Here’s a helpful way to understand the role of the mid-week prayer meeting in the life of the church.
It’s there to stop food waste.
In the UK, 9.5 million tonnes of good food is thrown away every year – even though 8.4 million people in the UK are classified as in “food poverty”. What a waste! Closer to home, you might know the feeling of a forgotten, unopened bag of salad in the fridge which went off. Or maybe, for some reason, you’ve found yourself scraping a carefully prepared dinner into the bin; it’s a real disappointment.
Well, the prayer meeting’s role is to stop food waste, but I’m not talking physically, but spiritually. The function of the church prayer meeting is to stop the food that God gave us on Sunday going off, and being unused!
What God gives us on Sunday is food. It’s spiritual nutrition. And it’s designed to be our major spiritual input of the week. Of course, we supplement it daily with our private and family intake of God’s word; but Sunday is our main feeding time. When the word of God is preached, Hebrews 5 calls it either “milk” or “solid food”. But either way, God’s word is designed to make us grow. And what he gives us in his word on Sundays is goodfood. That doesn’t mean the sermons themselves are always brilliant. But the food content is good. Sunday by Sunday you’re served the gospel of grace. You hear about faith and repentance in the Lord Jesus Christ. Hebrews 13:9 says: “Don’t be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, which have not benefited those devoted to them”. So, your ministers try not to serve you ultra-processed foods on Sunday, with artificial flavours and additives. We want to feed you spiritual food that will do you good. On Sunday night, it’s like we head home from church with our shopping bags, stuffed with good food from God.
And the question is: what are we going to do with it? Will we just let it go to waste? Will we just forget about it, and snack the rest of the week on other foods we find lying around?
James 2:22 says: “be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves”. That is a description of spiritual food-waste, isn’t it? Notice, James says this food waste isn’t something conscious. It’s not as though we deliberately think: “right, God gave me this bottle of milk, and I’m consciously going to leave it in the fridge, and let it go off”. That’s not what happens. No, we “deceive ourselves”. We don’t notice that we’re wasting God’s food. We don’t notice that we’re only hearing it, and stopping there; we don’t notice that it’s not changingus, and being acted upon.
So, part of prayer meeting’s role is to go back to the food from Sunday, to thank God for it, to reflect on what we’ve done with it, and what we’re still going to do with it. To change the food metaphor slightly: Tuesday (when we have church prayer meeting) is an opportunity to digest Sunday. Mentally, it’s really helpful for us to make the connection between Sunday and Tuesday. Tuesday is a different meeting, but it’s not to have a different agenda. Our agenda in prayer is to be set by the agenda of Sunday. It’s like on Sunday the food goes into the church’s mouth, hopefully it’s chewed over, after the service in conversations over coffee; on Sunday it’s swallowed, but on Tuesday it moves deeper down into the church’s digestive system, and at prayer meeting the word preached is prayed through; it’s absorbed. Through prayer, the Holy Spirit moves the nourishment of the Word into our bloodstream as a church.
If you think of our relationship to God as a conversation, it’s like on a Sunday, God speaks to us collectively, and on Tuesday we collectively speak back to him. But imagine a conversation in which there’s no connection between what God says to us and what we say back to him. We’ve probably all been in “conversations” like that! It isn’t really a dialogue, but two monologues! See, if the word preached on Sundays isn’t affecting the prayers prayed on Tuesday, what does that show? It shows we’re not really listening to him; we’re being “hearers only”.
So, what we ask God for as a church should change in light of what is preached. What we hear on Sundays should affect what we pray for on Tuesdays. This is why our prayers at prayer meeting are so revealing. They show what it is we really, really want as a congregation. They reveal what makes us tick as a church. And what we really want needs to be continually shaped by what God says to us in the preaching of the gospel. The point is to let the word shape, direct, correct, and train our prayers. I think when, together, we begin to grasp this connection between the word preached and the prayers prayed it’s a very exciting, healthy thing. It gives the prayer meeting a spiritual chemistry, because as a body we’re being nourished by the Word in much deeper ways than we otherwise would.
So, what is prayer meeting doing in the life of the church? It’s there to stop food waste; it’s the place where collectively we get to pray through what God has said to us in the preaching of the Word, asking him to bring its truth to bear on our congregation, neighbourhood, and world. The congregational prayer meeting is the place of spiritual digestion.