"The American church is functionally prayerless when it comes to corporate prayer. Of course, a remnant does the hidden work of prayer, but in most churches corporate prayer doesn’t function in any meaningful way. How big is that remnant? In our prayer seminars, we ask several confidential questions about a participant’s prayer life. In hundreds of seminars, we’ve found that about 15 percent of Christians in a typical church have a rich prayer life. So when someone says, “I’ll keep you in my prayers,” 85 percent of the time it is just words. This isn’t a pastor problem; it’s a follower-of-Jesus problem.
The prayer meeting, which used to function at the heart of a praying church, is all but dead. Wednesday night prayer meeting used to be the core meeting, where the most dedicated, spiritual people attended; now for many, the prayer meeting itself is a distant memory. At a recent A Praying Church seminar, I asked participants what they don’t like about prayer meetings. One young man nailed it: “It’s boring.” Someone else added, “It’s depressing.” But the most poignant comment was “I don’t know where I’d go to attend a prayer meeting.” I asked the pastor of a three-thousand-attendee church if he knew of any prayer meetings in his church. He said, without a hint of concern, “No, I’m not aware of any.”
Which brings us to the unique challenges of praying together in much of our modern world. We are a busy, and often wealthy, people. We didn’t reach our career goals and attain the comforts we enjoy by sitting around, and yet praying together feels like we are sitting around. We can be so intent on building and producing that we don’t pause to reflect on what we are building."
Miller, Paul E., A Praying Church: Becoming a People of Hope in a Discouraging World (pp. 26-27). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
