I have now been in my new role as minister of Newbury Baptist Church for twenty days. There are at least 150 people in the church I need to get to know. There are services to be planned, small groups to visit, key players in the town to greet, a host of users in our building to meet and 101 things besides.
You might be forgiven, then, for thinking that the hour I took yesterday to assemble a large map of the town from 36 sheets of paper was ill spent. Would you feel that more, or less if I added in the time taken to plan the subject matter of the meeting and source 24 electric candles for those who came? Whilst you are at it, would the fact that about a dozen people attended make it seem a better or worse use of time?
The thing is, the value of prayer is not measured in numbers. The value of time spent in prayer, surely, is not to be found in the numbers of people either attending or praying? It is not as if we can add up the combined lengths of all their spoken prayers and use them to tip the balance of God's favour in our direction.
On Sunday morning I was telling the congregation the tale of Peggy and Christine Smith - two elderly ladies on the Isle of Lewis whose faithful prayers played such a key role in the Hebridean revival in 1949. It would take a very skillful mathematician to equate the prayers of the two with the bent knees of the hundreds who were affected. Prayer, it would seem , is more about multiplication than addition.
That said, I am praying for addition upon addition to the numbers as one prayer meeting leads into another. Care to join me?
