Why Andrew Murray Said the Church Is Not Praying
⏱ 11 min read
Your prayer meeting feels thin. The room is small, the prayers are competent, the requests are familiar, and you leave wondering — quietly, never out loud — whether the half hour did anything at all. You do not say it because you love the people in the room. You do not say it because you know the question itself sounds faithless. But the question is there, and it has been there for a while, and the question has a name: why dont christians pray, and more pointedly, why does the prayer the church does pray feel so thin from the inside.
Andrew Murray asked the same question in 1898. He was sixty-nine years old, had pastored in South Africa for forty-five years, had watched revival, watched it recede, watched congregations rise and dim, and he sat down to write The Ministry of Intercession because the answer had become clear to him and the clarity hurt. The book is, among other things, a diagnosis — quiet, sorrowful, and unsparing — of the corporate intercession the church has lost. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries the personal half of this practice into a daily companion, because the corporate cannot be rebuilt without the personal underneath it. We will get to the journal. For now: the chair, the book, the slow read.
What Murray meant by “the ministry”
Notice the word in Murray’s title. Ministry. Not the discipline of intercession. Not the practice of it. Ministry. In the older grammar, ministry meant a vocational, sustained, public service carried by people called to it. Murray put the word on intercession deliberately. He believed the church had quietly demoted intercession from a vocation that some Christians actually built their lives around to a brief item on the weekly meeting agenda, and the demotion was the reason the prayer meeting felt thin.
The thinness, in Murray’s reading, was not the fault of the people in the room. The people were faithful. They had shown up. They had done their part as the format asked them to. The thinness was the format’s fault — and behind the format, a slow theological forgetting about what intercession actually was for. Murray’s book is the slow walk back to the older grammar. We are going to walk three paragraphs of it.
The first passage: bowing the knees
“Let us dwell there, where we have been placed of God. And let us bow our knees to the Father, that He would grant us to be mightily strengthened by His Spirit, that Christ as our Sanctification may dwell in our hearts, that the power of His death and His life may be revealed in us, and God’s will be done in us as it was in Him. I do bless Thee for this precious blessed word, for this precious blessed work of Thy beloved Son. In His never-ceasing intercession Thou ever hearest the wonderful prayer, ‘I sanctify myself for them, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.’ Blessed Father!”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what Murray is doing in the grammar. He is not asking for intercession to be added to the church’s calendar as a programme. He is asking for the church to dwell where it has been placed — and then, from that dwelt place, to bow its knees together. The order matters. Dwelling first. Bowing second. The corporate intercession the church has lost was not lost because someone took it off the calendar. It was lost because the church stopped dwelling. The bowing of knees without the dwelling beneath it produces the thin prayer meeting you have been sitting in.
Then the line you would miss at speed. In His never-ceasing intercession Thou ever hearest the wonderful prayer. Murray’s whole theology of corporate prayer rests here. Christ is already interceding. The church’s intercession does not start the conversation. The church’s intercession joins a conversation Christ has been having with the Father since His ascension and has not stopped having for a single hour since. The corporate prayer meeting that has forgotten this becomes a small group of people trying to start a conversation. The corporate prayer meeting that has remembered it becomes a small group of people stepping into a conversation that is already happening, the way a tributary joins a river. The thinness of the modern prayer meeting is partly the thinness of trying to start what is already underway.
This is the first reason why dont christians pray in any sustained corporate way anymore. The theology of Christ already interceding has been quietly lost, and without it the corporate prayer meeting feels like a small room of voices speaking into silence, when in Murray’s grammar it was always meant to feel like a small room of voices joining a great voice already in the air.
(For the wider personal companion to this same teaching — what it means for the individual woman to enter Christ’s ongoing intercession from her chair — see Why Andrew Murray Called Intercession a Holy Privilege. And for the long daily form, What Andrew Murray Taught About Praying Without Ceasing walks the continuous interior posture the corporate is meant to grow from.)
The second passage: the whole heart
“Beloved Christian! come and give your whole heart and life to intercession, and you will know its blessedness and its power.”
— Andrew Murray, Ministry of Intercession
Read it twice. The brevity is part of the meaning.
Murray is naming the second reason the church is not praying. Whole heart and life. The modern Christian has, almost without noticing, organised intercession as a part-of-the-week practice — Wednesday evening, perhaps, or Sunday morning during the pastoral prayer, or five minutes at the end of a small group. Murray would not have called that intercession. He would have called that an occasional remembering of intercession. Intercession, in the older grammar, was a life. The intercessor was someone whose whole heart had been given to praying for others — children, neighbours, the lost, the church, the nations — and the praying was the spine of the daily, not a small attached limb.
This is hard to hear, because the modern Christian woman’s life is full. The work, the family, the responsibilities, the small ten thousand things that have to be carried in a week. Murray was not asking for more hours. He was asking for a different centre. The woman whose centre is intercession does the same ten thousand small things as the woman whose centre is the calendar — but she does them out of a heart that has been holding others before the Father all day. The carrying of the family. The carrying of the colleague. The carrying of the neighbour who is in trouble. The carrying of the church. None of it asks for a new hour. All of it asks for a new posture.
The corporate prayer meeting on Wednesday evening is the visible expression of the dozens of women whose interior week has been one of held intercession. When those women are not in the room — or when the women in the room have not been carrying anyone all week — the half hour of corporate prayer is the half hour the room can produce on its own, and that is the thinness you have been feeling.
