Prayer and prayer meetings in the local church. We will discuss the pivotal role of corporate prayer meetings in the local church. We will also discuss the importance of children being exposed to corporate prayer meetings and what their participation should look like.

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Well welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. I'm Scott Brown, and of course we've got Jason Doe here. Hey, Jason. Hi, glad to join you again. Good deal.

Well, church and family life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of scripture for the spread of the gospel across the generations. And this week, we're gonna discuss the hottest topic here on election day, and that is corporate prayer meetings in local churches. Hot topic, and a blessed topic. But to discuss this, we've got Anthony Mathenia with us. Hey, Anthony.

Hey there. Good. Thanks to be with you. Welcome. Thank you so much.

Anthony is a pastor at Christ Church in Radford, Virginia, and he's also a director at HeartCry Missionary Society. So the purpose of our time today is really to issue an encouragement, hopefully a strong encouragement, for people to establish on the one hand, or to attend corporate prayer meetings in the church. And we realize this is not the hottest subject in the world. This is not kind of viral clickbait kind of thing, but we really think it should be, and we want to be part of encouraging that. In fact, Jason, I remember many years ago, probably 30 years ago, 25 years ago, we were in a church, and there was a man in our church who was so passionate about prayer, and he wanted to establish a prayer meeting in the church, and almost no one came for years, but he kept on.

And the problem is, you don't have that many people who are involved in corporate prayer meetings in church life today, and you don't have many... And the other problem is you don't have many churches that actually hold them. So we're here to say, let's go in a different direction. Right. So also, I just wrote a book called The Family at Church, and I wrote a chapter on corporate prayer meetings.

And I opened up the chapter with Isaiah 56, 7, I will make them joyful in my house of prayer. So I hope that's motivating. You know, God really desires to increase the joy of his people through their prayers. And you know, I think prayer is a gateway of joy for an individual, for a church, for a family. The Lord Jesus said, ask and you will receive, that your joy may be made full.

So the Lord Jesus Christ actually, He motivates us with joy in the encouragement to pray. And so anyway, so there you have it. Let's talk about scripture first. Let's sort of lay a foundation. You know, we want to try to explain the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life, and what are the biblical requirements for corporate prayer meetings?

Yeah, I mean, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, He taught them in the context that it would be a group of people praying. We're familiar with the model prayer, the Lord's Prayer, Our Father who is in heaven. If I'm praying alone, I don't say our Father. The expectation is that we will be gathering together as groups of believers and lifting our voices to our Lord to praise Him and make petitions of Him. So, I mean, that's exactly how Jesus taught us to pray, expecting that we would be coming together as believers in Christ and lifting up our prayers to Him, praying then in this way, Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be thy name." You know, I once heard somebody say that the prayerless church, the prayerless Christian is like the bus driver trying to push his bus and he doesn't ask for help but he doesn't realize that Superman is on the bus and the whole time and this person was saying you know our churches are like that often.

Superman is on the bus, but we're not going to him for help. We're not acknowledging him that he's there. And, you know, the example of the disciple saying, teach us to pray, it's a corporate setting. Absolutely, it is a corporate prayer meeting setting that's acknowledged there. Yeah, and the New Testament letters where Paul's writing say to the church at Colossae, be devoted to prayer.

He's not writing to an individual, he's writing to a church, to the Christians at Colossae, encouraging them, as a whole, as a body, you should be devoted to prayer. Obviously, there's implication on our lives as individuals that we ought to be devoted to prayer, but as a church too, we ought to be, as a people of God represented as a local New Testament body, we should be devoted to prayer. We should pray without ceasing to bring the church at Thessalonica into the equation. So, Anthony, how would you describe the relationship between private prayer and corporate prayer? Yeah, in some sense, there are similarities.

Obviously, it's still prayer. I think there are three areas, really, rather than two, so I'll take your question and expand on it just a little bit. Our private prayer time to God, with God, should be both praising Him for who he is, acknowledging our need for him in ongoing life, thanksgiving to him, asking him for the things that we lack. In a corporate prayer time, the major difference in that is that other people are listening in. So it's not a private prayer time.

You're praying on behalf of your brothers and sisters in Christ. You're lifting up their needs as well. You're seeing your needs as a corporate body. It's not an isolationist type event that's happening for others to watch. You want to be praying in a way that they too can join in and benefit and agree and say amen inside their heart, if not out loud.

