Heavy Metal Prayer Meeting

The church I go to has recently began renting some rooms within our local community centre. Our church also meets at the community centre on a Sunday and has recently become part of the management committee who helps to run the building.

So on Wednesday, we had our monthly church prayer meeting. I was quite excited to go along to our new rooms to meet with others to pray for our church, our town and our world. Chocolate biscuits and fruit juice were laid out on the table, keyboard in the corner - this was going to be great!

At 7:30, the prayer meeting began, but on the other side of the wall, in the main hall of the community centre, so did the heavy metal band!

It was an interesting juxtaposition to say the least. When we sang it was not so bad - we could hardly notice the incessant crunching guitar that created an acoustic wallpaper for the entire prayer meeting. We were thankful that the building was in use by the community (as the centre was due to be closed earlier in the year unless a group, including the church, stepped in to save it), We want the community centre to succeed! So we were happy it was being used, but it was unfortunate that both events were happening at the same time.

However, we pressed on despite the distraction. I must say many thoughts went through my mind during the prayer meeting and afterwards. The obvious ones like: 'Oh no! This is not going to work', and 'We are going to have to change the time or day of the prayer meeting in future' and even 'When are they going to stop!'. But this is not what I want to focus on here.

One thing that I thought about is how good it is that the church is part of the community, that a heavy metal band can practise alongside a prayer meeting. We are not so distant  - we embrace those who are not-one-of-us and whose culture is different. Our church is beginning to face outwards, towards the community more and more. This just served to help illustrate this position of our corporate spirit.

I was also able to find a place of calm within myself during the prayer meeting. Despite the 'noise' of the world that surrounded me and was pressing in from every side, I found a place of quietness and calm, a spacious place within my spirit where I could still draw close and meet with God despite being within a loud and stressful situation.

It also made me concentrate the hardest I have ever done in a prayer meeting before. I had to concentrate more in order to stay engaged. This realisation caused me to think - why don't I concentrate more in a normal prayer meeting (without heavy metal band)? In future I have determined to concentrate and engage more.

I was glad we had the experience of the heavy metal prayer meeting, although despite all the things I had learnt, I was not the best of fun. But the news came yesterday that the band will no longer be practising on a Wednesday evening - God is good!