A Step Backward | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 16, 1901

A Step Backward.

The Kansas City Journal of December 18 has the following:—

The pastors of Kansas City Christian churches adopted a resolution at their meeting yesterday, declaring it to be their sense that the mid-week prayer-meeting, as it is conducted in a majority of Protestant churches, has outlived its usefulness, and appointed a committee to prepare and report a program for such meetings which shall be more modern in its character and better calculated to meet the needs of present-day church people.

The chief advocate of a change (there were no dissentients) gave among his reasons the following:—

The prayer-meeting was perfectly adapted to the needs of the time which brought it into existence, but that time has long been past. The best men's lives have now become so full of other things that they can not be induced to come out and spend an evening in prayer.

In place of the prayer-meeting he proposed—

a series of mid-week critical talks and lectures on subjects which are of immediate and pressing interest and concern—on politics, matters touching the social and moral good, education, municipal affairs, etc.—by men who are closely in touch with every phase of life in the city and country at large.

It is characteristic of human nature to neglect in a spiritual way what is most needed. In no age of the world have men needed divine guidance as they need it now, yet how few really seek it! God can not help or guide him who does not feel his need of God. “The meek will He guide in judgment; and the meek will He teach His way.” United prayer is necessary for the prosperity of the church. “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven.” If the prayer-meeting is what it should be, it would be a place where souls held communion with God, and hearts blended together in His great cause of winning souls. All social distinctions would disappear, as all in humility bowed before the Great White Throne. God's life would flow into hearts made ready to receive it, by being emptied of sin and self. And the church would grow. But the discussion of economic, political, and civic questions will hardly augment the spiritual life. How much has departing from the law of God to do with this relegation of the prayer-meeting to the historic past?