Prayer is the essential foundation for Christian life and witness in the world. It is basic to spiritual maturity, church growth, mission mobilization and societal transformation.  Prayer is necessary but not sufficient.

In spite the multiplication of prayer movements and prayer congresses in the past 20 years, there seem to be hardly any change in the moral quality of societies and spiritual revival of churches.  Why is this so?  It seems that there is a tragic misunderstanding of prayer and hence also faulty practice of it.  It repeats the problem of Old Testament (OT) Israel where the prophets had to remind the people of God repeatedly that God prefers less religion and more transformation.  God desires not more religious services but more

Global Christianity has unwittingly fallen into a trap, which is historically known as “the Babylonian captivity of the church.” Thinking that this will result in better church growth, Christian leaders have been promoting “the local church is the base for ministry and/or world evangelization.” By “local church” is meant a congregation that seeks to have a full-time pastor (and a pastoral staff as it grows bigger) and her own sanctuary (ideally bought and owned rather than rented), in order to attract and maintain an ever-increasing attendance in her weekly Sunday worship services.

Though this looks appealing (and not many have seriously questioned this tradition), it has been a self-defeating (and historically, quite self-destructive) trap: for the maintenance mode of local churches have almost always killed (often sooner than later) the mission mode of the (whole) church! A lot of Christian resources become absorbed into the maintenance of church activities (e.g., evangelistic rallies, Sunday Schools, youth camps, mission conferences, building projects, etc. etc.) for nominal believers who offer to God (often hypocritically!) what are conveniently “extras” from the “abundant blessings” that He provides in their middle class “comfort zones”! Usually only a pittance (ever calculated the percentage of church budgets that really go into missions?)