Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church

by John Onwuchekwa Narrated by JD Jackson

Overview

What is the role of corporate prayer in the church?

Prayer is as necessary to the Christian as breathing is to the human body-but it often doesn't come quite as naturally. In fact, prayer in the church often gets subtly pushed to the side in favor of pragmatic practices that promise tangible results.

This book focuses on the necessity of regular prayer as a central practice in the local church-awakening us to the need and blessing of corporate prayer by examining what Jesus taught about prayer, how the first Christians approached prayer, and how to prioritize prayer in our congregations.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177771250
Publisher:	One Audiobooks
Publication date:	04/08/2020
Series:	9Marks: Building Healthy Churches
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Breathe Again

The Problem of Prayerlessness

Prayer Is Breathing

Well, here you are reading another book on prayer. Maybe the last one didn't make you feel guilty enough, and you're a glutton for punishment. What good is a book on prayer without an initial quote that surfaces your shortcomings as a pray-er? Without further ado, here it goes: "To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing!"

All jokes aside, that may be the most potent and challenging statement on prayer I've ever read. Breathing — as a metaphor for Christian prayer — captures so much of what prayer should be. It reminds us that prayer is something essential to our existence. Breathing is necessary for everything we do. It enables every activity. Likewise, prayer is basic and vital. It's tied to both our present existence and perpetual endurance. Prayer is breathing. There's no better metaphor of what prayer should be for the Christian.

That's why the struggle many Christians have with prayer is so puzzling. Isn't it strange how so many Christians believe this truth in principle, but so few churches ratify it in practice? Our problem isn't the way we talk about prayer. We talk about it with all the fervency and eloquence it deserves. Our problem is the way we treat prayer. Our practice doesn't line up with our proclamations, which is always a sign that something is off (see James 2).

A total absence of prayer in the church isn't a likely problem. Maybe a church somewhere out there never prays at all, but I don't assume that's happening in yours. I don't know your church, but I bet there are times you come together to pray. Such praying may be sparse and sporadic, but it happens.

And therein lies what I think is the biggest problem: not a complete lack of prayer, but too little prayer. Here's another quote to surface more of those prayer-related insecurities: "So we come to one of the crying evils of these times, maybe of all times — little or no praying. Of these two evils, perhaps little praying is worse than no praying. Little praying is a kind of make-believe, a salvo for the conscience, a farce and a delusion. The little estimate we put on prayer is evident from the little time we give to it."

When prayer is sparse and sporadic, when it's done just enough to ease the conscience and not much more, we've got a problem. We've all been a part of churches where prayer is present but neither purposeful nor potent. Unfortunately, our prayers in the church too often feel like prayer before a meal: obligatory and respectable, but no one really gets much out of it. Our church prayers get reduced to a tool for transitioning from one activity to the next. Let's have everyone close their eyes and bow their heads, so that transitioning the praise team on and off the stage isn't so awkward.

Do you see the danger in too little prayer? Where prayer is present, it's saying something — it's speaking, shouting. It teaches the church that we really need the Lord. Where prayer is absent, it reinforces the assumption that we're okay without him. Infrequent prayer teaches a church that God is needed only in special situations — under certain circumstances but not all. It teaches a church that God's help is intermittently necessary, not consistently so. It leads a church to believe that there are plenty of things we can do without God's help, and we need to bother him only when we run into especially difficult situations.

Reflect with me for a moment about the racially inflammatory events that bombarded the United States during the summer of 2016. In one week our nation witnessed the deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and five police officers in Dallas. People took sides, and every side had something to mourn. It was against this backdrop that many churches gathered corporately to pray for their communities, churches, leaders, and nation. Some churches gathered with churches across denominational lines. For a season, our prayers seemed potent, pressing, and purposeful. It was our screaming out, "God, we need your help!"

Once these crises had passed, however, corporate praying like this all but ceased. That's telling, isn't it? It reveals that we treat prayer as something special, meant to take care of things that we can't "handle" on our own. We don't treat prayer like breathing. We treat it like prescription medication meant to rid us of an infection. Once the infection is gone, so is the frequency and fervency of our prayers.

A Moment of Honesty

Allow me to be brutally honest for a minute. Since I don't have to look any of you in the eye, I feel a bit more courageous in admitting my faults. If you're anything like me, and reading a book on prayer makes you feel like a failure, then please know that writing a book on prayer makes me feel like a hypocrite. I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert when it comes to prayer. I don't feel particularly proficient at it. I wouldn't put "mighty man of prayer" on my résumé. I struggle with prayer. I always have. I feel like my prayers are often weak.

