Powerful Prayer Points
May 11, 2008 by worldlinkPrayer is vitally important in all of our lives. I suppose I could not emphasise sufficiently the importance, impact and power of prayer. I often try. It is a subject that I continually study and endeavor to practice. Never enough, but I am still trying. I read the following and wanted to pass it on to you. This preacher said:
Being a practitioner of prayer for about sixteen years and learning to experience the resource that prayer affords has created an acute awareness of the need for prayer, personally and corporately. Prayer is the essential foundation for a healthy and effective Christian disciple-making Church.
Across our country, many pastors are disillusioned. They are coaxed by their peers into the mode of offering many programs to build the church. In not too many years, those pastors have burned out, some to the point of despair and loss of faith. Many faced with this cycle try to find another new technique or exciting new seminar, which usually only compounds the problem. The stories of disillusionment in the ministry are without number. Many ministers in America are well trained but remain spiritually ineffective.
Participating for ten years in a “cyber fellowship” with several hundred other pastors has been an eye-opening experience. This e-mail format discusses current issues and challenges churches, pastors, and their families face. Discussion topics range from “How to do a baby dedication” to “Where to find professional counseling” for the pastor whose wife has just left after twenty years of living in a glass house. Ministers are crying out for help. Many times their cries are diagnosed incorrectly, and the proposed solutions are less than effective[ . Eugene Peterson articulates the current state from his perspective:
American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationery and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills. The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches.
Pastors need to get back to their calling. They need to get their eyes back on God through prayer and Bible reading to discover the spiritual direction that will reshape their ministry.

