Never Out Loud In My Own Church

Every night at that table, for twenty years, he has been the one who prays.

His wife, three children, and for the last four years a grandson in a high chair who says amen before anybody else and thinks that is the whole of it. He does it in Spanish, which is the language his mother prayed in, and he does not prepare anything and it comes out different every night and sometimes it goes on a bit and his daughter used to make faces about that when she was fifteen.

He is good at it. That is not a proud sentence; it is simply true, in the way that a man who has done a thing every night for twenty years is good at it.

At church he has never prayed out loud once.

Not in a home group, not in a prayer meeting, not on the two occasions when a man went round the circle and got to him and he shook his head and smiled and the man moved on and nobody thought anything of it.

Third row from the back, left side, twenty years.

He would tell you the reason without much difficulty: praying out loud in church is for the people who are good at it. The ones with the words. He has never for one second thought of that as a sad sentence, and it is only recently, since the grandson, that it has begun to sound like one.

If there is a room where your voice does not go, you know exactly what I mean.

Who is allowed

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting twenty years for somebody to say it.

Silence is not automatically humility. Sometimes it is. But a silence that comes from a rule about who is qualified is a silence about qualification, and it has been dressed as humility for so long that it has stopped looking like what it is.

Now read what Moses says when somebody tries to shut two men down for prophesying in the camp without permission.

And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the LORD's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!Numbers 11:29

Joshua wants them stopped, and his reasons are reasonable: they were not at the tent, they were not part of the seventy, and there is a procedure.

And Moses, who has every reason to protect his own position, says the opposite of what a man protecting his position says. He wishes all of them did it.

You are one of the Lord's people that Moses was wishing about, and the wishing did not have a shortlist attached. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Numbers 11:29, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

Notice what Moses does not say. He does not say: those two are unusually gifted. He does not sort anybody. He wishes the whole camp had it, which means the qualification he is imagining is not skill and not standing but simply belonging to the Lord.

So twenty years in the third row has not been humility. You have been one of the Lord's people the entire time, and that has always been the whole qualification. The word settled that long before you learned the sentence at that table, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the building while you read this.

Where the rule came from

Here is worth naming plainly, because you have never once examined it.

Nobody in that church made that rule. There is no elder anywhere who believes it. If you asked the man who goes round the circle whether prayer out loud is for people with the words, he would be genuinely upset that you thought so.

The rule is yours. You made it, probably about nineteen years ago, in a room where somebody prayed beautifully and you felt the gap between their sentences and yours, and you drew a conclusion in about four seconds that you have obeyed ever since.

And here is the strange arithmetic of it. The prayer you say every night at that table, in Spanish, unprepared, going on a bit, is by any honest measure a better prayer than most of the polished ones you have been comparing yourself to for two decades. You simply have not counted it, because it does not happen in a building.

Your grandson has heard you pray four hundred times. Not one person in that church has heard you once.

You have a voice that already prays and has for twenty years, and the room does not change what it is. Numbers 11 has Moses wishing the whole camp would do it; His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to say four sentences out loud in a circle and survive it.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you keep quiet is that somebody near you makes you pay for speaking, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Tell one person who can act. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour.