Falling from our first love

We had a 40th anniversary celebration of the founding of our church. It was very interesting. It featured surprise appearances by every pastor who had ever been on staff (two only in audio form) and my son’s 20-foot tall face looking at us from a screen, giving his testimony. There was also praise singing, a comedy skit, and a sort of Las Vegas dance routine.

It came out in the course of the reminiscences (I remember this personally, having first attended in the late 1970s) that in the early days the church was not based in a building but in the founder’s living room. One day a week there was an all-day prayer meeting—a Ugandan pastor who was part of the young congregation had urged that we needed all-night prayer if we wanted to get anything done.

(This last fact generated a few anecdotes: There used to be a pot of coffee brewing for early prayer meeting attenders. One woman, who arrived before the crowd, entered the house through the back door, helped herself to coffee, and sat down to wait for the others—only to realize she was in the wrong house. Another man, who eventually became a pastor, was annoyed that every time he tried to get into the house, he had to trip over people praying in the living room; he started using another door.)

Today all-day prayer meetings are a thing of the past, and the house church has given way to a grander facility that bristles with many ministries: youth groups, various support groups, organized missions, ESL classes, a pre-school for the community, free Tuesday community dinners, turkeys and the fixings for the poor, a food cupboard ministry, movie nights, etc.

So communal prayer is down a bit, but programs are up.

A few years ago I visited a big radio ministry in Florida and the director who gave me a tour admitted in passing that he does not have time to pray like he used to. It worried me because I realized that nobody who is slipping ever sees himself as slipping. Falling from our first love (Revelation 2:4) is always a possibility to watch for. The 40th anniversary celebration was good for me because as I was enjoying riding the coattails of prayer warriors in the ’70s, I was made to take an inventory of my present walk with God.

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