The World Needs Pastors Who Lead Prayerfully

Charles Swindoll wrote recently on his blog a two-part post on the praying pastor. They're both worth reading (like everything Swindoll writes), but I found the second part most memorable--especially the first sentence of his final paragraph. Here's what he wrote:

Whether from the outside or from the inside of the church, the Adversary will stop at nothing to try to disrupt and dismantle the body of Christ. But these struggles are not the demise of God’s people. On the contrary. They are our opportunities to apply biblical principles and priorities—the only solutions to the challenges we face.

We must keep our fingers on the pages of Scripture like a boat moored to the pier in a raging storm. While we do not worship the print on the page, the paper and ink lead us to the knowledge of the One whom we do worship—Jesus, our Master and Savior.

We need to stay on our knees. As I wrote last week, prayer is a radical interference with the status quo. It is the means by which God grants power to those who rely on Him. This dependence never changes. Even as a sixty-something-year-old man who had been preaching faithfully for years, the apostle Paul continued to walk in a state of dependence on God. You have to love Paul’s humility.

Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving; praying at the same time for us as well, that God will open up to us a door for the word, so that we may speak forth the mystery of Christ, for which I have also been imprisoned; that I may make it clear in the way I ought to speak. (Colossians 4:2–4)

There was no pretense with Paul. No degree of success or number of years in the ministry gave him a false sense of ultimate accomplishment. He knew he had not yet arrived. He remained dependent on the Spirit of God. And so with a genuinely thankful heart, he entreated his fellow believers for their prayers. Can you see the power of that kind of attitude? Very refreshing in the first century. And very rare in the twenty-first. No wonder the man made such a lasting impact for Christ! The Lord honored and blessed Paul’s ministry because he upheld prayer and promoted God’s Word.

Rather than trying to ape the world’s system, God points us in another direction. It’s a way of life that stays out of step with the world and yet is not aloof from those in the world.

The early church didn’t ask God to bless their gimmicks. So, the church today doesn’t need gimmicks to attract people—it needs pastors who lead prayerfully, biblical truth preached passionately, and Christianity lived out authentically.