The church has been given a specific calling by its Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ: “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” Amid a world shrouded in spiritual darkness and moral decay, the church is to live in such a way that the spiritual darkness will be dispersed by the light of God’s truth, and the moral decay by the purity of God’s grace. 

The question that begs to be asked is, “And how is the church to do this?” How is the church to live out its calling in the world to be salt and light? The opening words of E.M. Bounds' classic work on prayer are memorable:
 

We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God’s plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God’s method.

It is a truism that times change and that we change with the times. It is, or should also be, a truism that Christians are called to live out their faith in the here and now, not looking back to days gone by. There is, however, a danger in living in the here and now: the danger of becoming disconnected from the past. When modernity ceases to learn from history, it becomes prey to every new fad and fashion (C.S. Lewis wittily said, “Fads and fashions come and go, but they mainly go.”).

Christians’ desire to engage with the world as it is and not as it was is commendable and right. But the right desire for relevance in the church can blind the church to the true nature of relevance. 

In the first place, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is natively relevant. It does not need to be made relevant—it is relevant. I don't mean we are not to think very carefully about how we preach the gospel or witness to Christ. We must address the people in front of us, people who live in a world where society is being compelled not simply to tolerate sin, but to affirm it and celebrate it. Young people in particular are growing up in a world where sexual perversion is the norm, not the exception. We cannot and must not ignore that. However, the gospel is, natively by virtue of what it is, “the power of God for salvation” (Rom. 1:16). 

In 1 Cor. 6:9-11, we are given a snapshot of the composition of the church in Corinth: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

How did people like “that” come to be washed and sanctified and justified before God? Earlier in 2:1-5, Paul explained how it happened: "And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”

How did Paul go about making the gospel relevant to this imperial, Emperor-worshipping, notoriously sexually-permissive city? He preached Jesus Christ crucified “in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”

This takes us back to E.M. Bounds. The church has many pressing needs today, but one stands out. Like the apostles in the early church, we “must give ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). The order of the words may or may not be significant, but they do highlight the apostolic conviction that the ministry of the word without being saturated in prayer is futile. Futile? God is sovereign and can accomplish his saving and sanctifying purposes as it pleases him. But ordinarily God has tied our prayerful dependence on him to his blessings. 

Some years ago, a church contacted me asking if I would be willing to candidate for the position of senior pastor. I was sent a bundle of papers informing me about the church and its many, many activities. It was a conservative, Bible-believing, Reformed church. It was a church with a multitude of outreach activities; it even had an “evangelistic Valentine's Day dinner.” The one thing this church did not have was a corporate gathering for prayer. 

The early church we are told “devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). The verb Luke uses is the strongest he could have chosen. Commitment to “the prayers” was not an option for them to consider, it was a necessity they committed themselves to. Prayer was fundamental, not supplemental; it was central, not peripheral. Is the reason why the church today is so lacking in power the neglect of corporate prayer? Amidst all the other activities professedly biblical churches commit themselves to, why is corporate prayer at best marginalized and at worst simply neglected? 

As a young Christian, I was encouraged to have three “non-negotiables” in my life: morning and evening worship on the Lord’s Day, and the church’s midweek gathering for prayer. When a church gathers to pray is of little consequence. What is of great consequence is that a church does gather to pray.

Is the increasing demise of the church prayer meeting simply a sign that we live in different times from our Reformed forebears? Or is the demise a sign that the church is spiritually, and theologically, removed from that of our Reformed forebears? Corporate prayer is the church acknowledging that without God we can do nothing; it is a corporate confession of heartfelt dependence on the ministry of the Holy Spirit. May our churches devote themselves, like those in the early church, to prayer, for “Apart from me you can do nothing.”