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A Week of Prayer Shapes a Church |
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The year was 1981. It was a Tuesday morning during my first year in the pastoral ministry at Rexdale Alliance church. (I had come out of an 11-year career with Atomic energy of Canada). The mail for that day included a reminder to participate in our denomination’s annual world week of prayer. During the week our entire denomination, represented by missionaries and national churches in 50+ countries around the world, would pray at the same time and for largely the same needs, majoring on issues related to the global advance of the kingdom of Christ.
Later that day I asked one of my colleagues on staff whether she had seen the piece of mail. She had—and it was now in her waste basket. Chagrined, I enquire as to the reason. She told me that she knew of no church that actually set aside an entire week for prayer so she was disillusioned with it.
“Well, let’s change that,” I said. That started Rexdale on a journey. From that year on we began to earmark one week every year for prayer--we set aside Monday to Friday evening from about 7:30 to 9:30 pm to pray for various aspects of church ministry and global missions. This happened usually in March or April. About 35-50 people would attend.
Then, sometime in 1992 I came across a pamphlet written by Richard Roberts. Several passages caught my attention. Two that came across with the proverbial sledgehammer force were these.
“As soon as it becomes evident that immorality is on the increase and spirituality is on the decline, the biblically sound and spiritually lively church will not foolishly blame the world but will immediately recognize its own complicity. The church must first repent, for the righteous judgment was not against the world but against the church. Therefore in times of spiritual declension and moral decadence, the great duty of every Christian is both, to discover those sins that have caused the judgment, and to put them away by that method which God Himself has chosen . . . the Solemn Assembly. Corporate sin must be dealt with by corporate repentance according to divinely ordained methods.
“The evangelical movement in our country is characterized by an arrogance that is beyond belief. The neglect of prayer, the involvement in Philistine methodology, the moral evils and the doctrinal corruptions that characterize the movement are sufficient to cause Sodomites to wonder at God's justice in destroying their city while sparing North America. As God has been degraded to a being scarcely a half inch bigger than us humans, we have assumed gigantic proportions in our own eyes. In consequence of this, professed Christians have felt a liberty to neglect major portions of Scripture and be virtually untaught in, and unaffected by, the long history of the Christian Church. The Solemn Assembly has simply fallen into oblivion at the hands of a people too arrogant to know that their own corporate sins--especially those heart sins of pride, unbelief and rebellion--have created a nation ripe for destruction.”
It was this focus on corporate repentance that God brought to the forefront of my thinking. Yes, we had made sure that the denomination’s week of prayer was to some extent truly a prayer week in our church, but repentance, especially corporate repentance, was not a part of that week.
So we made two key changes/ additions to our week of prayer:
- We moved our annual week of prayer to the first full week of each year. We cancelled all programs in the church so nothing would compete with our people’s participation in this effort. We encouraged them to at least give the time that they would normally would to a ministry and devote that instead to sharing in this prayer time.
- We made corporate repentance a major part of the prayer agenda, starting the week with a Solemn Assembly. We wanted to begin the year by clearing the slate, by humbling ourselves before a holy God and taking time to repent deeply of our sins, whether or not we as individuals or even we as a local church were guilty of those particular sins.
Over the past fifteen years, the consistency of this event has brought growth. We now have upwards of 200 + people attending each night of our week of prayer. It has become a treasured part of our church life. The week of prayer says to God that if anything significant was to be accomplished that year in and through the ministry of this church, He would have to do it. It was a wholesale abandoning of any confidence in the flesh which is an insult to His sovereign lordship of the church. It really sets a tone for the year and shows our people we are serious at being dependant on God.
--Sunder Krishnan is senior pastor of Rexdale Alliance Church in Toronto, Canada. His church will be hosting the first CPLN regional conference to be held in Canada—scheduled Jan. 2-3, 2009 at the start of its week of prayer.
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Holding a Week of Prayer 