Some have asked me gently why I have not, for some time, issued strong challenges with regard to corporate prayer. My answer is this: it is my suspicion, founded on experience, that such diatribes and public invective do little good and are subject to the law of diminishing returns. Some listen in wonder and total incomprehension. Others merely become angry and resentful. Others depart laden with spiritual guilt. (Tom Swanston, Stranger in a Strange Land, p141)
The challenge has gone out in Greenview to be a people of prayer. There is a right anxiety that such a busy church as ours could muster only 27 at the last prayer meeting and that our annual prayer day – shall we say – felt a bit ‘flat’. But like the late Rev. Swanston we hesitate to press the issue further for fear of creating resentment and/or becoming a bore.
Ours is a culture, a Christian culture, that esteems the spontaneous, the informal and the ‘moment’. Unsurprisingly therefore some in the contemporary evangelical church see true liberty as casting off strictures and obligations – whether they be church meetings or spiritual disciplines. We want a faith that doesn’t need ‘warmed-up’ by personal effort but whose full benefits can be accessed instantaneously – we want gas not electric. The idea of labouring in prayer or faithfully attending meetings smacks of duty and legalism. We have been inculcated with the view that something can only be real and good if it lifts and excites your feelings.
Thus any talk about ‘needing to be at meetings’ can be quickly labeled as a return to the bad old days of dry formalized church-going. That of course is a danger. But I just fear more that our children may grow-up and look back at our evangelical generation with the thought – ‘did they really think they were suddenly in the C21 now so super-spiritual and enlightened that they could dispense with things as basic as the church prayer meeting - well look at the church they left us.'
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