Why dont christians pray. Murray’s answer: because intercession has been organised as a slot rather than a life, and a slot cannot produce what a life produces.
A somatic for the stiff body in the thin room
Pause here. The body knows the thinness before the mind does. The woman who has been sitting in shallow prayer meetings for years carries a small stiffness, often in the hips and the lower back — the body of someone who has been bracing through a practice she could not say out loud was not working.
Sit in a chair. Both feet flat on the floor. Notice where the body is gripping. Often the hip flexors. Often the small of the back. Take one slow inhale, and on the exhale, let the lower belly soften — not by force, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold it firm. Let the seat bones settle more fully into the chair. Let one more inhale come. On the next exhale, let the back release another fraction, the way a body releases when it has finally arrived home after a long day. Three breaths. No more.
The stiffness will not entirely lift. But the lower body, settling, signals to the soul that it has permission to sit here, slowly, without bracing. The corporate intercession Murray was describing required bodies that knew how to sit without bracing — because intercession is long, and the braced body cannot stay in the room for long. The somatic small release is part of the rebuilding. Murray did not call it that. He called it dwelling. The grammar is the same.
The Prayer Journal for Women is built around this daily small dwelling. One page each evening — a short scripture, room for one held face, one held name, one honest sentence. The journal is the personal half of what the corporate has lost. You cannot rebuild the prayer meeting alone. But you can rebuild the dwelling underneath your seat in it, and a room of women who have been dwelling all week is a different prayer meeting than a room of women who have not.
The third passage: the Spirit who makes the life unceasing
“Holy Spirit! with deep reverence I thank Thee for Thy work in me. It is through Thee I am lifted up into a share in the intercourse between the Son and the Father, and enter so into the fellowship of the life and love of the Holy Trinity. Spirit of God! perfect Thy work in me; bring me into perfect union with Christ my Intercessor. Let Thine unceasing indwelling make my life one of unceasing intercession. And let so my life become one that is unceasingly to the glory of the Father and to the blessing of those around me.”
— Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer
Read it slowly. Twice if you can.
This is the passage where Murray names what the lost intercession actually was. I am lifted up into a share in the intercourse between the Son and the Father. Intercession, in his grammar, is the creature being lifted into a conversation that the Trinity has been holding eternally. The intercessor is not a small person addressing a distant God. The intercessor is a small person being taken up into the love between Father and Son, by the Spirit, and the prayer that comes out is the prayer the Spirit prays in her while she is up there.
This is the theology the church has quietly lost, and its loss is why dont christians pray. The modern Christian thinks of intercession as me asking God for things on behalf of others. Murray thought of intercession as the Spirit lifting me into the eternal love of the Trinity and praying through me for the world. The two are not the same activity. The first is exhausting and produces the thin prayer meeting. The second is resting and produces what Murray called the never-ceasing intercession.
Let Thine unceasing indwelling make my life one of unceasing intercession. This is the line worth keeping near the page. Murray is asking for the Spirit’s indwelling to make the whole life a life of intercession — not a slot, not a meeting, not a Wednesday evening, but the whole quiet undertow of the day. The corporate prayer meeting that has women like this in it is not thin. It cannot be. Because the women are not starting the prayer when the meeting starts. They are bringing into the room what the Spirit has been praying in them all week.
(For the wider companion read on the long-faithfulness of this kind of intercession across years, see Andrew Murray on Praying for the Conversion of Loved Ones. And for the practical format that holds the daily personal half of this work, How to Start a Prayer Journal in 10 Minutes a Day walks the page that survives real life.)
What the church can do, slowly
Murray did not write The Ministry of Intercession as an accusation. He wrote it as a slow recovery letter. The corporate intercession the church has lost is recoverable — not by adding a prayer programme to the calendar, but by the slow rebuilding of the personal practice underneath every seat in the room. A church becomes a praying church when its women, one by one, in their separate chairs, begin to dwell in their week the way Murray described — held by the Spirit, lifted into the conversation Christ is already having with the Father, carrying the names through the Tuesday and the Wednesday and the long Saturday.
The prayer meeting then has something to gather. The thin half hour becomes a thick half hour, not because the format changed but because the bodies in the room have been carrying intercession all week and are bringing it in with them. Why dont christians pray. They do — when intercession has been recovered as a life, by the slow daily showing-up, in the chair, with the Spirit doing in them what they could not do for themselves. The meeting then is the river. The week is the tributaries. Without the tributaries, the river is the trickle. With them, the river is the river Murray was writing about.
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A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week. Built around the older voices, Murray among them. A small slow thread for the woman whose corporate prayer life feels thin and who is ready, slowly, to rebuild the personal underneath it.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. One page each evening — the personal dwelling that the corporate cannot be rebuilt without. We are also slowly working toward reprinting The Ministry of Intercession itself through Everspring Press, so the book Murray wrote for the quietly grieving prayer-meeting woman can be back in her hands in a clean modern edition.
The church is not praying, Murray would have told you, because the women in the chairs have not been dwelling. The recovery is not a programme. The recovery is the slow daily showing-up — woman by woman, chair by chair, week by week — until the river has tributaries again, and the corporate prayer meeting becomes what it was always meant to be: not the source, but the gathering.
