Leadership Journal

We sat in the interrogation room trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for our behavior. We couldn't tell the police in Bosnia the real reason for our actions. They wouldn't understand.

We were prayer walking.

A dozen of us from Jefferson, Oregon, had come to visit two United Nations workers in this war-ravaged village half a world away. The police might accept that, especially when we explained that we brought clothing and money. But why, they would ask, were we strolling the streets, looking around, then catching a knowing glance at one another and mumbling to ourselves?

We might have gotten away with it, if one of our number hadn't done the touristy thing and snapped a photo of a passing army vehicle. The police were suspicious of foreigners. Now they had us at the station for questioning.

This was a matter for prayer.

But then we were used to that. So many amazing things had happened since that pastors' conference ten years earlier, where God had started the transformation in me—in us all—and we became a praying church.

We had no agenda at that conference. Joe Aldrich, then president of Multnomah Bible College and Seminary, billed it as four days away just to pray. The four days away sounded especially inviting. My church was embroiled in the usual fights. We didn't get along. At 200, the church hadn't grown much during my tenure. We had tried every program I could find or concoct. After 13 years as pastor, I could point to little I considered an accomplishment. I was exhausted and at the end of myself.

But that's the point—I was at the end of myself. Joe called a number of pastors to come to Salem for this first prayer summit. He envisioned pastors praying together, and their churches and communities praying together. He wanted to encourage us in our complete dependence on God. And there I found that it had been many years since I was completely dependent on God. In prayer I was convicted of my own prayerlessness, of trying to program the work of God in our church. And the church I led was just like me.

I returned to my pulpit with a renewed commitment to seek God's face and His will for our church. We had tried everything else. Before my congregation, I made a personal commitment to make prayer a priority in my life.

"I have been a prayerless pastor," I told a subdued gathering. "I didn't realize how important prayer was in experiencing God's blessing and presence. That is going to change in my life and, I hope, in the life of our church."

I set a personal goal of one hour per day in private prayer and two hours with others from the church. If just one other person met me at the church to pray, I knew I could keep that commitment.

My congregation was willing, even eager, to join me in prayer. Almost everyone came to those first sessions. Then attendance dropped off—sometimes down to a handful. But we kept praying. And over time our daily meeting grew.

Our one prayer meeting has developed into thirty ...