Anatomy of a Revived Church by Thom S. Rainer

Author:Thom S. Rainer [Rainer, Thom S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Church / Growth, RELIGION / Christian Ministry / Evangelism
ISBN: 9781496474629
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

AN ANATOMY OF PERSISTENCE

I’m glad I didn’t give up. She said no three times. “She” is now my wife of more than four decades.

Nellie Jo was my high school sweetheart. But before that, she was no more than wishful thinking for me.

You see, I asked Nellie Jo for a date three times and got three negative responses. It took the persistence of the fourth plea before she relented. She became my girlfriend and then my wife. She became the mother of our three sons and the grandmother of our eleven grandchildren.

I don’t even want to imagine the path of my life had I given up early.

In our anatomy of revived churches, we did indeed go one layer deeper and discover the primacy of prayer in revitalization. But when we peeled back another layer, we discovered the persistency of prayer.

Prayer warriors did not give up when only a few showed up.

I met Ruth at a conference where I was speaking on the topic of revitalization, so I was not able to do an anatomy of her church’s turnaround. The story line, however, was common to the revitalizations we have studied. Though most members in her church were not aware of her leadership in persistent prayer, a few were. And a few of those would join her at church at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday mornings.

“I felt like our church was headed toward death,” she recalled. “It wasn’t just the attendance numbers. We had not had a baptism in over three years, and the spirit in worship services was dead. You could see it on the faces of the members. There was a real despondency in our church.”

Ruth believed in the power of prayer. In fact, she had trouble understanding why more members were not turning to God in desperate prayer. “We would say we were praying for sick and dying church members,” she said, “but we wouldn’t even talk about praying for our church that was sick and dying.”

So Ruth took the lead and began calling people to pray for the church. This pattern was also common in our anatomy of revitalized churches. One person began the call to prayer. It was not always one person, but many times it was.

One person. One person trusting God. One person believing in the power of prayer. One persistent person.

When Ruth began inviting people to join her for 5:30 a.m. prayer on Tuesday, she got a lot of polite but noncommittal responses. “I could tell they weren’t interested,” she said frankly. “No one was ugly about it. But they had no plans to pray for our church for thirty minutes on a Tuesday morning.”

“So what did you do?”

“I started the prayer meeting anyway,” Ruth explained. “At times, there were three or four of us. The biggest gathering we ever had was six. Most of the time it was just me and one or two others. Instead of giving up, I claimed the promise of Jesus in Matthew 18:20: ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.

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