“If someone’s showed up to your prayer gathering, they want to pray. If they’re not praying, it’s not for lack of desire. It’s because you haven’t created the space for them to do so.”
These are the words of Jon Tyson (Senior Pastor of Church of the City New York) during a webinar a couple years ago.
I left committed to crafting something better. My heart already burned for prayer; now it blazed with purpose. As a team, we weren’t interested in bathing our prayer meetings in mediocrity. We wanted something powerful.
We were about to create the greatest prayer meetings the world has ever seen. (Maybe you can tell where this is going.)
Over the next few months, we planned every minute of our one-hour prayer gatherings. We built playlists and slide packages. We printed banners. We ran pilot gatherings with our staff and asked for feedback. We made adjustments. We created a core team of volunteers to participate. We asked them for feedback. We made more adjustments.
At this point, it’s probably fair to say that the word “we” is how I sheepishly avoid the word “me.” Regardless, after nearly a year of preparation, it was time. We opened our prayer meeting to the church.
Remember what I said about the greatest prayer meetings the world has ever seen?
Scratch that.
Just about everything imaginable went wrong.
Our worship leader slept in. In fact, not only did he sleep in, but two hours later he found his alarm torn out of the socket and thrown onto the ground. Clearly his body revolted at the thought of a 5:30am start.
After a few unanswered phone calls, I accepted he wasn’t coming. The prayer meeting started in 20 minutes.
Another issue: our projector wasn’t working. We had hoped to use it for both lyrics during worship and instructions during prayer.
Our audio also had problems. I did fix those! …at 6:36am, six minutes after we were hoping to start.
At 6:37am I was defeated. I walked up to the front, read 2 Peter 1:1-11, announced a couple of worship songs we had pulled from Spotify, and suggested people look up the lyrics on their phones.
It was, quite frankly, humiliating.
It was also my favourite prayer meeting we’ve ever run.
Here’s the note from my prayer journal that morning. February 29, 2024:
“What better way to launch than complete dependence on You, O God? What better way to launch than in our humiliation? What better way to lead than to fall?”
As embarrassed as I was, I felt strangely… sustained. Perhaps even encouraged. The best word I have is released.
If nothing else, the Spirit reminded me that prayer is fundamentally about our hearts before God. I’m still committed to creating environments that are conducive to prayer. But it’s not about the glitz and the glamour—from that I was released. It’s about removing distractions so that we may give ourselves fully to the King of all creation.
Oh, and that projector that wouldn’t work? It flashed on. By itself. At 7:31am.
Seems like God has a sense of humour.
Now, if you’re interested in what our (very imperfect) prayer gatherings look like, check out our Prayer Room Training Manual. If you just want the quick details, here’s our typical structure:
6:30am – Welcome the room. Sit in silence. Pray. Read the passage of Scripture.
6:35am – Sing two songs together (or more if the Spirit so leads).
6:50am – Read the passage of Scripture again. Provide ten minutes for participants to meet with God separately. We’ve found that ambient background music helps participants focus.
7:00am – Turn the room towards intercession. Reference the prompts on the screen and anything else you sensed the Spirit nudging you towards in the previous 30 minutes. Invite participants to join those around them in prayer but give permission to those who desire more personal time with God.
7:22am – Re-gather the room together and “call out” what you sensed the Spirit doing over the previous hour. Sing one final song. Close with a prayer and a charge to live faithfully throughout our day.
7:30am – Done.
Over the course of a year, we’ve averaged two dozen people with almost no promotion—just personal invites. In a couple of weeks, we’ll start announcing our Prayer Room every Sunday. In a couple of months, we hope to launch a second time slot. We want our church to know that prayer is foundational to everything we do and everything we are.
I’ll close by briefly telling the story of Jacob, who showed up to one of our prayer gatherings after a rare announcement. Jacob has struggled for years with doubt. He wrestles intellectually with the possibility of an infinite God. He wrestles emotionally with the sense that he’s lacked an experience of God. He wrestles morally with a sense of failure over being a “bad Christian.”
Just before Christmas, he told me that he has found one place where all three of those concerns are addressed. This is not to say that he’s stopped wrestling—only that he has found an environment that bolsters his faith intellectually, experientially, and morally in ways that he had not found before.
That environment is the Prayer Room.
His struggles continue. Still, a regular environment dedicated to prayer has become a bastion of light in an otherwise dark and confusing landscape. I hope and pray for more of these stories.
Press on, friends. I know that your hopes and prayers are the same.
Nathan Archer, Pastor of Prayer and Groups, Central Heights Church