Prayerlesness, a pastor's achilles heel

If you want to witness first hand the state of corruption in modern American Christianity, just take a visit to your local Christian bookstore. The kinds of books available, the music, and the Christian trinkets are all an obvious sign of the superficiality and shallowness of the church. What is perhaps most telling of the pathetically weak state of the our spiritual strength is in the picture above. Out of all the thousands of books in a large Christian bookstore in San Jose, CA this is all you will find on the subject of prayer. If you look closely at the photo you will find that almost two of the five rows of books are written by the same author who is a woman. In fact, I thought it was very interesting that most the authors represented on this shelf are women: Stormie Omartian, Beth Moore, Beverly Lewis and a guy with a really hideous old woman's hair-do, Philip Yancey. Is this the best on prayer that American Evangelicalism can produce? Are there no men of prayer who have anything to say about it or is it that only women understand their need and dependence on God? Unfortunately, this is the sad reality - Christian leaders don't pray and they don't know how to pray! They don't need to pray since they have all the means available to them to grow their churches without any need of God's help. After all, most of Evangelicalism and even Fundamentalism is a product of Charles Finney's heretical Palagianism:

" Revivals were formerly regarded as miracles...For a long time it was suppsed by the Church that a revival was a miracle, an interposition of Divine power, with which they had nothing to do, and which they had no more agency in producing than they had in producing thunder or an earthquake. It is only within a few years that ministers generally have supposed revivals to be promoted, by the use of means designed and adapted specially to that object..." -Charles Finney, (from Lectures on Revivals of Religion)

Well, if we have no need for a miracle of God, then why would we need to pray so hard for it? There are plenty of means at our human disposal that are designed to produce what we once thought only God could do. So, walk around the other side of the book shelf and you will find rows and rows full of books about church growth and leadership by Rick Warren, Bill Hybles, John Maxwell and George Barna!

If you think my assessment is inaccurate, I would contend that it is not. Whenever I have a guest preacher  visit our church; or if I go out to lunch with a pastor; or if I am in the presence of a seasoned pastor from whom I can learn, I always ask him to teach me how I can improve my prayer life. I have not yet had one man give me any substantive advice on prayer except Steve Lawson who advised me to pray through the Scripture, especially the Psalms. What I usually hear from every other preacher is something like this:

(nervously squirming)
"Well, you know, that's not my strongest area. I pray here and there, in the car, while preparing sermons...uh, I wish I could say I had a better habit of prayer."

or 

"Ya, um....um...I am not that good at focusing my attention in a dedicated time of prayer, so I just kinda...you know...pray during the day and try to maintain a spirit of prayer."

Praying through out the day in spirit of prayer? That goes without saying!....ya right, how spiritual you try to sound! If you are one of these guys and you're reading this, I love you and want to sincerely rebuke you for dereliction of duty. The last time I checked, the Apostles stated that their main work in the church was the ministry of prayer and the word:

Acts 6:4 But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word.

You are not supposed to just try and pray here and there when the Lord puts something on your heart, you need to give yourself continually to prayer! How many members of our churches go un-prayed for because their pastor is too lazy or careless to figure out how to make prayer one of his "strong areas"?!  These same guys somehow have the ability to concentrate when it comes to following their favorite football team. Prayer is supposed to be one of your strong areas, in fact, it's supposed to be your strongest area only to be matched by your skill in exegeting and preaching Scripture! Listen to the average sermon on any given church's website, and I guarantee that the preacher's prayer life is probably many times more pathetic than his little pep talk that he calls preaching.

Just the other day, I got together with some pastors who have a weekly prayer meeting and are a part of a larger network of churches that partner in mercy ministry. There were probably less than ten of us. Yet, at the annual free luncheon, somehow over a hundred of them come out of the wood work to get their free meal, but most of them never show up to the weekly prayer meetings. I appreciated one of the pastor's words of admonition by telling us that we are being hypocritical to talk about revival when we're not willing to pray for one hour a week with other pastors for it! He hit me too since I have not been as personally involved in that prayer meeting as I should. I could almost feel the Lord's holy frustration in his spirit:

Mark 14:37 Then He (Jesus) came and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, "Simon, are you sleeping? Could you not watch one hour?

None of us could ever claim that we pray as we ought, just like none of us could dare claim that we are as holy as we ought to be. But, there is such an apathy concerning prayer among pastors when there should at least be a deliberate, regular, exhausting exercise of prayer that at least makes an honest attempt to intercede for the membership and tap into the power of God.

Now, maybe the stone I've thrown has hit a dog who will bark at me and challenge my prayer life. Fair enough. In a nutshell, I'll share what I do and perhaps blog about it a little more so that I offer a solution instead of merely complaining about the problem - Everyday, the first thing I do is grab a cup of coffee, plug in my iPod and listen to Bach.  I take out my Bible, a prayer book called "The Valley of Vision" and a notebook. After a reading in scripture and in the prayer book, I then proceed to write out a personal letter to God for the day. I follow the structure of the Lord's Model prayer found in Matthew 6:5-15 to give me some structure and to submit myself to the rights of God while approaching Him with my requests. This has been what has worked for me. I understand that I am like many of you - getting on my knees beside my bed and wearing grooves in my wood floor with my knees like "Praying Hyde" - is not going to happen. I'll fall asleep or my mind will quickly wonder in every other direction. The pen and paper are like harnesses on my attention that lead me to real communication with God. Perhaps this doesn't work for you. Fine, whatever...find something that does work for you and give yourself continually to it! I try to ignore all phone calls and I try to care less about all the urgent business that usually needs to be done before noon. I'd rather neglect emails, letter writing, returning phone calls, errands and other necessary demands on my time than to neglect what God has called me to do. You wouldn't ever neglect preparing your sermons would you? Of course not, because scores of people will know without a doubt that you were derelict of duty on Sunday morning if you get up there unprepared. Of course, if you're a charlatan of a pastor, you could always download pre-made TV dinner sermons from here so you can do more important things like improve your golf swing. If you were to go through the week having only prayed 5-10 minutes, how is anyone going to know? They won't, and that's why it's so easy to neglect prayer. Nobody is watching you, nobody is demanding you to punch a clock, nobody is looking over your shoulder. But God watches you waste your time on the internet, Facebooking and Twittering your every bowel movement for the world to read about while the people you are called to oversee never get a single mention in prayer on their behalf by their pastor for weeks, months or years.

Anyway, why don't you stop trying to figure out the hottest new trends from Willow Creek and get on your face before God so that you can have real revival in your church instead of the fake revivalism that prayerless men are trying to produce!? I may never pastor a mega church or get invited to big conferences, but when my ministry is over, I want my church and my family to be able to have tens of  thousands of pages of my personal prayers as a testimony to my love for them and my time before the throne of God on their behalf!