Prayer Before Strategy

Acts 13:1–3

"While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, 'Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul…'"

I am all for strategic planning, and I even enjoy it. I teach our interns a tool I picked up in college ministry, the planning cycle: vision, mission, goals, strategies, plans, execution, debrief, coaching. I've led whole leadership teams through it. There is real value in planning. As Eisenhower put it, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."

And yet, when we watch the gospel spread through the known world, it spreads largely unplanned. Some have said the book of Acts is not so much the acts of the apostles as the acts of the Spirit through the apostles. Pentecost was Spirit-initiated. So was Philip's encounter with the Ethiopian, Peter's preaching in Cornelius's house, even Stephen's speech and the persecution that scattered the disciples into a diaspora.

And so was this moment in Antioch. The leaders gather to worship and fast, and as they do, the Spirit reveals the strategy: set apart Saul and Barnabas. They commission them with more prayer, and the gospel presses on toward Europe.

Strategy and planning are here. But notice the order. Strategy follows prayer. For years the American church has had this backwards. We lead with strategy and then ask God to bless it. The early church reversed it. In the upper room at Pentecost and in the upper room at Antioch, the first work was prayer. Out of prayer and encounter, surrender and consecration, came the revelation of God's purposes.

Last week we spoke of building the altar of the local church. Here is one practical reason why. If we do not carry out our mission in and through and by prayer, we are left doing the best we can with what we have, and that is never enough. The walls of Jericho fell by the power of God. Lazarus was raised by the power of God. The beggar at the Beautiful Gate was healed by the power of God, not by the best Peter and John could manage. "Silver and gold I do not have," Peter said, "but what I have I give you." The power of God, and the wisdom of God, come through prayer.

This is why the altar must be built. Without it, we are relegated to our own strength, our own wisdom, our own plans. But as Martyn Lloyd-Jones reminds us, we pray for revival because God can do more in a single day than all our organizing can accomplish in fifty years.

Rev. Greg Johnson
Director, Revive New England