Prayerlessness

Powerlessness and the Church

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Jesus answered them, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you tell this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done. And if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”
—Matthew 21:21-22 CSB

Now the entire group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common. With great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was on all of them. For there was not a needy person among them because all those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the proceeds of what was sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet. This was then distributed to each person as any had need.
—Acts 4:32-35

If the Church in America wants to stem the tide of declining attendance, restoring supernaturalism isn’t the only fix.

“Can’t someone do something?” seems to be the biggest lament I see across the web. People have lost faith in institutions that can’t live up to their promises. Law enforcement is hamstrung to control indiscriminate crime and vandalism, City governments can’t control vagrancy and the trashed condition of their streets. Legislatures seem incapable of passing laws the average person needs. Job agencies can’t find people work. Companies charge us more and yet give us smaller portions of worsening quality.

Every institution we used to count on can’t seem to get its act together. In the middle of all this entropy, you would think the Church would be a bastion of efficacy.

But if so, why are people leaving our churches?

I read many articles about the state of the Church in America, and it never fails that when someone wants to point a finger of blame at anyone for the Church’s declining attendance and iffy discipleship, it’s always pointing at the people in the pews. Then when you find out who the author of the article is, it never fails to be either a church leader or an outsider journalist.

Hmm.

People will be loyal and will stick around if they…

  1. Feel wanted and needed.
  2. Have an opportunity to make a difference.
  3. Find what they need.

It’s really that simple. If those three things are not being met, people won’t stay.

How easy it is to pass that off as selfishness, and sadly, that often happens. That’s one of the blame points, that people are only in something for their own needs.

But why wouldn’t they be?

Check out that passage in Acts 4 above about the early Church, and note this:

For there was not a needy person among them…

People were getting their needs met in the early Church. They prayed for this and that, and this and that happened. People came in with an expectation of awe, and they experienced awe. They needed signs and wonders, and they got signs and wonders. They came in with financial and personal needs, and they got financial and personal needs met.

People won’t leave when the group has got their back and they know it.

It worries me that many churches seem devoid of power, whether that’s powerlessness in the Spirit, powerlessness in addressing the needs of people, or powerlessness in the face of the entropy of the age.

But why is this?

One sad trend that has perplexed me for as long as I have been writing about the American Church is the growing prayerlessness of our churches.

Consider this thought experiment…

A church leader decides that instead of 20 minutes of worship music and less than five minutes of corporate prayer, the church will do 20 minutes of prayer together and five minutes of worship. It may even mean soliciting prayer needs from the people in the seats so the church as a whole can pray for those needs.

Now, do you think that will change anything?

I think that literally everything that should happen in the life of the Christian and the church that Christian attends should begin and end with prayer. If we are not praying, then we should not be starting anything. If we are not praying, then we should not be expecting anything. And if we are not praying, then we are contributing to powerlessness in all its forms.

Yes, there remain practical responses to needs, but have we ever considered that the practical responses arise out of prayer? That prayer is the soil from which fruitfulness springs?

How do we overcome powerlessness as a Church? When the Church makes up its mind to pray with genuine faith.

Church leaders, you are the ones who must lead this turn to prayer. The onus is on you and no one else. If you’re not leading meaningful prayer time in your assemblies, you are failing your church. And I’ll go out on a limb here and say that if your church spends less than five minutes of its assembly time in corporate prayer for real needs, then that’s a fail.

No church will have problems keeping people when its prayers are powerful and efficacious. Believe it.

Thoughts on a Prayerless House of Prayer, “Premarital Sex” as an Oxymoron, and More

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I’ve been accused of being a thinker, but I just bluff well. Fact is, my Myers-Briggs is strongly ENFP, which makes me a feeler instead. Still, I’m always in my head, though the heart rules.

Some things I’ve been pondering…

Prayerless House of Prayer

I don’t have any figures to back me up, but my own experiences over the years tell me most evangelical churches spend about five minutes praying corporately during any 60-90-minute Sunday meeting. Mainline Protestant churches may up that to 10 minutes out of about an hour. Either way, it’s slim pickings prayer-wise.

When Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the temple, He referred to the temple as a house of prayer. While it’s an error to conflate the OT temple with a NT church, the idea that corporate prayer matters still exists. Consider how many references to prayer the Bible contains.

Consider this also: On your own, you can listen to a recording of a teaching/sermon, sing songs to God, and find out about goings-on in your church, but you can’t pray corporately without a corpus, the Body of Christ.

So what the heck is our problem on Sundays with praying as a group of believers and actually spending some time doing so? Isn’t that one of the purposes and tasks of the Church? Do we simply not believe our own mantra concerning the power of prayer?

Makes you wonder if one reason people eschew church meetings is because the church isn’t doing what it should be doing anyway, so what’s the point?

Is Premarital Sex an Oxymoron?

