Museum Piece
by Pastor William Hughes, Sugar Grove (PA) FMC

"My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations."
— Mark 11: 17

Pastor William Hughes

The "Irish Folk Museum" covers a forested area just outside of Belfast. Many reminders of Irish history reside there. An entire village including school, church, blacksmith shop, and courthouse has been reconstructed. Inside one of the "wee thatched cottage" dwellings is a magnificent piece of old-world engineering. A mammoth-sized weaving loom almost fills one entire room of a cottage. There is much detailed sophistication to this apparatus, considering it was designed and employed in a very primitive age. Every component was designed to move in one direction or another — pedals, levers, wheels, sliding arms. It must have been a grand and impressive thing in motion, creaking and squeaking, clanking and clattering, brought to life each day by its human operator. There is something sad about its silence today, that loom isn't what it was intended to be originally. It wasn't meant to be a static exhibit reminding people of the past. Yet inevitable human advancement and technology outmoded it and made it obsolete. Machines exist today that can do in a day all that old loom could do only in its lifetime. So its only function is to be a non-functional object of discussion, gathering dust.

I wonder if that old loom isn't somewhat like prayer in the lives of many Christians and the life of the church. Has prayer become a museum piece for believers and for the church today? Is prayer something we appreciate more for what it used to be to us than what it is? Is prayer still an active and operational element in our lives and church life? Loud noises of active prayer machinery once emanated from churches all across the land. Times of corporate prayer, concerts of prayer, group prayer. Meetings and gatherings for prayer were as numerous as they were for church worship, church social activities, church planning meetings, and church programming. What place does prayer have in our lives today?

I see that old loom, talked about much as a relic of the past, praised for the central role it once played in Irish life and history, yet relegated to a static role and no longer relied on for anything. I can understand why obsolescence would overtake that technologically outmoded piece of machinery. Better devices have been discovered; superior results can be produced with new inventions. That old loom was always going to have a limited life span of usefulness. Prayer, too, often gets talked about today but strangely — as though it were a relic of a past way of church life. Prayer activities once engaged in by the church are deemed to have lost usefulness. Few people exist today who can operate that old loom; the art of employing it is lost. But if the church forgets the art of prayer and loses the knowledge of employing it for its mission, that would be a great tragedy. We have no innovations that will replace prayer or do the work of prayer. Still — after 2,000 years — we are wholly reliant on prayer. It is as effective as ever as a tool for spiritual work.

Let it never be said of us or our churches that prayer has become a museum piece. May our community hear all the right noises of an active, working church prayer machine. May prayer not just generate discussion among us, may it be employed to produce results. My Irish loom was really doomed when one generation stopped teaching another how to use it. A whole generation stopped seeing the loom being employed and with that the art was lost. May God grant us the will and wisdom to show our future generation of believers how to employ prayer in our churches. May the art of praying never be lost.