(Note: This essay is a continuation of last week's piece on the theology of prayer as always being communal in nature.)
Even
though all prayer is communal in light of the mystical “communion of the
saints,” that doesn’t mean that we can give up on the actual practice of communal
prayer in the presence of one another. Throughout Christian history, it has
been repeatedly shown that communal prayer has a strength all its own. The
first believers in Jesus were all gathered together in the upper room in
constant prayer, and then came the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Later
on in the book of Acts, the believers were all gathered together in prayer when
Peter’s miraculous deliverance from prison took place (12:5-12), and at another
communal prayer meeting, their prayers were evidently so powerful that the
entire house was shaken (4:31).
There’s
an old story that comes down to us from the desert fathers, those heroes of the
faith from the 3rd century onward who decided to live as exemplary a
Christian life as they possibly could by retreating into the desert to
participate in prayer, the study of Scripture, and spiritual warfare. One
hermit, after several years of devoting himself to prayer, was feeling pretty
good about the power and effectiveness of his prayers. The Lord granted him a
vision in a dream of what his prayers looked like: he saw himself at prayer,
and flitting upwards towards heaven were bright little sparks, symbolizing his
prayers. At first he was cheered by this pleasant and encouraging image. But
then the vision shifted, and he could see the nearby church engaged in one of
their services of prayer. Instead of little sparks flitting heavenwards, here
was a vast column of flame, filling up the sky as it burst up toward the throne
of God. The hermit was duly chastened by the reminder—as powerful as one man’s
prayers might be, they are nothing compared to the unified prayers of the
people of God in worship.
One
of the other great stories about persistent, communal prayer comes from the
Moravian Christian community at Herrnhut, Germany in the 1700s. Led by Count
Ludwig von Zinzendorf, they devoted themselves to the passionate pursuit of
Christ, and began to operate a continuous prayer watch. Members of the
community would take up a rotation so that there would always be some
Christians at prayer together in Herrnhut, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365
days a year. The Moravians carried out this prayer marathon not only for one or
two years, but for an entire century.
And in those hundred years, God used the Moravians to help launch the Golden
Age of Protestant missions, bringing the Gospel to the ends of the earth, as
well as playing a role in sparking the Great Awakening in Britain and America. Moravian
missionaries became the first wave of the Protestant global church, selling
themselves into slavery to bring the Gospel to the West Indies even before
William Carey, heralded as “the father of modern missions,” ever dreamed of
going to India. Moravians were also instrumental in bringing the great preacher
John Wesley into a new and dynamic experience of faith in Christ early in his
adulthood, and Wesley and his followers would go on to spark the Great
Awakening on both sides of the Atlantic. All of this began with a prayer
meeting in Herrnhut.
Another
famous prayer meeting came in 1806, when five students at Williams College, in
Massachusetts, met outdoors to talk about theology and missions service. A
thunderstorm blew up quickly, and they took refuge under a haystack and there
began to pray for the cause of the Christian missionary endeavor. Those
students were so inspired by the events of that day that they decided to form
the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions—the end result being
that this humble little prayer gathering, “the Haystack Prayer Meeting,” became
the launching-point for the entire missionary endeavor that would blossom from
the eastern United States over the subsequent decades and send the Gospel to the
farthest reaches of the globe.
Persistent,
communal prayer can also be shown to have been at the root of many of the greatest
revivals in Christian history, including the Azusa Street Revival that launched
the worldwide explosion of Pentecostal Christianity. Many of the most
influential ministers of the Christian tradition, like Charles H. Spurgeon, “the
Prince of Preachers,” who held captive audiences of thousands of skeptical
Londoners in the late 1800s with his fearless and eloquent proclamation of the
grace of God, claimed that the real credit for their success in ministry was
due to the power of others’ prayer—in Spurgeon’s case, a group of his
parishioners who met together to pray for him while he was preaching, gathered
in a prayer-room that lay directly beneath his pulpit.
In
all of these instances, and many more besides, one lesson can be gleaned—the gathered
prayer of the people of God is a powerful and compelling thing, perhaps the
most powerful human-driven force in the world, in that it invokes the limitless
power of God. For this reason, “pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all
kinds of prayers and requests” (Eph. 6:18), and “do not give up meeting
together” (Heb. 10:25). Prayer really can change the world.