J.F. Cowan: By the self-centered prayer-meeting I mean that one the tap-root of whose spirituality is being killed by praying too much about "ourselves and our church." It has the inward look, and a morbid, unhealthy atmosphere. Usually the topics in such meetings are too introspective and subjective, and such topics lead those that pray to beseech God vaguely to make them better men and women, but they do not become better because they have no definite objective before them - they do not ask for grace to do some definite service, and then try to perform that service. They besiege the throne of grace with petitions for a revival in the church, but the revival does not come, because the prayers have no objective - no particular persons for whose conversion the members work as well as pray. And so the meetings drag wearily on, with narrow, selfish prayers that cannot be answered, because no one is trying to help answer them, and there is a pervading sense of unreality about the whole business that repels practical men of affairs, who are not accustomed to putting forth an effort without seeing something brought to pass, and the prayer-meeting seats are filled with women and elderly men.
The first suggestion that I would make for curing the
self-centered prayer-meeting, which always is the "gone-to-seed"
prayer-meeting, is that a new kind of topics be selected - themes
that have the outward, the humanward, the Godward look, instead of
the inward, self-centered look. Let me cite as an illustration of
my meaning the topics for thirteen consecutive weeks taken from one
of our leading denominational weeklies. They have been used in
prayer-meetings that I have attended, hence I know of their
practical workings. Here are the [inward-looking] topics:
"The mystery of pain and sorrow,"
"The peril of lukewarm Christianity,"
"Unprofitable friendships,"
"The inlets and outlets of power,"
"The rewards of work,"
"From what does Christ save?"
"Salvation as a motive to overcoming,"
"Salvation forbidding worry,"
"Salvation freeing the hands for service,"
"Salvation constraining to usefulness,"
"Salvation as an encouragement to prayer,"
"Heroic elements in ordinary life,"
"Mistaken values."
Not more than three of these topics, at most, can be said to
have the outward look, though a skillful leader might make them
more effective than they promise. Even the three exceptions:-
"Salvation freeing hands for service,"
"Salvation constraining to usefulness" (consecutive topics),
and
"Heroic elements in ordinary life,"
-have only a vague outward look; they lack a definite objective.
Suppose the first one were phrased,
"Salvation freeing our hands for neighborhood ministries-what
are some of them?" or,
"Salvation freeing our hands to I go teach all nations," or,
"How a saved man may help to save his city (or State, or
country),"
a definiteness of suggestion would have been furnished that would
give an edge to the meeting, and a clearness of objective that
would aim the prayers at something in particular, instead of
praying "up in the air."
The topic, "Heroic elements in ordinary life" is more suggestive, but how much more of freshness and definiteness might have been introduced into the meeting had it been, "Tomorrow's calls for heroism; how shall I honor them?" Still better, I think, though covering a different field, probably, from that contemplated by the original topic, would be a meeting on "Heroism among our life-savers," or, "The heroes of the rails," or, "Heroic home ministries" with a whole meeting devoted to one, or more than one of these classes. It would be a relief from the everlasting talking and praying and singing about ourselves, which is the death of a prayer-meeting; and who deserve the prayers of the church more and get them less than these men in hazardous vocations, for our comfort? Many a jaded prayer-meeting, that has prayed the benches almost empty beseeching God to pour out more blessings within those four walls, would be aroused to a new sense of "something doing", should it be announced that a whole evening would be spent in prayer for a class of men who had heretofore got only the crumbs of prayer, if anything. Practical men, who now stay at home because of the "close-corporation" nature of so much of the praying, would get a new respect for the church prayer-meeting, and a new incentive to go and pray.
In the Appendix will be found a list of suggested topics for a year. These are not offered so much with the thought of displacing any lists of prayer-meeting topics furnished by denominational or other agencies, as to meet a want of a large number of churches that have never used topics. After trying the experiment with these, they will doubtless be ready to continue with lists furnished by the denominational year book, or by a list made out by the pastor, or a committee. The list in the Appendix may further serve a useful purpose by providing alternate topics, when for any reason it seems desirable to vary from the topics being used. This list is also designed to embody, to some extent, the writer's ideas of topics that have the human interest, that have a practical objective, and meet the conditions set forth in this chapter.
One other thought in reference to prayer-meeting topics. It seems extremely desirable that there should be more unity of prayer in the church. There may be mischief in having a diversity of topics every week. When the Sunday-school directs the mind to one portion of Scripture, and the church prayer-meeting has before it something quite different, and the young people's prayer-meeting a still different theme and Scripture, with the woman's missionary prayer-meeting, and the junior society, and other organizations yet to hear from, is there not danger that, as Dr. Leonard W. Bacon once put it in a strong protest, that the church shall be "chopped into bits"?
It must be distracting; it cannot be unifying to have so many diverse prayer themes in a week. Now that the themes for the young people's prayer-meeting are based upon some phase of the Sunday-school lesson, why should not the church prayer-meeting themes fall into line and take some other phase of the same Scripture? And why should not the topic for the juniors be related in some way to this general theme? Why not have the whole church praying around one common center of thought? The Sunday-school lesson being a fixed point, let all the prayer-meeting themes radiate from that.
The gist of the case against the self-centered prayer-meeting is that selfish praying dries up the fountain of prayer. Prayer becomes unreal, perfunctory, burdensome, a vanishing quantity. On the other hand, prayer for others reopens the fount; one enjoys intercession when he is tired of begging. The prayer-meeting that is begging itself to death may intercede itself alive.
