I've been thinking all day about what I have wanted to share with you today and I finally decided that I want to share with you my discouragement about how few Christians in America, that I know of, really pray.
Today is Thursday, and usually every Thursday I meet with a small group of people at my church for a 10 AM prayer meeting. Sometimes we have 5 people and other times there may be just 2 of us. This morning, the prayer meeting didn't take place because the "regulars" who show up all had other things to do. And admittedly, I called the church office late to tell them I was going to be late getting there because I was tied up doing an interview for my podcast.
I was told that no one was there yet and asked to be called back in a few minutes with the verdict if whether or not I should go to the church for the churches weekly prayer meeting.
About ten minutes later I got a call from my pastor who informed me that the prayer meeting was off. And he was one of the people who is usually at the meeting. I told him I understood and that I could pray at home and God would still hear me.
But really, is that the point? No, the point of a church prayer meeting is for people in the church to come together and pray. I pray alone all of the time so it's not like there is something very special about that. But what is special is when believers take the time and make it a priority to attend a prayer meeting.
And I guess it's hard for me because I spend a lot of time writing about persecuted Christians all over the world whose number one request is that we PRAY for them. Yet, all too often, due to our schedules and what we feel is important here in the US churches, prayer is dismissed, cancelled or just all talk and no action. In other words, we really don't practice what we preach about all the time.
In fact, a few years ago I did a survey at a former church and I was trying to compare whether television had an impact on one's spiritual life. I was in school at the time and doing this research project for a class. Anyway, I compared television viewing with the spiritual disciplines of bible reading, prayer, scripture memorization, fellowship, worship activities and evangelism. When I got back the results from the congregants, what I discovered was that about 80% of the respondents claimed to have a thriving prayer life on a daily basis.
The interesting thing however, was that no one include fasting in that equation.
And in the end I found that what helped make a Christian a spiritually mature person didn't have anything to with television viewing, rather it had to do with how much time a person engages in spiritual growth activities.
And my guess is that if I had asked specifically about attending a church prayer meeting on a weekly basis the result would've been close to zero if not zero. I think this is an extremely sad spiritual state of affairs, especially since persecuted Christians want our prayers and usually that's all they ask for.
Yet, we in America for the most part do not appear to be committed to praying with one another, and I believe because of that our persecuted brothers and sisters suffer.