David:          This visit Karen, I would like to take a chance and break with a pattern we usually follow.

Karen:          Oh, my goodness, I like doing things differently on occasion. So, let’s go for a change and see what happens. What are we doing?

David:          Well, if this visit bombs, what we will not be doing is abetting the pattern that we’ve known for so long anyway.

Karen:          Okay honey, what are we doing?

Intro:            Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:          Karen, our usual pattern is to put the point we’re making into a single sentence, and we usually normally save that well into the visit.

Karen:          So, we’re going to be radical. This podcast we have decided to feature that key sentence at the very beginning of our discussion and here it is. For the American church to regain the strength and prestige it once had, it must solve its prayerlessness problem.

David:          I’ll repeat it but before I do let me just say kind of listen closely, and as a follower of this podcast decide whether or not you agree with that premise. Okay?

For the American church to regain the strength and prestige it once had, it must solve its prayerlessness problem.

Okay, I believe Karen that that’s a fair statement and I think that we’re talking generally speaking. We’re not talking about a specific situation in which a person might be involved church-wise and it’s just a great church and there are praying church and all the rest. I’m talking generally speaking in terms of the American public and the American church. There is a prayerlessness problem. Do you think people agree with that?

Karen:          Well, I don’t know if they agree with it but the data gatherers, the Pew Forum and the Barna Group, have both come to this conclusion. In fact, the results of their studies and the very in-depth studies are rather stunning. 80% of praying adults, and we don’t know what the quality of those prayers are, but 80% of praying adults most often pray silently and by themselves. We don’t have the power now that we used to have prayer cells, prayer groups who met regularly and got to know one another, learn from one another, how to pray. I mean things were shared by example and things that went on saw the prayers answer together. So that kind of system that used to exist in America no longer exists in our churches.

David:          Yeah, I think that people are not accustomed to coming together to pray. As I was being raised, I can remember prayer meetings. It was a time of a short sermon and then there would be prayer requests. Most of the time those prayer requests were about people who were sick or had physical problems.

Karen:          …or lost their jobs or something like that and those are important.

David:          They are. Although, I didn’t know most of the people, so it made it difficult for me. Or it made it less meaningful to me and put it that way. And usually, they would stay in the same group and then several people would pray and that would kind of be the extent of it. It was a good church. I don’t have negative feelings about the church at all, but prayer was not a vital part.

Karen:          But that was your example of a church; how church pray.

David:          I had a good example Karen because I had this incredibly fortunate privilege of working with it. Youth for Christ on their national staff, and those guys prayed.

Karen:          Yeah, they knew how to pray.

David:          They really did, and I learned a lot just by listening to them. They were passionate.

Karen:          Those leaders rose up after the Second World War. I mean there was a whole renewal of Christian organizations in the States and Youth for Christ was one of the significant ones and you were very privileged to be part of those leaders.

David:          I was kind of at the lowest part of the totem, but I learned from them in many ways and Karen they actually had times when they prayed all night.

Karen:          Yeah, they did.

David:          I never made it through the whole night, but they were amazing leaders in that sense.

Karen:          Now the interesting thing is that data studies, as I mentioned the Pew Forum and Barna Group, have found that only a very small percentage of people pray audibly with another person or group. Only two percent of the people who are praying have that group prayer experience or even collectively pray with a group in a church. So, we have a prayerlessness problem because history has shown, as you have talked about many times, that the great movements of God always grow on the base of huge prayer movements that begin to develop. I mean I’ve said we need thousands of these small prayer cells all over the country.

David:          You’re talking we need millions.

Karen:          We’re saying we need millions of small prayers in order for America to be affected again. In the prestige that you’re talking about as far as the local churches that we’re wanting to see are not great buildings. I mean that’s fine, but this church is demonstrating what Christians should be in among themselves. Look how they love one another and then at their impact on the community in the societies around them.

David:          Okay we are in a situation where there’s so much that is commendable about the church of late. I mean we’re very good in terms of youth ministry. We’re good in terms of the whole transition of what’s happening musically in the church. We’re in a position where…

Karen:          Using visuals. Many churches use visuals that are very up to date with overhead screens and whatever.