Notice how it works in every-day life. There is a day when interest in everything is dull. People are languid about their buying and selling. There is no enthusiasm about business or pleasure. The newspapers have little to tell. A brick wall falls and buries the workmen; some miners are entombed under a mass of slate and coal; some children are lost in the woods; the Gloucester fishermen are caught in the ice-floes. Prayer springs spontaneously from thousands of hearts. It is no task, as it is when we keep asking for the same blessings for ourselves. The town becomes alive; the newspapers fill their columns with intensely interesting matter. It is the same way with the prayer-meeting; the point is to bring into it more largely the element of intercession-prayer for others - for those who spiritually, socially, and in other ways, are in as urgent need of sympathy and rescue as the workmen, the miners, the children, the fishermen.
I wish to clinch this argument by issuing a challenge to any prayer-meeting in which interest is languishing, and the attendance of which is waning to a few faithful souls, while the great majority of the church stay at home. It is simply this: stop praying for the church and the people who go to the prayer-meeting; set before the prayer-meeting unselfish objects for which it has never before prayed-urgent needs in the kingdom of Christ - and within a month new life will begin to pulse through the dead prayer-meeting; there will be prayer for the church and its members, but with a new sense of reality and expectation. In short, the prescription that I would offer for a dying prayer-meeting is, definite objects of prayer that are outside the present radius of prayer; and the doses should be liberal and persisted in until people outside understand that the prayer-meeting has waked up to the needs of the great outer world, and is making a business of pleading with God about the lost sheep. The prayer-meeting that is more interested in the ninety-and-nine that went not astray, ought to wane.
Another thing that needs remedying in the self-centered prayer-meeting is the singing. We are singing too many, "Peace, peace, wonderful peace" songs, when the forces of evil were never so powerfully equipped for war as to-day, and the battle is on, up to our very thresholds. It is too much like the Russian soldiers worshipping their ikons while the Japanese were mounting heavy guns [in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905]. We are asking one another in song, "Are you in the inner circle?" as though we expected to find a cushion, a pair of slippers, and a Morris chair there. We need to get to singing, "War, war, strenuous war!" We need to ask one another, not "Are you in the inner circle?" but, "Are you at the post of danger?" While the prayer-meeting sings, "Peace, sweet peace," the devil captures the primaries, the news-stands ship in new installments of corrupting novels, the penny-in-the-slot picture machines line the sidewalks with their lewd postal cards, more deadly than Gatling guns, and the cigar-stores order an extra great-gross of cigarettes for our grammar-school boys. Too many of our prayer-meeting songs are simply opiates. We go home saying, "What a heavenly song!" It would be better to have prayer-meetings without a note of song, than to sing songs that chloroform our consciences and sense of responsibility for public good. We need to select the songs of the prayer-meeting as carefully as the topic. They should have the outward look; the battle note. We cannot always sing "Onward, Christian soldier," or "The battle hymn of the republic", or Luther's battle hymn, and it must be admitted that in the choice of songs with the outward look we are much more circumscribed than in the selection of topics, but there is too much singing in the prayer-meeting simply to "feel good."
I believe this. is a criticism that will bear examination; our fathers used to sing about God and His attributes; we sing about ourselves. Compare the old hymns with the modern hymns, and see if this is not true. And I believe that one of the ways to get the outward look in the singing of the prayer-meeting is to sing more of the old hymns that are about God, and fewer of the modern hymns that are subjective, and that consist largely in telling God about ourselves.
The third ingredient in my prescription for curing the self-centered prayer-meeting is, in addition to the outward look, it is important to have the outward reach. I mean by that, those who pray in the prayer-meeting must be got to working in the direction of their prayers. In Boston there are some forty Christian Endeavour societies that send bands of workers regularly to the Merrimac Street Mission. I have been told by the pastors of many of the churches represented that the evangelistic work that the Endeavourers try to do in the mission has a reflex effect in their prayer-meetings in promoting testimony and prayer. The pastor of a suburban church held a conference with his Endeavourers and induced a number of them to take each one of more apartment houses, into the letter-boxes of which they would be responsible for dropping the invitation cards to the services of the church. He expected a twofold result: that some flat-dwellers would accept the invitations; and that the young people who did the work would go to their prayer-meetings with a new sense of reality in regard to Christian service. When they spoke and prayed about working for Christ, it would not be wholly in the abstract, but something very concrete and real. And it is always easier to pray about concrete things than about abstract truths.
Sometimes, if this outward reach of the prayer-meeting can be had in no other way, it would be better to adjourn the prayer-meeting to the wickedest street corner in the vicinity of the church, or to some drunkard's home that needs the gospel, or to the platform of the railway station, filled with the town loungers, or to the saloon or pool-room. It would give that self-satisfied prayer-meeting pose a pretty hard shaking-up. It would bring home the awfulness of sin, and send the people back to pray with a vividness and pungency they had never had before. When Dr. Dawson organized that street demonstration in Boston, that took a thousand of the church members, headed by the Salvation Army band, on a march through the slums, and they came back to Tremont Temple, bringing a thousand men off the street, some of them so drunk that it took two to hold one upright; women with whom they would have been ashamed to walk by daylight, past their own doors, half-grown hoodlums, swearing and obscene, some of them brought out of the saloons, it did more to awaken the church members of Boston to the wickedness of the city, and to send them back to their churches to pray for convicting power, than all the sermons of a year could have done.
In some English prayer-meetings loaves of bread and flowers and clothing are brought, and the meeting breaks up into groups who go out to relieve distress and sing and preach Christ to the lost. Such suggestions will shock some of our staid church-goers, but anything is better than the prim, half-dead, droning, self-centered prayer-meeting, with which so many of us are familiar.
By John F. Cowan, New York, 1906
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By John F. Cowan, New York, 1906
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