J.F. Cowan: The suggestion has come from a leading denominational weekly that, since the midweek prayer seems to have waned in many churches, it might be best to abandon the idea of a meeting chiefly for prayer and testimony, and turn it into a forum for the discussion of religious, social, ethical, and civic questions. While wishing to treat the suggestion with the utmost courtesy, it seems to resolve itself into this kind of a prescription: If Christians are not inclined to pray in public, invite them to do something for which they have an inclination. Doctor the symptom, not the disease. Is a fifty-two-session open parliament supposedly on such questions as, "Does poverty cause drunkenness, or vice versa?" or, "Is trust money tainted?" or, "Shall we have the initiative and referendum?" as well calculated to go to the root of the matter, as a prescription for developing more prayer in the prayer-meeting?
The prayer-meeting may be decrepit in many churches, but, in the interest of vital piety, is a current events club the best successor? Shall we hybridize the prayer-meeting, or vitalize it? Would Wesley ever have sown the American continent with Methodist churches by the help of prayer and class meetings hybridized as is proposed above? A dead-alive prayer-meeting may make over into a lively lyceum, but the most spirited lyceum can never fill the place in the vital life of the church that a better prayer-meeting would have filled.
Therefore, before we proceed with the doubtful experiment of hybridizing the church or young people's prayer-meeting, by bringing free discussions of newspaper themes into the place of prayer, or by turning it into a "smoke talk," or, as was suggested for the young people's prayer-meeting at a religious convention recently virtually making it an annex to an all-inclusive Association of Somewhat Religiously Disposed Young Persons for Doing a Little of Everything under the Sun, let us consider if there is not some better way; if there are not undeveloped, latent possibilities in the old, half-dead prayer-meeting that can be awakened for its regeneration.
In Mexico there are gold mines that long ago were worked by the Indians in the most primitive fashion, until they were seemingly exhausted, when they were abandoned. Now, according to this modern religious theory, the only outcome for such mines would be to turn them into ostrich farms, or cold-storage warehouses. If a mine didn't pay with primitive pick and shovel, make it half mine and half ice-plant, or one-fourth mine and three-fourths summer resort; that might solve the problem of getting the most riches out of the mine. But the mining expert, the man of hard sense, says, "No; the way to make the old mine pay is to work it better - but as a mine." So, to-day, modern machinery supplants the rude implements of the Indian, in many an abandoned Mexican mine; and under the regime of the steam and electric stamp and smelter, fabulous wealth is being extracted, where primitive man gave up discouraged.
The prayer-meeting must keep to the primitive ideal, but not the primitive methods. A more rational and thorough-going treatment promises new results. The belief that primitive, pick-and-shovel methods are to blame for much of the falling off in interest in the prayer-meeting, stimulates the following rudimentary suggestions, which will be the basis of this book, and will be developed in detail in subsequent chapters.
I start with the premise that much prayer in the church has always meant power, and that there is no substitute for prayer. A lack of prayer means low spirituality. The revivals in Japan, Australia, England, Wales have been prayed down. To turn the prayer-meeting into a social and ethical department store, with a prayer counter in a corner of the basement, will be fatal. The church needs more prayer, and the way to get it is not by having less prayer-meeting. Instead of hybridizing the prayer-meeting, we need to vitalize it. How? Let me barely outline the answer here:
1. If the prayer-meeting is losing power under its present leadership, why not change the leadership, at least in part? We have a suggestion of the splendid possibilities in lay leadership, in young people's societies, in the Gideons, in the numerous city and rescue missions in charge of laymen, in the Y.M.C.A., the Student Volunteer Movement, etc. The First Baptist Church, of Boston, is trying a lay leader for its prayer-meeting, once a month, with encouraging results. In its leadership, as well as in participation, make the prayer-meeting, as much as possible, a meeting "of the people, for the people, by the people."
2. In many prayer-meetings there would be gain, not only in a partial change of leaders, but in a change of methods. Everywhere the Sunday-school is adopting new pedagogic methods - kindergartens, Perry pictures, the stereoscope, the stereopticon, organized classes, orchestras, etc. For the most part the prayer-meeting is from a half to a quarter of a century behind the Sunday-school, the Y.M.C.A. and the pulpit. It is the mine that is still worked with pick and shovel.
The comparatively small proportion of prayer-meetings that have moved out of the old ruts - not by becoming something other than prayer-meetings - but by becoming modern prayer-meetings, with prayer, testimony and devotional singing as the dominant features, give hopeful promise of what is possible, provided the same amount of brains is put into the prayer-meeting that is put into other religious problems. The trouble is that so many seem to believe that we may leave our brains on the hat-rack when we go to the prayer-meeting; prayer is so pious an act that it will take care of itself without an expenditure of gray matter.
3. Besides new leadership and new methods, the half-dead prayer-meeting needs a new perspective. It is self-centered. It looks in; it needs to look out. People have been going to it to pray largely for themselves and their own church. Prayer lags when we have nothing but ourselves to pray about. Selfishness always stagnates. Give the old prayer-meeting the outward, the Christward, the humanward look; give it the evangelistic and the missionary perspective, and in the place of stagnation, and green scum, and croaking, it will have bubbling, sparkling, overflowing life.
We need to change the pool into a fountain; the Dead Sea into Croton Reservoir, a Niagara of power. To do this we need, in many cases, a new line of prayer-meeting topics. Too many of our topics are introspective; they deal with the subjective phases of Christian life. Add to new leadership, and new methods, topics that set the people to praying for some one else besides, "Me and my wife, my son John, and his wife, us four and no more," and a new and strong volume of earnest prayer will swell the heart of the church and rise through the land, a mighty tide of spiritual power.
By John F. Cowan, New York, 1906
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