Prayer

I received a note today from one of our missionaries in Ancona, Italy. The team is planning a two day (48 hour) prayer event where the team invites the local community (churches, missionaries, and even “irreligious” Catholics) to come to a prayer room for one hour during this 48 hour period give an hour of their cluttered lives to prayer. Josh admits that like many of us, that prayer to him is an “awkward” thing.

The thing that is awkward to us is accepting the Biblical doctrine of prayer. The Bible clearly teaches that there are things that God cannot/will not do unless we pray. As Jesus said, “You have not because you ask not.” Some of us think that in prayer we align ourselves with the will of God, “Thy will be done”. In other words we think that prayer changes us, not so much that prayer changes things.

However, in prayer, like in many other things, God is asking us to join Him as partners in his purposes. God,for example, offers salvation to the world and asks us to be partners with him in the “Ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18) and has sent us into the world to preach the gospel to every creature (Matt. 28:19).

E. Stanley Jones wrote, “For in prayer you align yourself to the purposes and power of God, and He is able to do things that though you He couldn’t otherwise do. For this is an open universe, where some things are left open, contingent upon our doing them. If we do not do them, they will never be done. So God has left certain things to prayer—things which will never be done except we pray.”

The Church

Since Greta and I came home from Africa 6 years ago, we have been struggling with how we Americans are “doing church” these days. The American church culture – across the board – has changed more in the past 10 years than it has in the last 100 years. Sitting in church today we often feel more out of place and out of our comfort zone than we ever did in the more than 20 years we lived and worshiped with churches in Africa. During those years we often sat in church for two to three hours while everything was done in a language we did not understand except the few Biblical references that were used. But we did understand that we were there to worship and praise God. Today we sometimes sit in church where we can understand every word but the noise is often so loud we cannot hear them and we more often feel we are watching a show, sitting as observers on the sidelines of a worship program that someone else is doing. How did it get to this?

For years the church has been saying “y’all come” rather than “let’s all go.” It seems to me that much of the currently popular “seeker friendly” church service is just the latest edition of the “y’all come” program. I remember reading recently. “If we want to win the world to Christ, we must be willing to sit in the smoking section.” That is where the lost are sitting. I learned some of that many years ago from one of our Liberian families. One day I went to visit a neighbor. They were all in their “kitchen” or cook house, a dirt floored, thatch roofed shelter where they cooked over a wood fire. I sat there, using a log for a chiar, and talked for some time as the lady of the house prepared food. As I realized that it was soon to be meal time, I made as to leave, but they said, “Won’t you stay and eat with us?” I agreed and stayed to share their simple meal. Years later, this same family was in our home, and as we shared our meal with them, the lady recounted the story of how I had come to talk with them in their kitchen. She then told me that no missionary had ever done that before and how much it had meant to them.

The heart of the Christian message to the world is that God didn’t expect us to come to Him in heaven. He came to us. Jesus, the king of heaven, was born in a dirty, stinking stable and lived in one of the world’s most backward countries as a poor carpenter. He “became flesh and lived among us and we beheld his glory.” (John 1:14) The church was sent into the world (Matthew 28:19-20) to be His hands, feet, eyes and mouth so that the world could continue to see His glory. It is time for the church to return to its roots; to be born in the places where it is most needed; to get out in the real world and get its hands dirty; to sit in the cook house and eat with its neighbors.