Why we canned our Prayer Meeting

 

Sometimes churches are in danger of becoming museums or mausoleums rather than a place where the life of God fills and spills out of. We get so caught up with defending and propagating our systems, our “holy cows”, “it’s just how we’ve always done it” way of thinking that we become not so different to the manufacturers of caskets who spend thousands of rands and countless hours in fashioning out elaborate handles, felt inner linings and ornamental outer decorations that we forget that all that these glorified boxes are doing is containing death.

 

Our homes can become like this as well. We break the bank in buying the new flat-screen, the latest leather lazy-boy, lavish new carpets and mini fridges fully stocked and the only people who get to enjoy them are people who have removed their shoes at the door, who place their glass on a coaster and who make polite conversation around why we should upgrade our hi-fi system. They look good, but are lifeless in terms of kingdom benefit.

Same with our cars.

Same with our churches.

A few years ago, we at Life Changers decided that it was time to take out our shot-gun and get the braai ready as we prepared to take down one of christendoms plumpest holy cows. The prayer meeting.  Phrases such as “you judge the size of your church by the size of your prayer meeting”, “your prayer meeting is the engine room of your church” and “we’ll cancel Sunday before we cancel our prayer meeting” made us all weary to ever even consider tampering with this midweek meeting. Sure we could shake things up every now and again (pray in pairs and not just in groups of four or five) but this was one closed-handed issue that seemed as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar itself.

 

But after quite a dry spell of poorly attended (by our people and of faith and life) Tuesday prayer meetings , we courageously pulled the plug on this meeting to the sound-track of anger and shock from many voices at home and from a far. But just to show you that we are not heretical, and that this was a faith inspired assassination and not just because of a lack of attendance, here below are some of the reasons why we canned our midweek prayer meeting.

We want to be less busy

-We gather on a Sunday and on a Wednesday already on top of other social and outreach moments. We never want to be a busy church that is so consumed with meetings that it forsakes what the church should really be doing. We wanted to free up an extra night for people to be with their families, to join a tennis club or to invite other people over to their homes.

We want to be hungrier

-The same people at prayer meeting were the same people at everything else. And they were tired. Doing away with the prayer meeting got us thinking about how we could get more people praying. We had to ask ourselves the hard questions that we had so often just skirted around with dogmatic statements about prayer that we had just inherited.

We want revival

-Probably our greatest trump card for drawing the season of a formalised midweek prayer meeting was because we heard God say so.  We couldn’t help get away from the fact that even though we had an hour dedicated to corporate prayer each week, we were not a praying church. Ever since we closed it down, people are gathering off their own bats, in smaller informal gatherings, to pray and worship together, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. Since Tuesday nights of prayer came to an end, we have begun a journey of corporately fasting and praying in unique ways that have released the life of God like we haven’t seen before. Prayer is starting to become the language of our home groups. God spoke, we acted, and life has come back to our prayer expression as a community.

 

We don’t have the full answers. We are still learning. We might even go back to a weekly prayer meeting into the future. God will highlight his strategy as we continue to pray...

All we keep reminding ourselves about is that our God is not a God of a set of formulas that need to be followed for his life to come. We love to pray because it helps serve as a catalyst to seeing the life of God released more and more in our lives. We don’t want to be so present and pursuing the right ingredients, that we actually end up missing His presence. We applied this to our prayer lens. We want this to be the measuring stick of everything in our lives. 

 

A coffin has a body, but contains no life.

 

Unity (the introduction)

Unity is an interesting word.

Worth very little on the scrabble board, this 5 letter noun is thrown around often in political and church circles with such vehemence and passion that an unobservant outsider would think it is something we have waxed. Nestled near the back end of our scant used leather bound dictionaries, we often find ourselves spouting off some trite comment about unity (or lack there-of) in the church or amongst the churches and denominations as if we have the clarity and insight into it's true definition.


Psalm.133 "God commands a blessing when the brothers dwell in unity" is recited on mass by prayer groups the world over. As soon as we split up into groups of 4 or 5 (for this is how the Lord taught us to pray), it is worth taking the plunge and praying this verse upfront because if you hang back at all it will be snatched up quickly by another before you can say John.3:16.

(Quick side note on prayer meetings, always take the lead and pray the go-to scriptures early on and then settle back into the “Yes Lord’s” while the others fumble about, giving you time to scour the concordance at the back of your ESV (NIV is SO last year) for some more verses on that evenings theme. Useful tip I know. You’re welcome. But I digress.)

Over the next few blogs I am going to add to the vociferous commentary on unity by taking a few snapshots at what we as the wider body gather together around. Denominations, missional groupings, teams, teams within teams, circles, gatherings, or whatever the latest buzz-word is are coming together in a continuing pursuit for a truer and richer understanding of “unity”, with different ideologies, agendas and issues being thrown into the recipe of these collaborations.

 Can we learn from our mistakes or are we bound to just repeating them with just a different coat of terminology and slogans?

The next few blogs will be fun.

And I promise I won’t use Psalm.133

We Are The Church (Red Week #2)

Here is how Red Week went, by the numbers:

5- the number of days (various nights and mornings) that people abandoned their television schedules, their evenings at home, their Saturday lie-in, their Friday date-nights, and instead donned their Red Week T-shirts, got their hands and feet dirty and pursued what a church could look like when it started behaving like The Church.

+200- total number of different volunteers over the course of the week

176- number of one of a kind Red Week T-Shirts sold. That means I still have 24 left. Perfect stocking fillers for Christmas. Just saying.

3000- number of sandwiches (brown bread if anyone is asking) made and handed out. 2000 went to a pre-primary, a primary and a high school in DuNoon. The rest was delivered to individuals in the wider community of DuNoon during our Saturday morning Soup Kitchen.

+50- number of police and firemen we blessed and visited on the Friday evening.

+100- sick people visited and prayed for on the Wednesday night at the government hospital in Tygerberg. Emotional and faith stirring evening that not many will soon forget.

 2500- the collective age (or somewhere in that region) of the elderly folk that we visited, loved on and prayed for in the old age home in Melkbos.

40- the amount of people who were available on a Thursday morning. Apologies to all bosses for the numerous employees playing hooky that day.

Countless- number of lives that were impacted and changed through this week. Whether it was by making a sandwich or receiving one, visiting or being visited, life can not be the same again.


The Shepherd in Luke.15 left the 99 and went after the 1. His heart is our heart. Red Week, and The Church for that matter, should never measure its success on mere numbers. May our ongoing pursuit of being His hands and feet always be about the individual and not just an accumulation of figures to bandy about. His economics are never like ours.