Our prayer meetings have seldom been times of great encouragement to this pastor’s heart.<\/p>\n
When I became the pastor of our church in Munich, our church had a weekly Bible study. Yet once a month we would hold a prayer meeting instead of the Bible study. On good days, the attendance of the prayer meeting was half of the Bible study’s. On one occasion, someone showed up for the Bible study, realized it was a prayer meeting, and apologetically turned around and left. We tried doing different things in the prayer time, but whatever we tried, they were never well-attended.<\/p>\n
Then the coronavirus spread and we were told we couldn’t gather anymore as a church. Everything came to a screeching stop, including our prayer meetings. We quickly decided to switch to online services and finally to start a church podcast that we had planned for a while.<\/p>\n
A colleague also suggested something unusual—that we start a daily prayer time over Skype for anyone interested. He announced it through an email to all our members. I was both delighted and curious to see how it would go.<\/p>\n
I missed the first call due to other commitments but told him I would<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
God is good. He consistently uses circumstances that we might think are bad to bring about his glorious purposes among his people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[1856,327,116],"class_list":["post-16025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-coronavirus","tag-life-together","tag-prayer","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16025"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16027,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16025\/revisions\/16027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}