Nine years into my pastoring of a small, suburban congregation all heaven broke loose. On a Sunday in December, 1989, like the Berlin Wall that had recently crumbled half-way across the globe, a wall came crashing down in our church.
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Our creative but comfortable evangelical congregation suddenly went from singing three short choruses to worshipping for thirty minutes or more. Our theology of the Holy Spirit went from belief to experience. We began a journey that took us into realms of prayer we had never imagined.
Over a decade later, I learned an important lesson as I reviewed our journey. I realized the Holy Spirit had led us into a rhythm of praying. The rhythm of our praying allowed all of us, not just individuals, to move closer to the Apostle Paul's command to "pray continually" (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Hardly realizing how it had happened, we had developed an approach to praying that was daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual. With a variety of prayer opportunities, we involved more than just the praying core of the congregation in different forms of significant and strategic prayer.
Here is a sample of some of the things our congregation did as we developed a rhythmic pattern for prayer:
