Our prayer meetings were rarely moments of great encouragement for this pastor’s heart.
When I became pastor of our church in Munich, our church did a weekly Bible study; However, once a month, we had a prayer meeting instead of studying the Bible. On good days, half of those who participated in Bible studies participated in the On one occasion, someone came to study the Bible, realized it was a prayer meeting, apologized, turned around, and left. We even tried to do different things at the time of prayer, but whatever we tried, it never worked very well. Not bad.
- Then the coronavirus spread and we were told we could no longer unite as a church.
- Everything stopped.
- Including our prayer meetings.
- We quickly decided to switch to online meetings and finally start a church podcast that we had been planning for some time.
Did a colleague also suggest something unusual? That we start a daily prayer time on Skype for all concerned, he announced by email to all of our members. He was delighted with the idea and was curious to see what it would look like.
I missed the first call due to other appointments, but I told him I would join the next day; However, after the first Skype sentence, he emailed me and told me that we would postpone the second interval 90 minutes later because many members wanted to be a part of it. I attended another call during our second hour of Skype prayer, and the participation was very good. Three weeks later, our numbers didn’t go down. On the contrary, we are now moving on to other platforms and creating additional prayer time to increase capacity.
I also consider myself guilty. First, it was not only the church that did not expect to gather to pray; I myself was more interested in Bible studies than prayer meetings, but does that change?For me and for many in church. These moments of prayer have become my daily highlight. These are good times. Yes, we cannot meet and yet we remain closely linked. It is a great joy to meet many of our members, whom I had never seen in a prayer meeting; Who had never heard them pray before?and now I hear them every day.
As we pray on the Internet, I feel a growing desire to pray face to face. My hope and prayer is that this will last beyond COVID-19, that the disciplines initiated here continue and bring health to the prayer life of our church.
God is good. He always uses circumstances that may be bad for us to accomplish his glorious goals among his people.