Prayer Meetings: A Zooming Success!
We’ve all heard about niche industries, f1 racing and products for left-handed people spring to my mind. The church has a sort of niche market too, prayer meetings. Prayer meetings may seem quite an odd phenomenon in our western culture where faith seems a discredited characteristic but in the general church the prayer meeting is a powerful force to be reckoned with. Bethany works hard at prioritising prayer and one of the leaders makes it his focus in his church work. Current technologies have helped sustain the prayer meeting at Bethany. Zoom virtual prayer meetings may not have the same personal feel as an actual meeting but are popular when people aren’t happy about venturing out into the cold dark winter nights. Zoom prayer meetings are massively convenient too, brew up, boot up the computer login to zoom and away you go. Need to get a prayer need out amongst the congregation… post it on our WhatsApp group? Instant responses guaranteed!
Prayer meetings often have bad press, boring is probably a word that might be used by some, But I take that with a pinch of salt, some people’s idea of boring must mean something else than the standard definition of ‘not interesting; tedious’ because they are anything but boring. It seems counter intuitive calling prayer boring when we reach out in faith ready to change the world. Want to see your neighbourhood changed? Come to the Bethany church prayer meeting. More concerned about seeing yourself changed. God will do that too, join us at the prayer meeting. What else? World Peace? Not sure about the idea of world peace being a topic for prayer. The Bible is very realistic and world peace is definitely not something on Christ’s agenda.
What happens at a prayer meeting? To be quite honest they are usually very much a sameness, probably because most people seem to like sameness. Sometimes amazing things happen, and God’s Holy Spirit explodes the meeting and everything is changed. In fact, I was reading about such very events this morning and how the guys who followed Jesus in the book of Acts saw wonderful things including miracles. Meanwhile, back at the Bethany prayer meeting. There is music and singing, inspirational talks, bible readings, prophetic words and, not forgetting the important bit, prayer. People share things from their everyday lives and ask for prayer: health problems, challenges the church may be facing are two common topics. Sometimes people fast as well, the act of fasting can seem counterintuitive and that I think is one of its secrets, we are forced to change our mindsets from ‘I can do this’ to ‘I can only do this with God’s help’.
Do you get the idea? The meetings are encouraging and life affirming; they build unity in the group and often challenge people to actually do something, becoming the answer to their own prayer.
Bethany Prayer, weekly, Tuesday evening. You will certainly be welcomed by one and all.
