Recently a little boy told his mother that he would rather eat a squirrel than read a book! Last night I was surprised to discover that a lot of adults would rather eat a squirrel than pray in public.
Our pastor asked the congregation why the Sunday night prayer service is so poorly attended that he is able to hold it in his office rather than the sanctuary. A number of theories were put forth, but no one seemed to have a real answer to his question. Then a man said something that caused most of the congregation to nod in agreement, “Prayer is the most personal communication there is. It’s very hard to do something so intimate in front of a lot of other people.”
I knew immediately that this man had spoken for most of the people there. It isn’t really the television, or the sports, or the apathy that is keeping them away from the prayer services. They are staying away because they do not want to expose the most intimate aspects of their lives to people they hardly know.
After considering this matter, I think that the real problem is that most people do not know the difference between personal prayer and corporate prayer. Personal prayer is, absolutely, the most intimate form of communication. God knows everything about us. He knows everything that we have done and everything that we have thought. We, therefore, use our private prayer time to confess our sins and ask for forgiveness. We hold back nothing because there is nothing He does not already know. Because of the level of intimacy that we share with Him, nothing is either too insignificant, or too terrible to lay at His feet.
Corporate prayer is an entirely different matter. Normally, when people gather together to pray, they are praying about something specific. I have attended prayer meetings held prior to elections; I have attended prayer meetings for our city and our neighborhoods; I have attended prayer meetings for my church. The list is endless, but in every case these gatherings for public prayer had a focus. While it is never “wrong” to pray for something personal in this kind of meeting, that is not the purpose, and no one expects the meeting to turn into a sort of “true confessions” session.
On several occasions I have been asked ahead of time to pray at these kinds of meetings. In these cases it is my practice to spend time preparing by asking God what I am supposed to pray for during the meeting. I do not write out a prayer, but I do seek God to find out what he wants my particular focus to be. I once spent several hours during the week praying about a five-minute prayer that I was to offer on Sunday. When I was satisfied that I knew the direction my prayer was to take, I went to church with three specific points that I covered in my five minutes.
Prayer is spontaneous, but I believe that corporate prayer should have focus. If you are in a meeting and feel that God is directing you to pray for something that you had not thought of earlier, by all means do it, but don’t just show up and start talking out loud to God. As in most things, corporate prayer benefits from good preparation.
When I prepare, I ask God to show me what the people who will be in attendance need, and I ask him to give me a prayer that will help and bless them. Every group is different and corporate prayer gives us an opportunity to pray for the specific needs of those attending that particular meeting. Perhaps God wants the focus to be prayer for our marriages, or our children, or our nation. We do not know the specific concerns of the other people in attendance, but He does. This gives us an opportunity to pray for people without knowing the details of their lives. After all, God is the only one who needs to know all the details.
If you are a person who has a difficult time praying in public, I hope that you will rethink corporate prayer. It is very different from personal prayer because it is not about you. If you will make other people the focus and ask God to guide your prayer so that their needs will bemet, you will discover that praying in public is not so hard after all.
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