I say this because I've seen people who are mighty pray-ers, and I know I'm not one of them. My mom is. I remember watching her come home from work every day and greet us briefly en route to her room. On those days when her bedroom door was cracked, I would squint through the opening and see her get on her knees by her bed to pray. She emerged a different person. She did this every day. To this very day, she won't let me off of a phone call until she prays for me. And if she forgets, she calls back and leaves a voice mail. My dad was the same way. So when they planted a church in 2001, that church inherited their praying DNA the same way the Onwuchekwa kids inherited their noses.

My parents and the pastors, preachers, and authors who have most influenced me were all mighty men and women of prayer. They put my best attempts at prayer to shame. I know what it looks like to be a prayer warrior (if you'll allow me to use that term) because I've witnessed it firsthand, not because I've exemplified it throughout my Christian life. For most of my journey, I've found myself deficient in the very qualities I admire.

My Turning Point

A few years ago, something both terrible and wonderful happened. Six weeks before planting the church I currently pastor, my thirty-two-year-old brother suddenly died. No explanation. No cause of death. Nothing conclusive in the autopsy. No foul play. Just gone. Gone. For the first time in my life, I felt like all the wind was taken out of me. I couldn't breathe. If you've ever had the wind knocked out of you, then you know just how much it complicates everything. But this tragedy, in God's grace, was the best thing that could have ever happened for my relationship with the Lord and our church. God used a terrible situation to birth a wonderful thing in me.

I'm crying right now for the first time in months. I thought I had worked through my brother's death, but my heart is still incredibly tender as I reflect on this. Having the wind knocked out of me, literally and figuratively, was the tool God used to help me understand that prayer is breathing.

My filter vanished as my tongue was unhinged in prayer. I was both shocked and relieved, ashamed and angry at the words coming out of my mouth. I called God a liar. He seemed cruel and uncaring. Then in the same breath, I asked him to shower me with grace. I felt disdain, anger, hatred. And I told him. I couldn't help but tell him. It all just kept coming out. Pain felt like a truth serum that forced me to confess all of my unworthy thoughts of him. And he took it. Every ounce of it. He corrected my negative view, not with words of rebuke but words of consolation.

While I was drowning in sorrow, he emptied my oxygen tank to force me to come up for air. When I came up to him, I wasn't met with the cold shoulder I deserved, but with open arms. Whatever I was doing before wasn't praying. It was formal, cold, sterile, rehearsed, and rote. For the first time in my life, I felt like I knew what it was to pray, to commune with God. When I offered the cares of my heart — every one of them — I met a God who wasn't as scared to take those cares on as I was to share them.

God transformed my brother's final breaths into some of my first. As a result, my whole life pivoted. And this forced a pivot in the church I was preparing to lead. By God's grace, this tragedy and several other hardships our church experienced early on helped to reinforce this often forgotten truth: prayer is vital and necessary to spiritual life. Prayer is like breathing.

The Key to Effective Ministry

I have pastored two churches over the past decade, and I've been involved with networks, organizations, seminaries, collectives, and other groups of Christians. I've sat with visionary leaders who have churches filled with great systems. I've also sat with leaders who aren't visionary and who have churches with poor systems. I've done ministry with gifted individuals, people with average gifts, and people with very little gifting or proficiency at all. I've partnered with attractional churches, missional churches, megachurches, medium churches, and meager churches. Throughout my experience, I've learned that these distinctions aren't the most important; they're peripheral and secondary. If I had to draw a line to create two categories of churches, it wouldn't follow these distinctions. I've learned to see churches as those that pray and those that don't. As I'll explain later, a church's commitment to prayer is one of the greatest determiners of its effectiveness in ministry.

Prayer is oxygen for the Christian. It sustains us. So it follows that prayer must be a source of life for any community of Christians. It is to the church what it is to individuals — breathing. Yet many of our gatherings could be likened to people coming together merely to hold their collective breath. This would explain why people seem to have so little energy for actually living out the Christian life.

But breathing together is what our churches need. Prayer humbles us like nothing else. When we pray, we're reminded that prayer is not like other disciplines in the world that require impressive aptitude and increased exercise to bring about great results. If someone hopes to get rewarded or compensated for playing an instrument, for example, then he must first achieve a level of expertise through years of practice. Great results spring from a grueling, long-term regimen. There's no initial payoff for novices of any kind.

Prayer isn't like that because great results don't come as a direct result of a grueling regimen and expertise. Great results come from our gracious Ruler, the great Rewarder and Reward of his people who cry out to him.

Many great accomplishments in prayer come from apparent novices. Abraham met God, and God offered to hear his prayer to spare the town where his nephew resided (Gen. 18:22–33).Moses met God at a burning bush, and not long after he successfully interceded for Israel (Ex. 32:31–34). In the forty days following Jesus's resurrection and ascension, the disciples began to pray differently. They stopped praying forself-preservation and more for gospel faithfulness and boldness (cf. Mark 8:31–34; Acts 4:23–31; 5:40–41). God rewards the prayers of novices, which encourages consistent prayer in the lives of his people.

