You would never believe how much pressure there is on a church to perform. It seems that everyday I get a phone call or mail inviting me to try out a new program or Bible study that will “transform your church, revolutionize your worship, and impact your community.” Or I can attend a workshop where I will hear testimonials from pastors who reinvented the wheel (so to speak), did church differently, and now they are growing by leaps and bounds.

            They use catch words like new, fresh, exciting, relevant, innovative, creative, and powerful. This is opposed to being old, dry, boring, irrelevant, traditional, unoriginal, and dead. I certainly do not want to be any of those things. I have to confess that the pressure to be new and fresh can be frustrating. I am not a very innovative person. I do not have original thoughts. Most of my creative ideas flop. By the standard put upon churches today, our church is doomed to fail. Your pastor may be young, but he does not have many fresh ideas.

            Last week I came across a book by E.M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer. Sheer delight filled my senses as I read the first page:

            We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God’s plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than anything else. Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.

            What the church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Spirit can use—men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Spirit does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plan, but men—men of prayer.

E.M. Bounds lived from 1835-1913. It is interesting to me to find a pastor of 100 years ago to be fighting the same frustrations I find today. His encouragement was that we did not need pastors who were more clever, but pastors whom the Holy Spirit could use.

            He continues,

 “The young preacher has been taught to lay out all his strength on the form, taste, beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raise the clamor for talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation, reputation and brilliancy instead of holiness.”

I cannot tell you how strong the pressure is to be entertaining and fun. This is not to say that I enjoy boring preaching. I know when I am being boring. I have learned that no matter how well I preach, I do not have the life-giving power in me to change lives. I may speak with the eloquence of angels and preach absolute truth, but if the Spirit does not attach itself to the words I speak, they are powerless. Bounds says, “Genius, brains, brilliancy, strength, natural gifts do not save. The gospel flows through hearts…It is the heart and not the head which makes God’s great preachers.”

            I wish our associations and convention would focus more on the character of the pastor rather than his cleverness. Why should we be relentlessly searching for new, untested methods of outreach instead of looking to the ones that have been proven to work; like preaching and prayer? As Bounds says, “He will never talk well and with real success to men for God who has not learned well how to talk to God for men. More than this, prayerless words in the pulpit and out of it are deadening words.”

            The best advice I have received is to preach, pray, and be patient. Perhaps that does not resonate to a culture that wants immediate results. “A church,” Bounds says, “rarely revolts against or rises above the religion of its leaders. A prayerless ministry is the undertaker for all God’s truth and for God’s church.”

            So here is my confession: I have tried to be innovative. I have tried to be the well-spring of fresh ideas. I have failed, and I am frustrated. So I have decided to preach and pray and patiently wait on God.

“There are plenty of preachers who will deliver great and eloquent addresses on the need of revival and the spread of the kingdom of God, but not many there are who will do that without which all preaching and organizing are worse than vain—pray. It is out of date, almost a lost art, and the greatest benefactor this age could have is a man who will bring the preachers and the Church back to prayer.” – E.M. Bounds