David:          Programming. We’re very good. Organizational. We’re good in many, many ways but we are lacking in this area of effective fervent prayer.

Karen:          In my research on this topic, I came up with an article by Pastor Daniel Henderson. And he heads up a group called the Strategic Renewal Group. And so, he began to ask why don’t pastors lead our churches in prayer.

David:          Good article and can you review some of those big points?

Karen:          I will. Many of these pastors grew up in a prayerless church environment. So, we’re talking about the young group who are in their 20s, early 30s, and those 20 years that was in their formation period, they weren’t a part of churches. They didn’t have any models. Most of these were trained in a prayerless educational process and he refers then to his own education in seminary.

Read just a little bit of what he said. “I received seven years of formal undergraduate and graduate sermons on prayer and studied theological truths about prayer, but no one took me aside and taught me to pray by praying with me on a regular basis.” And he says, “this is the problem with most pastors. They’ve never had anyone tutor them, be a mentor to them in how to be praying people and how to create praying people.”

David:          He’s seen in college and seminary all those years. I learned a lot of things, but I didn’t experience the privilege of praying with a mentor. Exactly. That would be common, very, very common.

Karen:          That would be my experience as well. That would be your experience as well in a seminary.

David:          But Youth for Christ did fill that void for me.

Karen:          Yeah, you had an example that was after you had some a couple years of seminary.

Three: some of these pastors are not sure how to lead effective and life-changing prayer experiences and so they feel unsure and inadequate.

David:          I would say that you probably won’t solve the problem of prayerlessness in the church by preaching sermons about it. It may have some effect but that’s not the best way to resolve it. I would agree with what he says there.

Karen:          So, he points up this interesting thing. All of the ministers are in a prayerless success-oriented culture, the culture at large, and the culture within the church. And in order to be a successful church, you have to have measurements for that growth. Finances that are coming in enough to support the outreach, and of the baptism. And those are all great. But he talks about being in a statewide church leadership conference. And he said after his session a man approached him, explaining that he was the chairman of the Pastoral Search Committee in his local church.

David:          So, they were looking for a minister?

Karen:          Yes, and he pulled out a list this man did of over 85 desirable attributes for their next pastor which had been compiled through a survey of the congregation. 85 desirable attributes.

David:          Doing his homework.

Karen:          Many of the qualities centered on things like communication skills, that’s great. Management ability, fine. Pleasant personality, oh we hope so, and strong pastoral care interests. But nowhere on the list was there any mention of the priority of prayer as an essential for the new pastor. Isn’t that extraordinary?

David:          No, I’d say that’s probably…

Karen:          …I’d say its common.

David:          It’s an oversight but the oversight reveals where we’re coming from.

Karen:          There are a couple more points that we’ll go through quickly. Many pastors want to avoid the embarrassment of a prayerless church. So, when you call for a prayer meeting and you have a handful of people who come, it states in a visual kind of reality way that this is not a church that knows how to pray or is interested in praying, can’t make the time for it. And I think one of the things we might say here, David, is that our culture overloads our systems. We have so much screen time that we spend on that other generations didn’t have. We’re busy, busy, busy, we’re going, going, going, our calendars are full. You know there’s no time for prayer to be built into that.

David:          Well, we haven’t made the time.

Karen:          Well, we haven’t felt like it was important enough to make the time.

David:          I would agree. These are all very helpful. Yeah, there are more?

Karen:          Yeah, there’s a couple more. Some battle a prayerless personal life. It’s hard to take the church farther than you have journeyed in your own life.

Now there are ways to do that and that means an act of humility. I don’t know how to pray very well and I’m going to connect myself with people in my church who are farther along than I am so I can learn from them. And we’re going to them learn from one another. I mean that’s just a hard place for many pastors to come from to admit that. But that is one of the reasons why we don’t have brain leadership in our church.

And there one more. Every pastor is a special target of the enemy. You can bet that enemy doesn’t want our pastor to be praying pastors or churches to be praying churches.

