Joe's Blog for Week 2

In Chapter 2 of Unbinding Your Heart, Martha Reese points out that many of our congregations have been going south (i.e., losing numbers) for decades. “It will take a miracle,” she points out, “to turn things around.” So this chapter is on prayer. Why not? What do we have to lose by turning the whole thing over to God to see how God will guide us?

To bolster her position that this is a good idea, she tells three stories, about three different denominations. The first is about a Disciples of Christ Church, mid-western, healthy, moderate to “fairly progressive” in theology. They formed an evangelism team and asked Martha what to do. She told them to spend three months praying together before they did anything else.

They were skeptical, but they did it. They prayed individually every day and together at least once a week. By the end, their three-member committee had grown to 50, then 65. Visitors and baptisms were increasing. People were following up, baking bread, buying small gifts, starting a welcome center. A year later, they had 80 new members.

The second story reports on a Reformed Church in America in California. It, too, was growing and had a vibrant “life stage ministry” for 20 to 30-year olds. They have two contemporary worship services and one traditional each week. They use music and small groups as a way of reaching out to the young “postmoderns.” The pastor’s wife was trained in prayer in a week-long event in cooperation with a Moravian church, and prayer is central to what they do. One group prays for each worship service. They have “prayer walkers” whose role is to pray as they walk through events such as Halloween parties and Vacation Bible School. They pray for the people, the children, everyone.

And the third story is about a very small town and a very small church (125 in worship). The heart of the story centers on the four pastors in the town who used to be in competition for members until they started meeting for a two-hour prayer session each week. Not only is the competition gone, but one of them has partnered with a Catholic mission to El Salvador and a congregant had the courage to ask the whole congregation to support a simple but effective water purification initiative for that country. And there were other positive results of their prayerful meetings.

Reese says the point of these stories is that all of these successes start with a relationship with God, and the way to become conscious of and deepen that relationship, is through prayer. And so she ends the chapter with five statements about prayer, and with Jesus’s promise in Matthew 18:19: “If two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my father in heaven.”

In connection with this study, nearly our whole congregation is praying the same prayers every day, and are meeting to pray once a week in their small groups. Shut-ins, college students, people who can’t come, are also praying. Prayer cards are now available in each pew so we can record what we want others to pray about. As you leave the sanctuary, you will see a beautiful prayer wall. It reminds me of that other wall in Jerusalem, where some years ago, I rolled up my prayer note and stuck it in a crack. I don’t remember what it said, but I’m sure God does.