When I put together our current SNL campaign, I knew prayer is always critical to God doing anything in our midst. So I decided to have two days of prayer and fasting, and have two prayer meetings on each of those days.

Monday was the first day, and it was interesting and moving.

The Problem:

I hardly ever hear about churches having prayer meetings anymore. They seem to be nearly extinct. I think I understand why too. Let’s face it, gather together with a bunch of other people to do nothing pray sounds pretty boring, dull and humdrum. Hardly a recipe for success now days!

If I’m going to be honest here I have to admit I’ve found most prayer meetings I’ve been in pretty boring. Probably the worst part is when we all share our prayer requests. This usually ends up being a cross between a hypochondriac convention and a gossip session! The listing of illnesses goes on and on, and my mind has checked out long before we get to the praying part!

Ugh!

My Solution:

I thought about all this as I prepared an order of service. How do I allow people to share what’s on their hearts, and avoid the endless listing of problems and predicaments that can drive people to despair?

An idea popped into my head out of nowhere, and it seems to have worked pretty well. After I introduced and explained things, every word spoken from that point on would be spoken to God.

The only exception was my reading of a Scripture passage and then naming the topic to be prayer for. Following that, if anyone had something in that area they wanted prayed for, they actually had to pray about it! Out loud of course. Then others could pick up on that and pray for it too.

Basically I adapted Conversational Prayer into a slightly more structured format, and it worked! In the morning service anyway. The evening meeting was interrupted by a crisis I had to deal with, and by the time I got back we didn’t have much time left. I’m looking forward to December 12th when we’ll do it all again!

Just A Start:

We had a grand total of 11 people split between the two services, and that’s counting me.

Pretty sad isn’t it?

I’m so very grateful to those who made it, and am inviting everyone to redouble their efforts on December 12th.

It time we put an end to the Prayerless American Church isn’t it?