J.F. Cowan: Often the minister must lead the prayer-meeting because there is no one else in sight. How may he put new life into the old meeting? Many a minister is asking himself this question as he wends his way to his meeting, week after week.
I hope no minister will deem this a Judas-like thrust, coming from a brother minister. The writer has been longer in the pew than in the pulpit, and therefore may help his brother minister to see himself as the layman sees him - a valuable service - still he is a minister, and stands with the "cloth" against all senseless class criticism. It is in a spirit of loyalty to his brethren that he suggests : When the minister leads the meeting let him leave his pulpit manner in the study and turn the key on it. Many a minister believes that there is gain in discarding, when he goes to the prayer-meeting, the full clerical garb that he wears into the pulpit; but he cannot so easily discard his pulpit tone and manner. One of the most obvious needs of the minister-led prayer-meeting is to be" depulpitized. "
What is meant by that? A certain minister reads manuscript sermons on Sunday, to large congregations. On Wednesday evening he speaks to a handful, from notes slipped into his Bible, but he speaks in precisely the same tone that he uses on Sunday, and as much of it. The unnecessary volume, and the oratorical delivery are so much out of place in the smaller room and in the more informal meeting that they give an air of unreality. A man who goes to the prayer-meetings remarked, "He seems a thousand miles away from me and the little fret that I brought with me. I could almost fancy he was speaking to some man on Mars, rather than to myself."
Of many an expiring prayer-meeting it might be said, "Killed by too much Sundayishness." The minister's talk was not only in pulpit tones, but homiletic and stilted in style. Perhaps it dealt more largely with the Jews, two or three thousand years ago, than with the affairs of Jonesville, in the year of our Lord 1906 [when this was written]. A prayer-meeting talk that sounds as if it might have been cut off either end of the sermon will help to put no new life in the old meeting. On the other hand, no one would want his minister to be flippant. He would not have him come to the prayer-meeting wearing a golf suit. He would not wish him to speak with his hands in his trousers' pockets, or utter spiritual truths in the same jovial tone in which he would tell a good story at a banquet.
But the prayer-meeting should be a very human meeting-that is the pith of this plea. Here are human beings, with human infirmities and yearnings, just from a human atmosphere, seeking divine compassion and help in their human frailty. It makes all the difference in the world whether the leader puts himself alongside them, as a brother who understands their week-day life, and yearns with human pity to point them to One who can help, or whether he forgets the humanness of the situation, and elevates himself on his theological or philosophical stilts, away above his people. The trouble with some minister-led prayer-meetings is that the minister's vocabulary, the trend of his thinking, are a story or two above the pews in which the people sit, and no elevator is running. The nomenclature of the latest scientific or critical book that the minister has read has about as helpful a place in the average prayer-meeting as an elephant in a robin's nest. It is just about as difficult for a plain man or woman to speak or pray freely or naturally after the minister has illustrated his remarks by allusions to Haeckel's agnosticism, or the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as it would for a boy to mount the platform after one of Russell Conwell's brilliant orations, and recite "Little drops of water, little grains of sand."
The prayer with which the minister leads the prayer-meeting is often the unconscious executioner of all the unborn prayers that were springing from the hearts of the worshippers. It is pitched so high, in its phrasing and in its allusions to current theological thought, that it disparages and smothers the simple prayer that Sister Smith had on her lips. Some clerical prayers slay the prayer impulses in the hearts of the members like a nipping frost among the flower beds. The minister is prone to forget that his hearers have not been reading the books whence his vocabulary is largely drawn. He is thinking with the editors, the scholars, the ministers' association; he does not get down close enough beside his people to remember that the great burden on the heart of one woman in that meeting is not whether the higher critics or the lower critics come out on top, but whether the measles come out well on Johnny, or whether the rash strikes in and kills him. In his lofty flights of civic fervor he may ignore the possibility that one man may have come to pray, not that the political rascals in New York or Chicago may be overthrown, but that his note that is due in bank at twelve to-morrow, and to meet which he has not enough money in sight, may be taken care of in some way.
The vital issue in most minister-led prayer-meetings, especially if the minister be scholarly, bookish, idealistic, is, Will the leader remember to be human? Will he, by his utter simplicity and naturalness and keen sympathy, as a man among erring, troubled men and women, put into that meeting the simplicity and sense of reality that will make it the largest possible blessing?
Utter simplicity; common, every-day words are at a premium. Cant from the latest book is no better than cant from the Salvation Army barracks. If most of us could husk off all the religious phrases that the working man and the mother do not have in common with us, we should be better fitted to lead them in their devotions. Every phrase unfamiliar to the speech of our hearers tends to make our prayer vague and meaningless to them. The less of the minister, and the more of the man and brother, the closer the shepherd keeps to his foot-sore and weary sheep. If only the minister will remember that he is the shepherd, not the watch-dog, nor the expert on blooded merinos, his sheep will grow fat and strong.
By John F. Cowan, New York, 1906
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By John F. Cowan, New York, 1906
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