The third category, I would say, and this is where most churches, most church prayer meetings are going to fall in the category of corporate intercession. It's where you're actually praying for the needs within the body, praying for the sick, praying for evangelistic opportunities, those kinds of things. Those types of prayer meetings are necessary. Those are the most common types of prayer meetings that churches have, but a corporate prayer meeting, when I say corporate prayer meeting, I don't mean a horizontal, looking at the horizontal and the needs and praying for the sick and the ministry opportunities and those things, but more of a vertical mentality of us coming to God, recognizing His greatness, praising Him for his glory, begging him to fall down in mercy and grace and love on us, particularly during those moments that we have corporate prayer before our morning worship service. And it's an opportunity for us to come before God and prepare our hearts and recognize his greatness and ask him to draw near in mercy again in the person in power of his spirit, granting to us all the benefits that Christ has purchased for us as we seek to worship him corporately or collectively on that Lord's day.

Scott, there's a phrase I stole from you a long time ago. I've used it many times in between. I don't even think I've told you this, but the phrase is linger longer. And I heard Scott use that years ago at a prayer meeting, and it was linger longer in praise. And the exhortation was for people just to extend the time at the beginning of our prayer meeting to do exactly what you were talking about, just to soak in the goodness of God and to speak back to Him, just the beauties of the reality of who God is in praise.

And so, we'll often, at our corporate prayer meetings, I'll open that way. Linger longer in praise, and the challenge is, hey, try not to be the one who breaks the pattern of praise. It'll be fine for whoever does, whoever has the first request, but just, hey, try to be the person who extends the time of praise a little longer. You know, to have that vertical focus, I think is so critical. I'm glad you brought that up.

You know, my view is that one of the most damaging things you can do in a prayer meeting is start with asking for requests, because it just drives you to the horizontal. It drives you to answer, you know, every sick person and things like, well, we should pray for the sick, and we should do all that for sure. But it consumes an enormous amount of time just dealing on the horizontal. And I would encourage churches to get to the vertical right quick. Don't take requests.

That's my opinion. Don't take requests. Get straight to prayer. Don't waste your time, you know, jabbering about other people. You know, if you know someone who is, who's in need, then just pray for them.

You don't have to ask for requests and have this transfer time. You know, our time is precious. You know, consume the time in prayer, not talking about prayer. Now, I don't know how you feel about that, but I have a pretty strong conviction that you should go straight to prayer and not spend a lot of time asking for requests generally? Yeah, I mean I would say for corporate prayer there's no reason to take a request because you're basically the only request is God will you draw near.

We need more of you. When it comes to intercession, I mean, in those meetings, we separate those meetings here, so we're not mixing the two. It's possible to do both, and certainly, but we've just chosen to not do that, and we have a corporate prayer meeting on Sunday mornings that are strictly encouraged to be vertical. And the other times when we pray, typically a Sunday evening or a Wednesday evening, is when we're going to implement the corporate intercession. But even then, we're not asking people for requests.

People may send in something knowing that the prayer meeting is coming so that it's on our agenda. But those are fairly structured as well. In fact, I will list off some main items for prayer, categories even, and then detailed specifics underneath those categories. And we pray through each of the major categories on our nights of corporate intercession. And we can pray, encourage the people to pray outside of what's on there, but we have, everyone has that in kind of a bookmark sized piece of paper in front of them, and it serves as a guideline for the evening, but also it slides right in their Bible, so the next morning and the morning after that, they still have these needs that exist within the body to continue taking them before the Lord as an individual.

So are you saying that you pray through categories and it just comes up or specific people on that piece of paper? Both. So it would be categories, for example, praying for women who are expecting, and then there would be a list of those women who are expecting, and we would pray for them as individuals, or pray for heart cry missionaries, and then we would have a list of those missionaries that have been sent out of the church. And I would mention in the introduction to the prayer meeting some of the specifics to draw attention to, but their names are there as a reminder so that we continue taking their needs before the Lord. Let's talk about categories for a minute.

So, you mentioned missionaries and people, you know, women who are pregnant and things like that. What else is on your category list? The specific needs for the leadership within the church. We're in the process of building a building for all of the providential things and provisions that we need with regard to that. The evangelism opportunity, so outreach on the college campuses, at the drug clinic, at the abortion clinics, those kinds of things show up on there regularly.

Yeah, that's pretty common. That's what we do too, pretty much. And the leader will just kind of lead through the categories by, you know, announcing, introducing, or starting to pray, you know, for those categories. We found that to be pretty helpful. So, Scott, I've got a text here.

