Letting prayer grow—organically

As the prayer coordinator for Brown Christian Fellowship, I entered the year excited to lead a weekly prayer meeting. I assumed it would, of course, be very popular among the freshmen, well-attended by the leaders, and everyone’s favorite I-V event! Right? I mean, I was excited about prayer, wasn’t I? So why shouldn’t everyone else be equally as eager? First I struggled to reserve a comfortable room across from the chaplain’s office, with big puffy couches to sit on and a soft carpet to kneel on if necessary. I arranged it for noon (a fairly standard prayer meeting time, I thought) on Tuesdays (middle of the week is always better than beginning or end). I showed up expectantly for my first meeting.

And I ended up praying alone while a man from the Hillel Society made loud rustling noises in the corner as he reshelved books and flattened cardboard boxes.

I was so disappointed and distracted that I left after only 20 minutes. Discouraged, I prayed, “God, I thought you were really going to do something big with prayer this year! You laid it on my heart all summer! Why doesn’t my fellowship value prayer? Where are the leaders? Don’t they know prayer is a crucial part of effective campus ministry?” And the answer? “Let go of your agenda, Sarah. Let go of your structures and your pre-conceived notions of what campus prayer should look like. Prayer needs to be more organic than this.”

Organic? What does that mean? Well, it means that when a love for corporate prayer is not already an inherent part of a fellowship’s “culture,” holding a prayer meeting—even a flawlessly planned one—is not going to compel people to come out to pray. Prayer needs to grow—organically—from within the hearts of the members. So I decided to cancel the prayer meeting and make a commitment to pray with anyone in the fellowship who wanted to pray. I would schedule the prayer meetings around the people, rather than the other way around.

I didn’t have to wait long to see the fruit from this decision. Almost immediately after I came to this conclusion, two people contacted me out of the blue to ask if we could meet to pray together on a regular basis. These two women are housemates and neither knew that the other had asked me to pray with her. The three of us have been meeting together every Friday afternoon to pray, first as squatters in a random math department room, and now at their apartment. I have been incredibly blessed by this partnership. Praise God for his prompting me to scrap the structure and think more organically!