RE: [FamilyofGod] When the Church fails to pray! :-(
Sorry to say, but you are very on target. A few years ago, at one of our church conferences, one of the speakers pointed this out: he basically said, what’s the least attended event at church? Isn’t it the prayer meeting.
I attend two churches. After we moved out of the city, I felt that I wanted to find a church as a back-up to my then home church. I fell in love with the new church as much as the old. God led me to make the new, smaller, local church my home church now, but I’m so fond of the first church that I go there for their night services almost every week.
Anyway, my smaller home church has a better attendance than does my old, very large church. I which I could figure out why or what the difference is.
My home church is about 70 members and gets about ten at the prayer meeting. My former home church is about 1500 and gets between four and eight people at the specific small group meetings like the persecuted church meeting the the missions prayer meeting. We have a Sunday School wide quarterly day of prayer, and even that often gets between twenty and thirty people. Sometimes, when the pastor’s really push, we can double it to forty at the Sunday school prayer meeting.
I find that, with a bigger inner city church, people can retain anonymity more, so they can “fall through the cracks” if they want to . I’d say that only a couple of hundred people are really involved in anything other than the eleven o’clock church service. Our evening service gets only about four to five hundred, if that. And the Sunday school for the adults is only a few hundred. We also do mid-week in-home local Bible studies, and only about one to two hundred fifty are involved in those.
R. C. Sproul once said that, for the number of people that claim to be Christian, we should have more impact on our culture. His feeling was that, of those that were not just saying this for guilt/convenience, he felt the reason for the lack of effect on the culture was that most Christians stay too immature. Every time a poll is taken, we find that as many Christians as non-Christians are getting divorces. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of Christians are getting pregnant out of wedlock and/or living with boyfriends—though I don’t think these stats are quite as high as the rest of the culture.
This isn’t to say that we don’t all sin, I’m talking about lifestyle issues or those that think there is nothing wrong with their way of life, but are claiming to be Christian. I’m sure we all could come up with a lot of this considering that so many denominations today have a very liberal branch. When we start parsing out the Lord’s Word and take away from inerrancy...
Tina
From: FamilyofGod@
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 12:36 AM
To: Family Of God
Subject: [FamilyofGod] When the Church fails to pray! :-(
dear FG brethren,
Of all the ministries at my home church of 17 years, Calvary Chapel/Honolulu:
I notice that the ones involving intercessory prayer for Pastor Bill Stonebraker and the rest of the staff, the congregation and any Gospel-sharing and Kingdom-building outreach has the least number of members. Not only that, whenever one of the ladies who's in charge of the Women's Prayer Ministry calls a prayer meeting every Sunday morning before the services, the same three or four women show up--and, yes, that includes me. Why is prayer so neglected in the Church today? Can any of you please share your story of how it is being grossly downplayed at your own home churches too? Goodness gracious, I sure hope that it's not only happening here because my pastor and his wife are big-time prayer warriors, as are the associate pastors and their wives and the church staff! This is terribly disturbing to me! That's why I'm so thankful to God for moving upon George's heart to launch Family Of God!!!
in Christ my True Everything,
Jolene.
The LORD is my strength and my shield;
My heart trusts in Him, and I am helped;
Therefore my heart exults, And with my song I shall thank Him.--Psalm 28:7 (NASB)
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