I love it because it's a prayer request from the apostle Paul in 2 Thessalonians 3 verses 1 and 2. He writes, finally, brethren, pray for us that the word of the Lord may run swiftly and be glorified just as it is with you, and that we may be delivered from unreasonable and wicked men, for not all have faith." So we just learned something about the apostle Paul here. He believed that God, in answer to the prayers of the Thessalonians, would actually cause the Gospel to run more swiftly. So he solicits those prayers because he wants the Gospel to have the most impact through his ministry. He could see one outcome with prayer and one outcome without, sort of in his mind's eye.

And this is just a wonderful thing for us to pray for, that the Word of God would run swiftly as it was among the Thessalonians, and we should be praying for ourselves, our church, like in our own community. We want the Word of God to run swiftly in Youngsville, North Carolina. That's where the church that I serve is, and I'm sure the same in Radford and Wake Forest. You know, just quickly on the categories, you know, praying for the Word of God to run swiftly is critical. You know, you have that great acronym, ACTS, you know, Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.

I want to add one more scripture, pray scripture. You know, we've had prayer times fairly often where I would introduce it and say, let's concentrate on praying the Word of God tonight. Let's focus on the words of Scripture. You always know that you're praying in Jesus' name if you pray the Word of God. It's the will of God, you know, directly.

But, you know, these different categories, leading people through those categories, you know, is really critical. So I've got a question for you guys. How do you deal with people who don't pray in the prayer meetings? You know, it's typical you have the people who always pray and you have the people who always don't pray, but they're there. So how do you address that?

Yeah, I mean, If I think they ought to be praying, I will encourage them, just in conversation at some point, I would mention, hey, it's nice to see you every week at the corporate prayer meeting. The majority of our people are at the corporate prayer meeting, so it's not just a few that are there. So I'll say, you know, it would be great to hear from you. And if you're reluctant to do that and praying publicly, I'll offer some practical helps. You know, think through before you come.

Plan to pray. If you plan to pray in the prayer meeting, you're more likely to do it. If you're waiting to kind of feel a little ooey gooey during the prayer meeting, you're probably not going to do it. You're going to talk yourself out of it. But if you plan, write down a couple thoughts, keep it short, don't try to get into a long, eloquent prayer, lift up, you know, and based on whatever the theme was as it was introduced, I introduce it each week with a theme from scripture.

We try to pray in that vein. So if you come prepared to pray and make it match that vein, it tends to be really helpful. So I try to encourage more voices to be heard. And even from the pulpit, as I'm beginning or introducing the prayer meeting, I will encourage people to keep their prayers brief, to speak up so that everyone can hear, and to leave room around the throne for brothers and sisters to come and offer praise and petition as well. And sometimes we'll even say, those of you who haven't prayed in a while or have never prayed, you know, take this morning as an opportunity for your voice to be heard before the throne.

I like what you said about feeling ooey gooey, because I think that is a big hindrance. People want to feel some massive dump of emotion and profundity, So they're waiting for that and they don't pray. I think sometimes people don't pray because they're they're dry They don't they had they don't have anything to say. They're not filled with the Holy Spirit, you know you know one of the great manifestations of the filling of the Spirit is speaking to one another with Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. And I've experienced that you have a man who used to pray, but he doesn't anymore, and you find out he's got himself all wrapped up in pornography, and he's not praying because he's dead inside, and he needs to repent, and he needs to turn.

So there are different maladies that exist in prayer meetings, people who don't pray, things like that. Let's talk about some of the common problems, the malfunctions, the things we have to teach our people, you know, about. I'll just kick off one. You know, I, I, I regularly find myself encouraging people to pray shorter prayers, and, and, and, and pray sequentially and, you know, redeem the time, you know, Gobble up all the time. Don't let there be a long silence.

If there's a silence, you're next. Make the time full. Pour out as much before the throne of God as you can, and don't you dominate the time, but also don't you lag. Everybody jump in, jump in like crazy, like that. Yeah, I often will encourage our people.

We don't have a lot of downtime or quiet time during the prayer meeting. People tend to pray really well, and the prayer meetings are for the most part really encouraging. But when there is a law, my great fear is that we are confessing our self-sufficiency during that time by not expressing our gratitude to God and conveying the need that we realize that we have. We feel sufficient without Him, so there tends to be a lull. But we went a long time in the past several months without being able to have corporate prayer because we were meeting outdoors and you simply can't hear because we were spread out.

We've recently moved indoors into a different meeting facility and started having the prayer meetings again. That's the number one thing people missed during COVID among us was the prayer meetings. And they've been great the past four weeks. It's been wonderful to be back indoors and being able to pray corporately again together. Anthony and Scott, I'm sure you've had this experience.

I've had it many times. You're at a prayer meeting, corporate prayer meeting, and everything's on track. It's just sort of running according to routine. And then somebody jumps in and they're just lit up. They are praying with just an extra measure of fervency and earnestness.

And it sort of, it jumps the train off the tracks in a good way, meaning on the tracks being almost a little too routine for a prayer meeting, and it raises the intensity of the prayer meeting. And I find myself as I'm going to corporate prayer meetings trying to spend a few minutes to be ready to really have something that is on my heart that I could pray for that might raise the intensity of the meeting. Prayer meetings definitely function at different level of intensity, And you don't want to manufacture that and have it be contrived, but at the same time you want people who come meaning business and who can raise the level of intensity of the prayer meeting. Yeah, and I have found that there are people who are extremely gifted at doing that. I mean, that person is often a similar group of people, you know, again and again that the Lord uses in that way to really help with the praying.

And at the same time, you're going to have those people at times who go off the rails in a very negative way. You know, it's moving along in a very positive direction and someone's own special interest comes into it or they're too quiet and no one can hear, or they hit the eight or nine minute mark and they've lost the people in the prayer meeting and those kinds of things. Having people willing to be patient and to step in after those prayers that may not be the most helpful and to get back on track and to bring it back around rather than just throwing our hands up and saying, well, all that was for naught, but realizing that no, we're meeting before a God who is gracious and people are at different places along their Christian journey. I mean, You have brand new believers lifting their voice in the corporate prayer meeting, and you have people who've walked with God for 40 or 50 years lifting their voice. It's going to sound different.

You know, around my dinner table at night, it sounds different. What I say doesn't sound like what my five-year-old son says most of the time. I hope not. In terms of pitfalls that we need to be prepared to address and be prepared to sort of manage around at prayer meetings, One of them, which I'm sure all of us have been guilty of at some point, is sermons preached under the pretense of prayer. You know, somebody has something they want to communicate to the group, and so they use a prayer time to do that.

I have done that in the past and I really don't want to do that. I want my prayers to actually be to God, not to my brothers and sisters communicating a message. What would you say if you have someone or several someones who are regularly doing that as a pastor, sort of how would you weigh it into that? Yeah, I don't treat it from the pulpit because everybody's going to know who you're talking to and that's really not helpful. I mean, it's happened before.

I go to them as an individual and explain that I appreciate the zeal and their desire, and it's not necessarily wrong, but it's in the wrong place in the wrong context. And like there's a place for that, but the public prayer meeting is not. We're here to talk to God on behalf of one another, not to talk to one another on behalf of God. That's a good way to say that. Hey, let's talk about incorporating children.

You know, my view is that children, you know, there's a beautiful picture in Acts 21 verse five where, you know, the wives and the children are all gathered together. They kneel down on the shoreline and they pray together. It's a picture of children being involved. And, you know, I, my view is that one of the things that parents need to do is they need to teach their children that, hey, this is what Christians are supposed to do. This is what Christians do.

They pray, and there's so many good things about it. You know, children need to know that you pray because you're dependent. You need God. God is so good, we need him, so that's why we pray. What are some other things that parents need to do to prepare their children to be in the prayer meetings and then to be in the prayer meetings?

What are your thoughts on that? I have a co-elder who I would say is really good at this, and he prepares his children in terms of helping them know good things to pray for, less helpful things to pray for. Sometimes children come into prayer meetings and they're praying for things that just aren't very helpful. They're unaware of it. A length of prayers.

Some of them who have a propensity to pray over and over and over again and sort of dominate. You don't want to have children coming in and dominating your prayer meetings, he'll let them know, hey, I'd like for you to pray maybe two times, you know, tonight during the time, in order to just allow for space for other people to also pray and other children to also pray. Yeah. I think the difficulty with that comes from when families join the church who have school age or middle school age children who haven't been in an environment like that. That's where I have sensed the biggest difficulty.

I mean, my kids, for example, they don't know of a time going to church when there's not corporate prayer meeting. So it feels weird to them when we don't do it. It's not awkward. But for a family coming in from the community, what do you do with a four-year-old or a seven-year-old for this 45 minutes of seeking the Lord together? But I think if the parents understand the purpose of it, they can communicate that to the kids.

And Kids learn fast. They're resilient. I have had parents complain, you know, that their kids are bored during the prayer meeting. And I usually just say they're only bored because you are. And maybe that's not the best answer.

But typically the kids are going to feed off what the parents say. If you're coming into church and you're talking about looking forward to seeking the Lord together and being in a corporate prayer meeting, the kids are probably not gonna complain a whole lot. And there are quiet things that littler kids can do in the midst of a corporate prayer meeting, but Just having them there, they learn as a result of being there. They learn the types of things to pray for, and they're going to grow into that. When the Lord changes them, then they start lifting their voice to him in the midst of the congregation as well.

Comes to a prayer meeting and the only thing they get out of it is that they need God, we need God, and that He's good and that He listens. If that's all they get, to me that's enough, you know, when a child is young, if they just grab the ethos. But plus, if they listen, hey, when you get to the intercession parts, they'll learn about the hurts and the things that are going on in people's lives. One of the things that I love about our prayer meetings is that I hear people pray about things that I didn't even know about as a pastor, as one of the pastors of the church. And so everybody kind of gets calibrated that way.

So there are a lot of real benefits for children, but I think you have to coach children. I think you have to help them see how wonderful it is that God listens to his people. What an amazing thing, you know? And I know it's difficult for little ones, especially little ones, to concentrate and things like that, but I think it's way better to have them there and just keep teaching them, God is good, God listens, we need him really bad, and that's why we're here. Even if the only thing they learn is, wow, those people are really serious about prayer, or they're really serious about God, those are all good things to be communicated through a corporate prayer meeting to a child.

Yeah, yeah. And the gospel should be full-orbed, maybe not in every prayer, but throughout the prayer meeting, the full-orbed gospel should be present, And it's the hearing of the gospel that's going to result in faith in those children. Okay, so let's wind it up here. So Anthony, what's your speech to the church leaders that don't have corporate prayer meetings? I would say that the corporate prayer meeting is the best thermometer for measuring the temperature of the church or the health of the church.

So if you don't have a corporate prayer meeting, you don't even have a measuring stick to start with. Now, if you do have one, then it is the best measuring stick and it lets you know where the people are. You know, again, I said a lull in a prayer meeting typically is a result of self-sufficiency in some fashion. If you aren't having a prayer meeting, I think you're probably presuming upon God and being self-sufficient, you know, not seeing the importance of it, not taking the scriptures seriously. There's a lot in the Bible about prayer and the expectation is that we're getting together to pray.

I mean, we live in a day when church in our culture tends to be fairly far from what we see on the pages of the New Testament when we think about the way the service is put together or seeking to do what would draw more people or be more appetizing to man and his flesh. Prayer meetings are hard. It's difficult. When I first began pastoring here almost 10 years ago, I mean, I said I wanted to start a corporate prayer meeting immediately, and it was said to me, that will never work. You can't get people to pray publicly.

Like, it's dangerous, and or it's just going to be quiet, or people are going to take it over. And I just said, well, I'm pretty sure it can work because I've seen it work. I mean, I came from a church where we had a corporate prayer meeting every week, and I had been in those corporate prayer meetings for several years. So I knew that it could work, and I knew that it was beneficial and important to implement. Yeah, that's good stuff.

Okay, so what do you guys say to the person who's not attending their prayer meetings? Well, I think one of the reasons why that may be is the things that compete with it in life. In other words, churches can do this too. That's what I was thinking as you were speaking, Anthony. Churches can set up a busy church schedule so that the prayer meeting is competing with four or five other things on a weekly basis, or even you have the prayer meeting once a month because it doesn't rate compared to the things that you've set up as competitors.

So the churches that I've seen where prayer meetings are alive and are well attended are the churches that don't have a lot in competition with those prayer meetings. And so the person who's not attending it really needs to look at their life and say, what have I set up as competitors to prayer? Now think about that for a minute. You set up something in competition with prayer. Does it really deserve that spot?

Right, right. That's really critical. What about you, Anthony? What do you say to the guy who's not attending his prayer meeting? Yeah, I would just encourage him that as a member of a New Testament church, you have a covenant to be a part of the body, and the prayer meeting is a very important, a vitally important meeting of the church.

And every member should seek to be there and to play a meaningful part, either lifting their voice in prayer or being engaged enough to where they can be in agreement with the prayers that are being prayed. Yeah. Well, I heard it said a long time ago that if a person loves the church, they'll go to the worship services on Sunday morning. If they love the pastor, they go on Sunday night, but if they love God, they'll go to the prayer meeting. So, well, thank you so much.

I'm really grateful for God calling us to pray, for God calling us to be dependent upon Him and to cry out to Him. It's the best thing that a church can do. So maybe the Lord will use this to incite pastors and people in churches to really crank up the activity in their prayer life, their corporate prayer life. So, okay, Anthony, thank you so much for joining us. It was a blessing, great stuff.

I hope the Lord spreads it. Yep. Amen. Thanks for having me. Thanks.

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