Facebook’s trends sidebar recently included “news” of celebrity couples who “saved themselves” for marriage by refraining from the wango tango before the wedding. How bizarre that this qualifies as something we need to know.

We think of fornication as sex before marriage. Adultery is sex after marriage but with someone who is not one’s spouse. Both trend high on the “really bad sins” list in the minds of most Christians.

A challenge: What does the Bible say constitutes a marriage?

Almost all Christian wedding ceremonies quote this verse from Genesis:

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
—Genesis 2:21-24 ESV

Here’s the baffling reality: For as highly as God and Man hold marriage, there’s no proscribed marriage ceremony in the Bible. No set words to say. No vows to make. Nothing. We have other examples of things to say or do as shown in the Bible for hallowed events, but weddings, nope.

When you look, almost nothing is said except that a man who defiles a virgin must pay a bride price for her and make her his wife, but if her father objects, the man still must pay dad the money (see Exodus 22:16-17).

So does the wedding ceremony really mean anything?

If we get down to the purest essence from that Genesis passage, we find these elements:

  • Leaving parents
  • Holding fast (cleaving) to a spouse
  • A sexual union that formally makes the couple one flesh

So, is marriage simply the following?

  • Have sex exclusively with one person, leave your parents, and set up your own household.

Because it seems to me that’s the definition of marriage from a biblical perspective. Which makes the whole issue of premarital sex an oxymoron. The sexual act itself creates what God recognizes as the formal union. There’s no ceremony there, just the intention to start a separate household.

We understand why adultery is wrong. But what if the real sin in fornication isn’t the sex itself but having sex without any intention both to stay true to the other person and to establish a separate household with them?

Really changes the perspective, doesn’t it?

Super Bowl as Church Meeting

Heard more arguments for making Presidents Day the Monday after the Super Bowl. I don’t see any drawbacks in doing so.

Except that the Super Bowl has become an alternate Thanksgiving Day, only with friends instead of family members. It’s the religious holiday for people who feel no compulsion otherwise to do anything religious.

Used to be that Sunday evening church services didn’t bow to the Super Bowl, but now they do. Many churches cancel whatever Sunday evening meetings they ordinarily hold in deference to the Big Game. One could argue that all the elements of a church service (communion meal, worship, separation from other events, identification with a restricted group, and fellowship) exist within a Super Bowl party.

Makes me wonder if instead of decrying our perpetual slide into worldliness and placing too much emphasis on things that will pass away (such as Super Bowls), we Christian instead try to understand what we have done to our church meetings that so many people would rather be at a Super Bowl party substitute.

False Football Prophets

Dear Lord, I hope it’s not true that some self-proclaimed prophet said revival would only come to America if the Panthers won. Looks like my hopes are dashed.

Are there any genuine prophetic voices left out there?

Of Kingdoms and Politics

Christians I know continue to line up behind their chosen presidential candidates, and it’s a hot mess honestly, much more than usual. It says something about the beliefs of the supporters and how they read the Bible.

  • Those who feel the need to upset the establishment, to turn against the Pharisees and usher in a new kind of Kingdom, so to speak, support Trump or Sanders.
  • Those who desire a kinder, gentler, humble Kingdom are falling in for Carson.
  • Those who want a Kingdom that transcends boundaries and makes peace between factions look to Rubio.
  • Those who instead want the King to come, winnowing fork in His hand, to separate the wheat from the chaff support Cruz.
  • Those who nostalgically recall the way the Kingdom used to be are in for Christie, Bush, Kasich, or Clinton.
  • And I’ve got nothing for Fiorina.  😉

Thoughts?

Want to rebut or endorse any of my musings from above? Please comment below. Your comments make Cerulean Sanctum a great place to be, and I appreciate them very much.

Hmm, I Wonder What My Father’s House Shall Be Called?

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PrayerThe fashion today finds some churches talking smack about how long the worship portion of their Sunday meeting persists.

“We open with 20 minutes of nonstop praise to the Lord!”

“Well, we spend 40 minutes lifting up His name!”

Meanwhile, churches continue to build or renovate so that the altar area is more like the stage at a KISS concert. It used to be that a church could drop $50,000 easily on sound equipment. How 2005! Now they spend that much on stage lighting.

Can I ask a simple question?

What did Jesus say His Father’s house shall be called? A house of a 45-minute worship set with lasers?

When was the last time you heard anyone brag, “We open our meeting with a half hour of prayer”?

Something is monstrously wrong in American Christianity when a church of believers can sing some bad rock songs interminably  and then brag about it, yet you can’t get the assembled Body of Christ at that same church to spend five minutes in shared prayer.

I wonder if we’ve reached a stage where we can say that our Father’s house has become one of misplaced priorities.

He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”
–Matthew 21:13

You see, there is more than one holy thing such robbers can steal.