Article July 16, 1904 Issue

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How Long Should The Long Prayer Be. Surely not twenty minutes! A good church deacon said, not long ago, that on a particular Sunday, just an ordinary day, his minister prayed twenty-two minutes and preached twenty-five, and that the prayer, as a regular thing, reached the teens. The record for three Sundays consecutively was fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen and one half minutes. A business man in the congregation said he always took that time to figure out some difficult problems in his business affairs It was further asserted that the prayers were always the same, that they lacked the element of petition and confession and seemed oratorical and were given entirely too much to instructing the Lord. There seemed to be no vital connection between the minister and his people—no bearing up of their needs to God. It is questionable whether he was conscious of the impression thus made upon them, for he was earnest and sincere, but the congregation, even including the young people and the children, talked of it and grew weary; some even stayed away from the services on account of it or came in after the prayer was over.

If some preachers wonder why men in the strenuous, hurrying life of business are not more interested in the preaching services, is it possible a radical change in "the long prayer" would in a majority of cases help matters tremendously? . . . The petition ought to be free from any sentence or word which can seem like telling the Lord anything about people, conditions, or things, and without so much as a hint of preaching "thrown into the form of a prayer"—just asking in three to five minutes at most for the helps and the blessings the people and their minister may safely be known to need.

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