David:          Yeah, that’s very fair. That’s helpful. I’d like to say that we’ll talk on this topic several more times because there’s a lot of study that has been done by very confident people. I don’t feel as though I am lacking in experience, but I also don’t feel like I’m the only person who has insight into this. Even when I join with you, the two of us, we need help trying to say how do we resolve this thing, which is a massive problem in terms of our land.

Karen:          I think the bottom line we’re going for, because many people do pray. I mean, 80% of people who are faith-based say they pray, but it’s an individual prayer. It’s not out loud, and it’s hard to measure how much that prayer goes on in their lives. Maybe, oh God, help me find my car keys.

David:          That’s exactly right. It depends on the questionnaire. Do you pray in the course of that? Oh, yes, all the time.

Karen:          Yeah, so what we’re going to go toward in the next podcast is trying to build a case for the fact that America needs and the church in America needs prayer groups that meet regularly and we’re recommending once a week. Same group of people, maybe four to eight is an ideal group of people, and they learn how to pray with one another by praying with one another. And you are in a group like that. If you have a chance on this podcaster and the next ones, I would like you to really go into what you have learned from your prayer group that meets weekly by phone.

David:          Well, you say what I’ve learned. There’s so much that I’ve learned. These are people in different parts of the country, and we come together once a week on Wednesdays at noon to pray for an hour. There are eight of us that are consistently there, and then sometimes other people will join us. I don’t know how they hear about it, probably through some of the people that say, would you like to join us? Probably the word would be it’s a revival prayer.

Karen:          Revival prayer.

David:          We’re praying for a new life to come to the church. I find that a lot of times when somebody in that group will pray something, they use a great expression, and then I write it down.

Karen:          You’re copying.

David:          That’s very good. I’m going to tell you that again because that was what I was trying to express and couldn’t get it right, but that’s a good phrase. So, you’re in trouble, God. You got to listen to it.

Karen:          That’s one of the examples of what praying in a prayer group does for us. It opens our minds that sometimes get closed to certain ways of doing things in certain formulas, and then someone else breaks out according to their own patterns, and we go, wow. Oh, my goodness. That’s wonderful. So that’s why those are the things that happen in these prayer cells.   

David:          One of the persons in the group prayed this last time and said, “I don’t know why I keep track of these things, but this is my 200th time to join with the group and pray.” And I thought, “Wow,” because this is one of the persons who joined later on. And we had been praying for some time before he became a part. So, I didn’t start it. Somebody else started it. I’m a part of the group. I would say that we’re probably into 350 times we’ve prayed together.

Karen:          He’s been going for quite a while.

David:          It’s the highlight of my week.

Karen:          Ok.

David:          It is the highlight of my week. I really, really enjoyed it. I have learned so much. And as a group, we have become quite powerful in the sense that one of the women of the group said the other day, “Lord, this is the most important hour of my whole week.”

Karen:          Oh, my goodness.

David:          “I am called to be here. We are your praying people. We want you to know that we’re on your side and we’re praying what we feel is your heart.”

Karen:          And whenever I ask you, well, how did your prayer group go today? You always say recently, the last couple of months, “Oh, it was great. It was wonderful.”

And then I’ll say, “Well, why was it so wonderful?” And then we’ll go into the reasons for that. But it has really impacted you and you are 85 years of age. You’re learning things new about prayer.

David:          Oh yeah. That’s really true. I don’t think you will solve the prayerlessness problem in the church by saying, “Let’s have a Wednesday night service” or something of that sort where the whole congregation comes together, and a few people pray. But I do think you can solve it if all we see these churches with many small groups where people are learning from one another and have a long-range vision because you don’t call us as a group immediately. It takes a while. I would say, Karen, that one of our great trials coming up is that there’s going to be a political election and there’ll be people on both sides of that.

Karen:          Yeah, you have very different political positions in your groups. And you’ve weathered it really well, I think.

David:          You said the prayer group is bigger than political.

Karen:          Beautiful. That’s beautiful.

