We have witnessed, if not pulled off, a revolution over the past forty years in how the church gathers together to worship. Most of this has been driven by a radical shift in understanding the purpose of the Lord’s Day gathering. Once this meeting became more about attracting and winning the lost we grew increasingly attuned to the mindset of those outside the kingdom. What we soon discovered, however, was that these changes attracted more of the found than the lost. The great bulk of worshippers in mega-churches across the country came not from the world but from older, smaller churches. In short, their services are designed for unbelievers but attract believers.
Public prayer, I suspect, is profoundly uncomfortable for the so called “seeker.” They can participate in every other aspect of a worship service. They can sing along, or at least listen to the music. They can hear the sermon. They can greet those around them. But prayer is actually that time in the worship service where we draw near to the living God. We are all at our most vulnerable. It is one thing to sway to the music with eyes focussed on a distant horizon to blend in with everyone else. It is another altogether to try to fool the living God.
What an irony that worship services designed to look spontaneous, informal, unplanned, sincere have minimized those times in the service when we are exactly that. We want the feeling of intense emotion, without the scariness of actual intense emotion.
Prayer is also that time in the service when we are tightly bound together. I once had a congregant ask me over lunch, “Why don’t you trust us to pray?” My brow furrowed, and I confessed, “I don’t know what you mean.” He explained, “You know, how we have prayers written out in the order of worship, that we read together, because you don’t trust us.” I smiled and explained, “It has nothing to do with trust. We read those prayers together (and we had plenty of prayer time without read prayers) so that we can pray together. It is all of us, coming before the throne together. It’s no different than when we sing the Apostle’s Creed together.”
The short answer is far simpler. We don’t spend much time together in prayer during our worship services because we don’t value prayer. It’s the same reason we are weak in praying alone. We find prayer impractical, tiresome, expendable. Whereas Jesus, and the church through history has found it practical, invigorating and invaluable. Our failure to devote time to prayer is just one more sign of our failure to value the One to whom we pray. We may speak and sing about Him. But we rarely speak and sing to Him.
I don’t have a solution to this problem. Except for the one solution to every problem. What we need to do is repent and believe the gospel.
This is the forty-second installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we at Sovereign Grace Fellowship meet this Sunday April 27 at 10:30 AM at our new location, our beautiful farm at 11281 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us. Also note that tonight we continue our Bible study on issues dividing the church, tonight considering politics.