Pentecostal Prayer

My personal experience of prayer comes from an hour between three and four o’clock in the afternoon spent every day sitting in the presence of God on an old chair in Coffee Room #3 on the fourth floor of the Men’s dorm in the Computer Technical School of Pravetz, Bulgaria. It is accompanied with the memories of leaving the dormitory through a first-floor window along with 15-20 other boys and running in the early morning snow to the small mountain Church of God through the doors of which so many have entered the glory of Heaven. And it always brings to my mind the image of my praying grandmother who forgetting the need of sleep and rest spent countless nights of prayer in the presence of the Almighty God.

If Pentecostalism has indeed discovered and acquired any of the characteristics of the Primitive Church this would be the prayer of the early saints. Prayer is also the means for universal identification with the Pentecostal movement. The Bible School of Charles Fox Parham in Topeka, Kansas had a prayer tower where prayers were ascending nightly and daily to God. It was through prayer and laying on of hands when around 11 p.m. on December 31, 1900, Agnes Ozman was baptized in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues. Six years later the Apostolic Faith stated that the beginning of Pentecost started with prayer in a cottage meeting at 214 Bonnie Brae.

It was a timeless prayer as they wept all day and night. It was prayer for reclaiming the power from the past; prayer for the present needs, and prayer for the future return of Christ. Prayer was not only the source of divine power, but also the means for preservation of the power and the identity of the Primitive Church. Prayer was not only the request for power, but also for the personal change and preparation of the believer who was going to receive the power. The connection between power and prayer was in the spirit of the ongoing Azusa Street Revival, whose members were earnestly urged to, “Pray for the power of the Holy Ghost.”

Similarly, the Church of God based its quest for the Primitive Church in prayer. Moreover, prayer was the only way these poor, uneducated and persecuted people could find comfort for their needs and answers for their lives. Prayer was their communication with God, their worship and their only way of experiencing the divine and acquiring the supernatural. It was not a sophisticated constructive liturgy, but rather a simple deconstructive experience, where the believer was divinely liberated from the past, present and future doctrinal dogmas and human limitations.

Only then was the believer able to experience the presence of God freely. The past pain was gone, the present need was trivial and the future was in the hands of the Almighty God. Hope, faith, crying, tears and joy were all ecstatically present in the reality of prayer, because God could hear and see all. And somehow, in a ways, which remains unexplainable, mystic and supernatural, their cry to God was heard and they were indeed empowered.

It was through a fervent prayer that in the summer of 1896 in the Shearer Schoolhouse in Cherokee County, NC about 130 people received the baptism of the Holy Ghost. It was through the prayer that took place in a cottage house, after the model of the Primitive Methodists. It was through the prayer in the house of W.F. Bryant and the prayers of the men on the “Prayer Mountain.” It was like the prayer in the Upper Room in Jerusalem (Acts 2). It was through the prayer which all seekers of God prayed in their search for His presence, in their need and in their longing for life. It was through the prayer, which reclaims, experiences and preserves the true Christian identity.

Twenty years later, The First Assembly of the Church of God recommended that prayer meetings would be held weekly in the local churches. It also urged for every family to gather together in family worship and seek God, instructing their children to kneel in the presence of the Almighty. In the 1907 Consecration Service both A.J. Tomlinson and M.S. Lemons expressed their desire and willingness to pray as they worked in the ministry.  To seek the power for ministry through prayer was completely in the spirit Azusa Street Revival, through which Pentecostalism addressed the world with the words, “The power of God now… “