“My house shall be a house of prayer” Mark 11:17

The Lord is calling His people to be people of prayer. Yet many believers feel disconnected on a heart level with Christ or see prayer primarily as a way to get God to do things for them.  Yet, Paul, in his great apostolic prayer asks that the church would: Know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Eph 3:19

Research shows only 3.3% of believers find prayer to be a satisfying experience. In addition, 32% of church goers are stalled in their faith or dissatisfied with their church experience.  That number grows to 49% for new believers (Reveal of Willowcreek). These dissatisfied believers are many times more likely to leave one church for another or drop out of church altogether. Much of this dissatisfaction has to do with lack of actual connection with the heart of God. In many cases, there is just not enough time during Sunday services for pastors to do any serious training and equipping on how to experience God in prayer.

Another contributor to the dissatisfaction is that the most common prayer models people tend to use –supplication and intercession – are based on asking God for things or praying down lists instead of actually communing with the Living Word of God and enjoying His presence.

Here’s the great news in all of this.

Those who do grow closest to Christ are the ones who win the most people to Christ, give the most money and are the best volunteers. (Reveal) What is the most powerful way for people to grow closer to Christ? Again, research from Reveal shows that it is “reflective (devotional) prayer using the Bible!” You might say true disciples are the ones who are equipped to “pursue knowing Christ in an experiential way using Bible-centered devotional prayer as the way to connect to God’s heart”.

What’s the real problem?

The greatest hindrance to spiritual growth is not that people in congregations are not hungry for God, but that many leaders have been trained to focus on numerical growth and ministry building methods instead of spiritual growth.  Reveal calls this “the church activity model”.  Leaders imagine that if people come to meetings and participate in church activity that they are growing spiritually.

But the numbers don’t lie.

Church activity, by it’s self, is burning people out, they have little spiritual fuel to run on and they are dropping out of the local church.

New research shows five reasons that church programs fail to make genuine disciples.

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