I’ve come home from a congregational prayer meeting.
Twenty of us from teens to (lets just say) older.
What a blessing to hear our teens pray that our prayer meetings will continue to meet regularly for years.
It does an old pastor’s heart good.
One of the lessons our church has been reminded of over the last couple of months is the power of the ordinary means of grace which can only be experienced in corporate context.
These comments from Todd Pruett remind us, that for all their values, movements and para-church groups lack the experience of what confessional Christians call the ordinary means of grace.
An excerpt:
If you are unfamiliar with the term “ordinary means of grace” it refers to those elements of our gathered worship to which the Lord has attached his blessing: the preaching and reading of God’s Word, the sacraments (Lord’s Supper and Baptism), prayer, praise, and fellowship.
These ordinary means of grace are the things that the Lord has given his church. They are not the inventions of man. We call them means of grace because the Lord has appointed them as means by which he blesses and builds his church. We call them ordinary because there is nothing about them that is spectacular. They are not rare like miracles. They are ordinary. They are to be practiced regularly in our Lord’s Day gatherings precisely because we regularly need what God offers us through them. But these are gifts not given to movements. God has given these means of grace to his church.
Movements tend to focus on a preferred market niche like women, men, black, white, young, fans of loud music, students, the balding, etc. Interestingly I don’t see many movements targeting for its core the elderly or poor. But that’s another post. I’m not saying that a meeting or conference tailored specifically for men or women is wrong. But it must not supplant the church, for a movement is not the church. Movements are not the inheritors of God’s promises nor are they the stewards of God’s oracles and his ordinary means of grace.
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