David:          And it’s a learning process even in that regard. How do you pray for those people? I think that, Karen, every prayer group, there needs to be leadership. Now, that leadership could change over time or it could say, I’m deferring for a while, the so-and-so you need to say.

Karen:          Someone, though, who makes sure the group gets through the process well and doesn’t get boggled down in the process, and that’s easy to happen in any group of any kind.

David:          Yeah. I would say that if pastors could call people to form into small groups, let them pick out the ones they want. If the group grows too big, they’ll divide. They’ll do what they need to do. But it’s not going to happen without the creativity of the people involved. Some people may say, “You know what? Our group comes an hour early to church and we immediately go to the room. We don’t horse around. We just start to pray. And we pray up until 10 minutes before the service starts. That’s our weekly time when we come together as a group.”

Karen:          Well, I think that we have to ask them to make a covenant. We have to ask people to be serious about this because a lot of the lessons that come from praying in a group come a little bit later on as you get to know one another better. And then not a lot of time is spent in the prayer time doing that, getting to know one another, you know one another as you hear one another praying.

So, there needs to be kind of a commitment. I will attend this group, and we’ll see what happens for a year. And we will meet this frequently or we will meet at this time. And we’re recommending once a week, but they have to frame that themselves. But there has to be that kind of covenant commitment to the group.

David:          Yeah, we’re getting a little bit big, so we need to split.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          It’s going to be hard.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          We will do it.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          So and so on the church would be good at this but isn’t involved in the group. So, let’s see if we can pull that person in. Let’s see if maybe in the next half year we can divide it in two because we’ve learned a lot. And if we could bring people along in the process, that would be very good. But those prayer cells are very important, and it does take leadership. I think if you just come and say, let’s get together and see what happens.

Karen:          There’s always sort of a feeling of who, who, who, who, what, what, what, what, what, you know, that voice you, if you have someone who is a skilled leader that takes that uncomfortableness away from the group that’s meeting. And they can trust that that person here, she will move them along in the right kind of way.

David:          Yeah. And some people will be very organized, and some people will be much.

Karen:          …Very spontaneous.

David:          Spontaneous. Yeah. I like the organized time.

Karen:          And I like the spontaneous.

David:          Well, I would say if you put me in charge, I’m going to say, okay, we got six minutes. We’re going to pray prayers of praise. Let me explain what it means. We’ll go through it. Then we will stop, and we’ll start to pray prayers of thanks or gratitude. Then we’ll be in a situation where we’re going to bring our requests before the Lord. But we’re praying in terms of the nation, in terms of the churches of the land, not only in terms of our community, our church, but the other churches in our community. We’re praying for a great movement of the Holy Spirit and we’re going to learn together. We’re going to see something amazing on this day.

Karen:          I have a wonderful example of this that just came to my attention.

So, we have many prisoners who’ve been taken out of inner-city neighborhoods because of crimes and put in jails and we’ve followed some of this in Chicago. And in the prisons, there hasn’t been a real renewal and revival and coming to Jesus, it’s kind of movement.

David:          Yeah, it’s been one of the great highlights going on in terms of…

Karen:          Yeah, extraordinary. And so, I was reading an article about Chicago, which has a high crime rate, a lot of shootings. I mean, its gang related, and the writer made the comment that we have all of these young men now who’ve been in prison for years, many who’ve gotten their degrees in prison. They’ve had tutoring and wonderful relationships with prison ministries. They’ve become Christian and they have grown in their faith who are now being released back into their old neighborhoods.

Imagine the impact of it and talk about answer to prayer in the most unusual sort of way. But that’s the kind of thing that these groups we’re talking about effectuates. So, we do have markers for the impact of our prayers. And this is one example of what happens when people pray.

David:          Yeah, very much so. Let me repeat that sentence once more and say that we’re just getting into it, and we’re determined that we’re going to be positive and not be critical. People don’t need to be beaten over the…

Karen:          No, they don’t need to be ashamed.

David:          For the American church to regain the strength and prestige it once had, it must solve its prayerlessness problem.

Outro:          You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters, hosts@beforewego.show.

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