, not his teaching or ministry, was at the center of the church. He decreased so that the Spirit, who brings us the risen Christ, could increase.
4. The Spirit Works “Outside the Box” of Mere Management, of What Is Humanly Possible
So what happens when you pray as a community? If I had to summarize it in one word, I’d say “surprise.” Unexpected things happen. Paul mentions this as he closes his prayer in Ephesians: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us…” (Eph. 3:20).
One evening in 1973 at a local church, Dad said, “The gospel can change anyone.” After a psychiatrist in the congregation challenged Dad, he went home wondering, “Do I really believe the gospel can change anyone?” He decided to find the toughest people in Philadelphia to see if the gospel could change them.
And who was tougher than the Warlocks motorcycle gang? He knew they hung out at a local ice cream stand, so he went there with one of his seminary students. He bought an ice cream cone and walked over to a gang of rowdy teenagers who regularly gathered there to drink and share drugs.
With ice cream dripping down his hand, Dad gave one of his memorable opening lines, “I’m Reverend Miller. Are there any Warlocks here?” When they started taunting him, Dad made it worse by saying, “Actually, I’m Dr. Miller.” Just as the mocking was increasing, a tough-looking red-head—a thief, drug addict, and an alcoholic—said to the gang, “Shut up. I know this guy. He picked me up hitchhiking. We should listen to him.”
His name was Bob Heppe. Over the next six months, Dad befriended Bob, even listening to his drunken calls in the middle of the night. Dad patiently pointed Bob back again and again to Christ. Bob now serves as a missionary to South Asians in London.
5. The Community Orbits around Its Prayer Meetings
At my own ministry, “seeJesus,” the life of our mission orbits around our prayer meetings. We have three prayer meetings a week for our twenty-five staff members: thirty minutes on Monday and Wednesday, an hour on Thursday, and two hours on Friday. That comes to four hours of prayer each week. It’s open-mic time for the first fifteen minutes, when anyone can ask prayer for anything, and then we get into the work of prayer. Those meetings are the center of our life together. It’s where individual burdens become everyone’s burdens.
A kind of divine community forms around so much time in concentrated prayer. We are all aware the Spirit is the One who does all the big things (and many of the small ones) in our work. So corporately, we are frequently celebrating surprise—the unexpected activity of the Spirit.
6. Think and Coach the Prayer Meeting
Because prayer feels spiritual, as opposed to concrete, we tend not to improve in our praying skills the way we would in writing or soccer. Since it’s “the Spirit,” it is supposed to just flow naturally, but there is so much to learn about praying together. Here are some of the problems of prayer meetings:
- People jump around from topic to topic, not paying attention to one another’s prayers.
- People pray only for felt needs, such as medical problems.
- Oversharing of prayer requests results in too little time to pray.
- Some key people don’t attend prayer time. You feel like you are all alone.
I’m not shy about coaching our prayer meetings, suggesting ways we can pray together more effectively. It’s taken time for us to not just have a jumble of prayer requests, but to listen to one another as we pray and build on one another’s prayers—almost like a conversation.
7. Praying Together Reenacts the Dying and Rising of Jesus
This last point is the most important: praying together is powerful because it reenacts the dying and rising of Jesus. First, the dying. I began to pray regularly for my family twenty-five years ago because I realized that my parenting wasn’t creating Christ in them. I had failed. My sense of my own weakness over the next ten years grew as God took me through relentless suffering.
When I started seeJesus, I was weak in every area of my life. Now, nineteen years later, we are still underfunded, understaffed, and overwhelmed. Taking four hours out of the work week to pray weakens us even more because it gives us less time to work!
But we pray because we are weak. We don’t get stuck in weakness, however, because weak- ness is the launchpad for resurrection power. That’s Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 1–2. The Corinthians are doing church badly, because they don’t realize that their weakness reenacts the dying of Christ, which leaves space for the Spirit to do wonders in their midst. Dying is the launchpad for rising. When Paul mentions the Spirit, he always mentions one of these five words: power, life, hope, knowledge, and glory. The Spirit brings power and wisdom, which created new life and glory, filling us with hope.
In our little mission, we experience these real-time resurrections from the Spirit almost continuously. We’ve seen God work in so many ways that we are all aware the Spirit is at the center, working in response to our prayers to the Father. When you are aware of this as a praying community, it fuels itself. Answered prayer creates faith, which in turn encourages more prayer.
That’s why Paul and Silas prayed and sang in prison. They were anticipating and reenacting the resurrection of Jesus. The Spirit worked through the earthquake, overturning the false narrative of Paul and Silas as troublemakers. Their little praying community first transformed the prison and then impacted the whole city of Philippi. They didn’t just survive in a world where they had become powerless; God went beyond all that they could ask or think.
The post A Praying Church Part 4: Discovering a Praying Church appeared first on Focus on the Family.
Continue reading...