How Prayer Changed Our Church in Forty Days
HELLO FRIENDS,
I transitioned for the first time from one lead pastor position to another. We moved in the middle of Coronavirus from April through June, in the year 2020, across the mid-west. Coming into an established church with one hundred in regular attendance, I began to realize a very dysfunctional church family. Some members remember the good ol’ days in the 1980s and how things were five pastors ago. Some longed for the leadership and gospel-centered ministry from three pastors ago. Half of the church was blaming at least someone for their favorite pastor leaving. Obviously, there is much more to this scenario than time would allow me to explain.
I assumed my position as lead pastor in the middle of an anxious time with a church that has different opinions for how the church should select a new pastor and different visions for what the new pastor’s goals and style should be. With it being public knowledge that I am not the best candidate in a small minority’s view, I decided to stand firm in the assurance that God Himself called me here. As I came to understand the distress of this church, all of my goals begin to shift through prayer as to what must happen. Already every area of ministry has been postponed because of Covid-19, so the togetherness has been hindered. We needed a moving of the Holy Spirit that I’m certain few have seen in their Christian life.
In a desperate attempt to help this church, who were now my family and friends, I pleaded for prayer. Not realizing the strain, it would be on my family and the difficulty it would bring to others' lives, I announces one Sunday morning “Forty consecutive days of prayer, three times a day; 6:00AM, 12:00PM, and 7:00PM. Starting tomorrow morning.” And so we began…
1. We prayed for Unity
We began to pray for unity, that God would knit our hearts together. That God would help us forgive one another. After three sessions of prayer, the first day yielded a total of thirty-one prayer partners with ten in the morning, five in the afternoon, and sixteen in the evening. After several days in this direction of prayer, I began to hear an eagerness to the call for unity. I began to hear names being called out to God for reproof in this very public congregational style of praying. No doubt we prayed for unity but were gifted with comradery.
As we would hear someone pray for people that were on their heart, others then would pick up that burden and pray for that person as well even if they didn’t know who they were. We also heard prayers for the people sitting in that room. Prayers like “God, help her know that you love her, that you want to be in the middle of her life. Help her know that she is not alone and has family here that loves her. God I know you love her.” As people continue to pray intimately, there is an encouraging Spirit among them.
When praying intimately but congregationally, it becomes natural to let your guard down and start showing your vulnerabilities in your prayers. Some began to pray for themselves and the hurt that they have personally experienced in the last few years. Some revealed their own personal fears in raising a family and being responsible for young lives and the desire to exemplify godliness. A few prayed for some to forgive them while others voiced their failures and repented to God in this public prayer meeting. Even prayers of repentance for the church as a whole.
2. Unexpectedly we received an Awakening
As prayer continued into the halfway mark of twenty days, it had become clear that God was listening. Individuals were voicing their adorations toward God in thanksgiving for answered prayers. And so we prayed bigger. We prayed with expectation of future blessings. We praised our God and we knew God was working. Our faith was growing each consecutive day of prayer.
No longer did it seem like a prayer challenge but rather a prayer privilege. We were no longer spending time praying; we were investing time praying. As we prayed for others, we began to have an overwhelming desire to reach out to them. There was a moment that stuck out to me, it was the moment we stopped asking for God to help in someone else’s life and started asking God to use us to help them. We were becoming the way God answered our own prayers.
Each day of prayer had a new level of dependence on God. We plead for a Spiritual awakening for us and others and we prayed for churches in our city to be solely dependent on God. Our newly given wisdom of depending on God for more than just the spiritual things in our church had brought an atmosphere of revival; a beautiful breath of fresh air. Revival has changed our conversations. The NFL had started but few want to discuss the stats of the game. The conversation had been drawn around the gospel and our place in building the Kingdom of God. When the church begins speaking about the same things, we start seeing what unity looks like.
3. Revival imported by prayer
The size of the prayer meeting was growing slowly, averaging out at almost fifty each day. We saw many guests and even a staff member from another church getting in on this wonderful endeavor. What does Revival look like inside of an established church in just a month and a half? A term that I have invented that drives Auto-Correct crazy is “sibling-ness.” This church has a certain sibling quality few churches experience that even these guests and ministry leaders could see.
Churches naturally have friendships within them: people with whom they have things in common, those they encounter weekly in small groups, people they find clever or interesting. But when revival enters into a church that has a wide range of ages and stages of life, I seemed to only be able to explain it as sibling-ness, sisters and brothers caring for one another.
Another amazing side effect of revival being imported by prayer is that we are still reaping the seeds that were sown during those forty days. We see Him working in the hearts of individuals that have no idea that a group of people prayed for them diligently and consistently. We see the awesomeness of God answering the prayers of this small church in the heart of the city. As we rejoice almost daily for what is still being done by God my faith has increased, my expectations have changed, and my family has grown.
Revival is not brought in by a dynamic speaker, a cleaver preacher, or a missionary with stories that only they can comprehend. Revival is not a program you implement. Revival is a gift that only God can give to those who strive for connection and real communion with the One who breathed the worlds into existence, brought the intensity of a burning bush, and caused dead bones to live again.
If you ask any regular church member if they would like to experience revival in their church, most likely they would say yes. If you cautioned them and say that it would cost them something, they would probably grab a checkbook. However, when you explain that revival comes from sacrificing a great deal of time, convenience, and giving up your self-preservation mentality, most will shy away from it. Pastors, are you willing to plea with God without ceasing to see the flock you shepherd grow in the newness of revival?
Joshua Hargis
Pastor | Elyria Baptist Church, Elyria Ohio