It was late afternoon on the first Wednesday of the month.
The work day was almost coming to an end.
(At that time, I was working in a bank as a currency analyst.)
The pace of work was at full throttle in midweek.
I was spent from the day.
All I wanted to do was to eat something nice for dinner, watch something interesting and relax.
But… there was prayer meeting that night and I had promised myself that I would be there.
After all, when I was studying in London, my pastor used to say, ‘the church’s prayer meeting is the lifeblood of the church.’
But that evening, the mind was willing but the flesh was weak.
I reasoned with myself:
Why must pray together?!
“Why can’t I just pray by myself?
Then I don’t need to make small talk with people I’m unfamiliar with.
Aren’t there people ‘holding the fort’ – those who are ‘gifted in prayer’.”
But I felt bad. I had already committed myself to be there.
Besides, the words from Mark, another mentor in London, rang in my ear, ‘If they don’t come for prayer meeting, it’s their loss. They miss out on communing with God.’
He wasn’t saying that vindictively or with self-righteousness.
He said it as a matter of fact.
The context is that, a bunch of us, student leaders then, were trying to figure out how to encourage (read: guilt-trip) fellow students in the ministry to come for prayer meeting.
Sensing our misplaced desperation, Mark directed us to the reality that prayer meetings are about communion with God. We don’t have to beg people to come but we can hold out the offer of communion, communion with God himself.
With Mark’s face before my eyes and his voice ringing in my ear, I gobbled up my dinner and dragged my feet to the prayer meeting.
Showing up with tired reluctance, I thought I would just complete my last task of the day before getting my much-deserved rest.
But unexpectedly, I found rest at prayer meeting itself.
Somehow (and I’m not quite sure how), even though I was less than excited to be there, I came away with my mind cleared and my heart lifted.
The things that troubled me at work, no longer troubled me.
Over the years, this pattern repeated several times.
This pattern of I-don’t-quite-want-to-be-there but somehow (and I’m not quite sure how) coming away refreshed.
The truth is that going to prayer meeting can sometimes feel like a chore.
It’s midweek, work is in full throttle, children have to prepare for the school week and schedules are packed to the brim!
Speaking to people we hardly know is hardly appealing.
Self-consciousness sets in when we share our needs.
Inadequacies about our prayer fluency abound.
We may even have reservations about the meeting being so structured.
But even when we show up with reluctance, God can still meet us and use us.
What may feel like yet another task that drains our energy, may end up recharging us.[1]
To be sure, there is no formula here.
There’s no promise to ‘come for prayer meeting and you’ll be changed forever!’[2]
But what I will say is this: God desires his people to pray together in unity.
Consider Psalm 133:1–3 Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity…For there the LORD has commanded the blessing, life forevermore…Sometimes, we unknowingly smuggle into church life corporate ethos. Often in the corporate world, the call to unity is merely an instrument to increase production: ‘if everyone plays their part, we can efficiently produce more!’ Here in Psalm 133, unity amongst God’s people isn’t described in merely functional terms. It isn’t about division of labour or increase in production. Rather, it is ‘good and pleasant’ to the Lord! It is where He has commanded ‘the blessing, life forevermore’. And corporate prayer is one of the most concrete ways this unity is practised. God is pleased when his children are united in prayer rather than fighting one another.[3]
Even more fundamentally, prayer is never private. It can be done in solitude but never in private.[4] When Jesus lectures his disciples on Prayer 101, it doesn’t start with “My Father in heaven” but “Our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9) because prayer is irreducibly communal. When we relate to God as Father, we are not doing so in isolation. Rather, when we relate to God as Father, we are only relating through His one and only begotten Son and along with our fellow brothers and sisters. In short, we relate to God as Father only in union with Christ and therefore always with others in the body of Christ.
We may think we are praying privately but consider this: which posture of prayer; which phrase of prayer; which principle in prayer – isn’t ultimately learnt from someone, some community or some liturgy? Human beings can’t but imitate – we are less original than we think. This applies also to our personal (not private) prayers – they are influenced by someone; some community; some liturgy (formal or casual).[5] Spirituality must be personal but never private. Let us therefore consider how we may ‘stir one another up’ in communal prayer.
Our prayers together might seem to us uneventful, unfruitful or even uninteresting (if we dare to say what’s on our mind). But who knows how they may be regarded in heaven?
Consider the scene in Revelation 8:3-4 …another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne, 4 and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.
If this is how God receives our prayers, then perhaps our midweek prayer meeting is more than just another chore.
[1] That said, of course, we may be in seasons of life where coming to church for a midweek meeting is near impossible or at least not wise at all. That’s cool.
[2] When I was in army, I once heard a friend reach out to a non-Christian, saying, ‘Come to my church on Sunday, just one service and you’ll be changed!’ I think such a formulaic notion of God is worrisome to say the least.
[3] Perhaps, those who have multiple children will nod rigorously in agreement.
[4] Eugene Peterson (author of the Message translation) puts it this way: We can no more have a private prayer than we can have a private language. A private language is impossible. Every word spoken carries with it a long history of development in complex communities of experience. All speech is relational, making a community of speakers and listeners. So too is prayer. Prayer is language used in the vast contextual awareness that God speaks and listens. We are involved, whether we will it or not, in a community of the Word-spoken or read, understood and obeyed (or misunderstood and disobeyed). We can do this in solitude, but we cannot do it in private. It involves an Other and others.
[5] This is also why we pay so much attention to the content of the Sunday liturgy – we know that it leaks into each congregant’s prayer life – for better or worse.
