When we worry about how new life can be breathed into dry bones... Church History is full of reasons to hope.
There is a Living God who is the Fountain of Life.
Church is NOT a human creation but the supreme work of the infinite and eternal God.
So, in 1949, Peggy and Christine Smith began to pray.
One was 84 and the other was 82 - one was nearly blind and the other nearly crippled.
Yet, they were so deeply burdened about Church on their Hebridean island that they began to pray.
Church attendance was very low - and especially young people wanted nothing to do with Church.
Everybody said that Church was finished.
YET... they began to seriously and earnestly pray.
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What is most vital in our current Church crisis?
Could it be serious prayer?
Church is not a human creation: it is built by the Spirit of the Living God, bought by the blood of God and is at the very centre of the universe.
No human power can open blind eyes and awaken the spiritually dead.
This is not about what flesh and blood can or cannot do.
So, Peggy and Christine began to pray.
They spent hours in prayer, sometimes praying from 10 p.m. to 3 or 4 a.m. in their little cottage - BUT, not for endless months and years.
This all happened in just a few weeks.
As they continued to pray through the night a couple of times a week, some of the local Church ministers began to join in with them every Tuesday and Friday.
They felt that Isaiah 44:3 was important for them in these prayers:
'For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground...'
They felt that they should call a preacher called Duncan Campbell to come to their island - and eventually he came. He intended to stay for two weeks, but ended up being there for two years!
When Duncan arrived about 30 people gathered together in a cottage to pray.
At about 3am, it seemed that the Living God drew near to them and some fell to the floor with that overwhelming sense of holy awe and humbled brokenness.
They continued in prayer through the night - and when they left the cottage in the light of the morning, they found men and women wanting to find out about the Living God.
Do we know what it is to be so excited by something that we cannot sleep?
We perhaps might stay up far too late, into the early hours, because we are so caught up in a box set or a novel... or because of some important event in our lives.
BUT, what if prayer and the presence of God were like THAT to us?
We cannot just turn that on and make it happen through psychological tricks... but can we not cry out to be MADE hungry and thirsty?
"Lord I believe... help my unbelief!
Lord, I'm NOT as excited by YOU as I am by so many other things in my life - I KNOW that is wrong and sick.... please heal me and help me. If you are willing, you can make me clean!"
So, in the cottage - people were not thinking of sleep that special night and the next day they found people who also had a new hunger for reality, a genuine thirst for the Living God.
The next night buses brought people from around the island to the Church building and when the Word of God was declared, many people felt deeply moved.
At the end of the meeting time, as people began to leave, a young man began to pray and as he carried on praying more people turned up at the Church building - until many more people were outside, surrounding the building.
A Church leader read Psalm 132 - and then the Church family sang that old Psalm and people pressed into the Church building until 4am - trying to find out how to find the Living God, how to become part of Church.
At 4am, someone arrived to say people had started turning up to the police station. They had been troubled in the night because of the wrong things they had done - and they thought the police station was the only place to go if you were guilty of wrong!
Church was so far out of their minds that it never occurred to them that they should perhaps go to Church!
The people at the police station wanted somebody to pray with them - so people from Church went to help them.
Describing the scenes outside the police station, a minister declared:
“I saw a sight I never thought was possible.
Something I shall never forget.
Under the starlit sky, men and women were kneeling everywhere, by the roadside, outside the cottages, even behind the peat stacks, crying for God to have mercy upon them.”
It all sounds impossible - even fanciful to those of us who have never seen or heard such things.
But, it sounds like the kind of thing that happened in the Bible - and that has happened countless times through Church History.
It has happened many times in England - and IS happening in many parts of the world right now.
It happens in all kinds of churches - when people seriously want to do that kind of business with the Living God.
It has happened in the most formal churches and the most informal - in churches with no resources, no human skills or training, no great strategies.
This very day I have been hearing of a Church in another part of the world that has been experiencing this kind of divine life.
Perhaps the key to it all is PRAYER.
When we asked what they were doing as Church... everything they said are the very kind of things that many of US are already doing... BUT... the one clear difference was PRAYER.
They were meeting in the early morning to pray all together as Church - because THAT was more important to them than food and drink, than sleep or comfort.
Very challenging... but also so inspiring.