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The December/January edition of the New South Wales Presbyterian Church’s Pulse magazine pdf edition is available on their website.
Along with lots of articles there’s a piece from David Jones, current moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Australia about challenges confronting our church across Australia.

Our Vital Opportunity

BY RT REV DAVID JONES | MODERATOR

An Urgent Situation
Without wishing to be alarmist we are, I believe, facing an urgent situation. At the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Australia (GAA) in September we received reports from South Australia and West Australia, which amounted to a Macedonian Call.
There are just two ministers in the whole of Western Australia and the situation is scarcely any better in South Australia.
Most congregations are small and struggling. Things have improved somewhat in Tasmania in recent years with some new church plants and a total of 15 ordained ministers, but there too, our average age is pretty high, despite the new congregations.
In Victoria the Ministry Development Committee reported to the Assembly that “humanly speaking” in the next three to five years 41 out of Victoria’s 97 parishes would no longer be viable.
In Queensland and NSW, while there are undoubtedly some exciting new initiatives and some great new church plants appearing, we are
still arguably Australia’s most elderly denomination.
In the Northern Territory, the Darwin Church has just planted a second congregation. We urgently need to discover how to “restart the engines” before the plane hits the ground.
Extraordinary Prayer
The first and most important thing we need to do, I believe, is to call our people to “extraordinary prayer.”
We need to pray specifically for conversions from the world and especially for the raising up of “laborer’s for the harvest” (Matt 9:36-37). It’s not that the Gospel has lost its power or that the opportunities aren’t there, “the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few” and therefore we should pray to the Lord of the Harvest to raise up gospel workers.
In 1857, in New York, Jeremiah Lanphier started a businessmen’s prayer meeting in the upper room of the Dutch Reformed Church Consistory Building in Manhattan.
Only six people out of a population of a million showed up. But the following week there were fourteen, and then twenty-three when it was
decided to meet everyday for prayer. By late winter they were filling the Dutch Reformed Church, then the Methodist Church on John Street, then Trinity Episcopal Church on Broadway at Wall Street. In February and March of 1858, every church and public hall in down town New York was filled.
A newspaper reporter with horse and buggy was sent round the prayer meetings to see how many men were praying. In one hour he could get to only twelve meetings, but he counted 6,100 men attending.
Then a landslide of prayer began, which overflowed to the churches in the evenings. People began to be converted, ten thousand a
week in New York City alone. The movement spread throughout New England, the church bells bringing people to prayer at eight in the morning, twelve noon, and six in the evening. It was the beginning of a Revival that spread all over the world.
What does “extraordinary prayer” look like?
It will be:

• Corporate, as in Acts 4, the whole church gathered, in one place, with one mind, speaking with one voice. (Acts 4:24ff) We need to bring back the congregational prayer meeting and make it the hub of church life.
• Kingdom Centered – it will be about “God and his glory” before it’s about “us and our needs” (Acts 4:24-30) “His name hallowed, his kingdom come, his will done on earth as it is in heaven.”
• Prevailing – “We will not let you go until you bless us”. When there is an apparent discrepancy between what we read in the word and what we see in the world we can either shrug our shoulders and walk away or bend our knees and pray. We need to fill our mouths with arguments and plead God’s promises back to him, like a man with a chequebook going to the bank. – “Pay bearer on demand”
• Intercessory – identifying with those we are praying for, and praying – not in a “fingerpointing”, “stand-offish” way, but with a sense of “there but for the grace of God go I”. Someone has said that “Intercession” is “love on its knees with tears in its eyes”. Like Daniel and his friends in Babylon we are resident aliens here and we need to seek the peace and prosperity of “the city to which God has carried us and pray to the Lord for it” (Jeremiah 29:7) Why not turn your local newspaper into a prayer-book and make the headlines your prayer points?
• Hard work – not so much “praying for the work” but “prayer is the work”. (Acts 2:42; 6:4) It’s spiritual work and it doesn’t come naturally to us. Perhaps we should rename the prayer meeting the “working bee”. We need to do whatever it takes to give ourselves to serious, sustained, disciplined prayer. Maybe we need to ask our people to “fast”, not as a means of twisting God’s arm, but as a way of disciplining ourselves to pray more seriously. Fasting is giving up whatever hinders us from praying, it may be food, it’s more likely to be TV. Why not “give up” a night in front of the TV to pray for the lost?
• Celebratory – God is the “inspirer and hearer” of prayer, so we should expect answers and celebrate them appropriately. Nine out of the ten lepers healed by Jesus neglected to thank him. Nine out of ten times we forget to thank God for his answers to prayer.

The article includes this excerpt as a side-bar:

A CALL TO PRAYER
“Imagine that our situation ecclesiastically is like that of a jetliner diving to earth, with three of its four engines shut down. Collision with the ground is only 10 mins away. In this state of ultimate crisis, the pilot needs to know only one thing: how to start the engines immediately. If he is successful and power is restored, the pilot, his crew, and the airline as a whole can profitably consider ways to improve service to their passengers. They might examine
such matters as greater efficiency and friendliness in the flight attendants, faster baggage delivery, or even an improved aircraft design. But in a situation of end-time peril, the only thing worth concentrating on is the cause of the engine failure and how to correct it. Other improvements are useless if that problem is not solved first”
JACK MILLER
OUTGROWING THE INGROWN CHURCH