The biblical pattern for church ministry moves from the pulpit to the people, from the gathering to the scattering.1 Never the other way around. All other ministries should be subservient to and ordered around the church’s main gathering. It’s intended to be the roaring river that gives life and direction to all the other discipling tributaries of the church. The order is never reversed.

Regardless of how your church states its mission—”living and proclaiming God’s truth in the world” or “spreading a passion for God’s supremacy among the nations”—every biblical church exists to make disciples, that is, gospel-believing, Spirit-indwelt, Word-obeying, Kingdom-advancing followers of Jesus Christ. This goal can be stated in different ways and with different emphases. It can be cute or curt. The bottom line is churches make disciples.
Okay … but how does a church do this? How does your church do this?
A thought experiment might help us here. Let’s say someone is converted through a relationship with a member of your church. What do you do next? Do you put them through a class for new Christians? Rush to place them in a community group? Maybe you’ve read The Trellis and the Vine (ah, that’s where I remember this illustration) and you enlist that member to begin discipling them.
All that’s wonderful. Now let me ask a follow-up question: what does your church’s weekly corporate worship gathering have to do with that baby believer’s discipleship? Further still, what’s the relationship between that newly formed discipling relationship and the Sunday service? More to the point, does your church make disciples when it gathers or only when its members scatter?
If you do a quick Google search, or thumb through your favorite publisher’s most recent catalog, or pick up the latest popular book on discipleship, you’ll find a consistent theme: real discipling work happens either through well-constructed programs or organic personal ministry.
I don’t intend to disparage programs or discipling. A culture of discipling—where members do deliberate spiritual good to one another out of a sense of loving obligation—is necessary for a church to be healthy. Programs can help toward that end.
But I am concerned that many pastors unwittingly overlook the core discipleship program the New Testament prescribes: the corporate worship gathering. It’s more fundamental to Christian growth than any program. Yes, it’s even more fundamental than any personal ministry of the Word that ought to resound throughout the week. The Sunday gathering is the primary discipler of a local congregation. Why? Because of what it proclaims and the pattern it sets.
Proclamation: The Gathering Disciples
When saints gather on Sundays, they do so to worship, yes, and to grow. And God grows his people through the Word—his world-creating, life-maintaining, saint-sanctifying Word (John 1:3-4; Heb. 1:1; John 17:17; 2 Tim. 3:16). It’s no surprise, then, that Scripture regulates the service around itself. In the gathering, we should read and preach Holy Scripture (1 Tim. 4:13; 2 Tim. 4:1–3), we should sing its truths (Col. 3:16), we should pray its hopes (Eph. 6:18), and we should visualize its message through the sacraments (1 Cor. 11:26; 10:21).
A Sunday morning gathering isn’t a production. It’s not marked by pageantry or sophistry. No. Saints gather every Lord’s Day trusting their pastors have planned a service that delivers up their most important meal of the week.
In other words, the corporate worship gathering disciples the saints because it proclaims God’s Word which in turn teaches for growth and trains for ministry.
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We ought also to remember God’s name whenever night falls upon the soul, whenever sorrows or trials seem to have obscured the very light of God’s face. In such moments, we are to remember God’s character as expressed by His holy name. Today, we are to remember particularly that we now call God our Father because of our adoption through His Son. If He has given us so great a gift, how much more will He be steadfastly with us even through the long nights of the soul?

I remember your name in the night, O LORD,and keep your law.
Psalm 119:55 ESV

Here the psalmist declares that his nightly meditation is upon the name of the LORD. As he lay in his bed, he thinks upon the nature and goodness of his God, for God’s name reflects His character. We observed this, of course, in Exodus with the LORD revealing and then displaying the grandeur of His name to both the Israelites and the Egyptians, and that declaration (“I am the LORD”) continues to be one of the great refrains throughout the remainder of the Old Testament.
This bears two applications.
First, we ought to have God’s name in mind whenever we are most alone. It is common that in the night people face, because of the stillness and solitude, the existential realities that they distract themselves from throughout the day.
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At best we can conclude that God indeed HEARS all prayers of all people just as he knows all things, but he only ANSWERS prayers according to his own will, and that is mainly the prayers of those who seek to do his will.

So what happens when you live your entire life as if God does not exist, but then you get into a real jam? You do not believe in God, you want nothing to do with God, and you actually dislike the very idea of God existing and interfering with your selfish lifestyle. But then crunch time comes.
Folks like this can very quickly change their tune and start praying fast and furiously. As the old saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes. When all hell breaks out, when some massive crisis comes along, then all of a sudden plenty of Joe and Josephine Pagans will burst out into prayer – as if there actually is a God who is there.
So what are we to make of such prayers? Does God in fact hear them? Does he answer them? Let me seek to flesh out some thoughts on this. These questions arise from a few brief things I happened to see on the television the other night. Both involved those who seemed to clearly be non-Christians who were speaking about God and prayer.
One was all rather trivial, while the other was quite serious. As to the former, some gal on a food cooking contest program said something about praying to God that the food comes out OK. But just moments prior she had uttered a string of swear words because of problems she had in her cooking. I immediately thought, ‘Hmm, and what God is this that she is praying to?’
These superficial and usually meaningless prayers are of course heard all the time: ‘God, please let the judges like my food.’ ‘God, help me get that parking spot.’ (Christians often pray that one too!) ‘God, help me get that dress that is on sale.’ Sam and Samantha Secular can pray prayers like this all the time. They may not even believe in God, but they are happy to now and then throw up prayers nonetheless to get something they want or crave.
Contrary to the beliefs of many people – pagans and Christians alike – God is not a divine Santa Claus whose only purpose for existing is to give us goodies and nice things whenever and wherever we seek them. He does not exist to serve us. We exist to serve, love and obey him.
But the second TV example was indeed much more important. A show about missing persons featured a 4-year-old girl who went missing in remote Tasmania. When I heard what the panicked mother said, I actually wrote it down: “I never prayed in my life, but I am now.” Hmm…
Thankfully the girl was found on the third day. And then the mum spoke of what ‘a blessing it was that she was found.’ Hmm again. To speak about “blessings” means there must be someone who gives out such blessings. Nature does not bless us in this sense – but a personal God can and does.
Now, does God care about children in strife, and does he care about grieving and panicking parents?
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