If prayer is like breathing, then it isn't about our expertise. It's about our experiencing the power of the One to whom we pray. It's about the great expectations that grow in us when we have a genuine experience of the God who hears and answers. We don't need experts, and that's a strong encouragement to churches filled with many members and even pastors who feel like novices. I've experienced the beauty of weak prayers that meet a willing Savior. Our church has, too. It's a lot like taking the first breath after having the wind knocked out of you. The experience makes you eager to take another, and another, and another.

About This Book

This book won't talk much about prayer in the life of the individual Christian. There are better, more comprehensive works for that. This book is about prayer in the life of the church, and when it comes to corporate prayer, what do our churches need more than encouragement?

As someone who has helped lead churches of various sizes, budgets, and neighborhoods, I've had a wide range of relationships with other Christians and pastors. From my diverse experience, I've become convinced that prayer is among the most vital keys to a successful ministry. It's as necessary as breathing. It's not meant to replace work but enable it. If we want to see our churches thrive in faithfulness to God, then our churches must pray like their lives depended on it. We must learn how to breathe together.

My prayer is that this book doesn't have a long shelf life. There are wonderful Christian classics that will never lose their relevance until Christ returns. But my prayer is that soon, and very soon, a book like this would find as little of a market as I expect a book entitled How to Breathe with Your Family at Dinner would find.

My prayer is that this book will one day be more for edification when our energy wanes, and less for persuasion that our energies should be directed toward corporate prayer in the first place. My prayer is that regularly, fervently, and corporately crying out to our Father would be so ordinary and expected that it would be laughable that someone actually took time to write a book about it. I hope that happens one day. But since that day is not today, let's start this journey together and pray that God blesses it.

CHAPTER 2

A Class Act

Teach Us to Pray

Necessary [??] Natural

In 2017, my wife and I received a phone call that would change our lives. For ten years we had tried to have a baby. For five years we tried to adopt. The phone call came on a Saturday, and by Monday we'd adopted our daughter.

The good news was that we finally had what we'd been praying for. The bad news was that she was born about two months premature and couldn't breathe on her own. We couldn't bring our baby girl home. She had to stay in the hospital for a few weeks, hooked up to a machine in order to learn how to breathe.

Breathing, the very thing necessary to her life being sustained, didn't come naturally to her. So it is with us and prayer. "To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing" is still true. But just because something is necessary for life doesn't mean it comes naturally to us. It was true for my daughter's breathing, and it's true for our spiritual breathing as well.

Think back through the Bible at instances of people who needed prayer, and just how easy it was for them to avoid it. How about Adam and Eve? After disobeying God and being spared from instant death, our gracious God came and initiated a conversation with them. At this point, they could have admitted their weakness and asked God for his help. They did neither. Instead, they attempted to redirect God's judgment to someone a little more "deserving."

Cain had a face-to-face conversation with God after being caught red-handed, but he neither admitted his weakness nor appealed for mercy. In Psalm 32, David admits that it was as natural as it was destructive to keep silent about his sin rather than pray. The disciples in Mark 14 realize that when lying prostrate, it's much easier to sleep than to offer supplication to God. Everyone who needs prayer the most finds out that it's unnatural.

Teach Us to Pray

One of the most ironic sequences of dialogue in Scripture is when the disciples ask Jesus how to pray (Luke 11:1). What makes it ironic isn't the fact that they're asking Jesus to teach them something. Jesus was God. He was wise, and they constantly referred to him as Rabbi and Teacher. This request stands out because this is the only record in Scripture when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them.

When it comes to Jesus's mighty acts and miracles, the disciples marvel at how he could calm the winds and waves. They stand in awe as Jesus heals the blind, casts out demons, and makes the lame walk. Peter doesn't ask how Jesus walks on water. He makes a request, and proceeds to walk out.

When Jesus sends out the seventy-two in Luke 10, he doesn't give step-by-step instructions on how to treat leprosy or cast out demons. He gives imperatives: heal the sick and proclaim the kingdom. None of the disciples say, "But Jesus, I was asleep the day you went over how much spittle to use whenhealing a blind man, or what to do when you find someone born blind versus someone who has gone blind." They takeJesus's mandate in stride and go with it, and they come back rejoicing that it actually worked.

Even when faced with their inability, like when they fail to cast out the demon in Mark 9, the disciples don't say to Jesus, "Teach us how to do that." Instead, they say, "Why couldn't we?" They seek a diagnosis as to what they did wrong, not a prescription for how to do it correctly.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Prayer"
by .
Copyright © 2018 John Onwuchekwa.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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