Collective Prayer, Group Mind
It is not something limited to churches. But if the church/group is genuinely connected to the Divine (i.e. to God), then it has a whole lot of extra “grunt”.power re getting prayers answered.
Be realistic. As alluded to in several Posts on this website, “predators” DO hunt in churches. People often join a church or start attending one, because they are looking for “answers” or “help” or both. That can make them easy targets for the predators. That is what attracts the predators to churches, i.e., easy targets who are vulnerable and trusting.
But that “negative risk factor” does not change the reality that when you find a good church, with people who are close to God, you have “found gold”.
It is a common theme in Biblical tradition, that group prayer can often achieve more than individual prayer. That is not limited to monotheistic religions. But, the closer to God the group is, the more spiritual power the group has access to.
Simple logic tells you that if you deal with any random spirit (what most Pentecostal-Charismatic denominations do), then you reap what those spirits want you to reap. This is part of the reason why Pentecostal churches have such a shocking record re how they treat each other, how they persecute other Christians, and why they are so prone to financialy exploiting others.
Ditto if your group thinks that the Messiah Son of David is just some ascended master from India who learned it all in the Punjab. Get REAL!! India has great spiritual knowledge, much of it passed down from Abraham. But the Messiah is a Son of David, the fulfilment of Divine prophecy that goes back to Eden.
Ditto again for groups that tell you that the Bible was the revelation “for a past era”, but not for our modern age. Again, GET REAL. God is above time. The Word of God is above time. It came out of a dimension above time. It is true now just as it was thousands of years ago.
The Group Dynamics of united prayer will still work, even if the “theology” is limited. But it will work even beter if the theology is more accurate.
Face it. A LOT of what gets taught in churches is wrong. If prayers call on God for personal intervention, and then God intervence, 100% full on, what happens? Well, the ones doing the praying take the answered prayer as a sign that thir beliefs and theology must be perfect.
So what would YOU do if YOU were God in that situation? Do you keep encouraging the stupidity by answering every prayer? Or do you limit the personal intervention?
Not all prayer is about God stepping in like a puppet master. Some things work as “general principles”. People can reap what they sow, good or bad. Faith can do amazing things – Jesus emphasised Faith. He did not always talk about God answering the prayers. Sometimes He attributed the helings to the Faith of the person “receiving”. He said plainly to the woman who had been suffering from her internal bleeding for 12 years:
“Your faith has saved you”.
That woman had crawled through a crowd to grab the knot, the 9 strings, representing Light as a 9-Fold String, on Jesus’ garment. But something “closed the circuit” and the healing power shot out from Jesus and healed her. Jesus felt it happen.
Peter said to Jesus: “The crowd is jostling you, and you ask ‘Who touched Me?’ “
Peter was amazed by Jesus’ question. But, going by Jesus’ words, it was Faith that established the link/contact.
Shared Faith, Group Faith, can boost the connection. Just make sure it is a GOOD Group!
Facts of “Church Life”
Sad to say, but it is the truth. A lot of people “running loose” in church congregations are gossips and troublemakers. They criticise everything and everyone. Their main delights are being judgemental and ruining other peoples’ lives, just for “fun”. Yes, those “evil bastards” get off on harming others. They achieve nothing good in their own lives. They are determined to harm anything or anyone that is “of God” or looks likely to achieve anything.
So you want to joins your prayers to the fake prayers of those “aforementioned evil bastards”?
The answer is, obviously NO!
But, flip side, if you find a genuine group, even if it is just a small “home group” that you know you can trust, whom you can successfully and powerfully pray with, you have struck GOLD.