Fear of Prayer
I have been teaching the high school sunday school class for about a year now and something I have had serious issues with is students not wanting to pray. I start a morning out by asking for someone to pray and I eventually have to call on someone to do it. It usually consists of thanking God for the morning and asking that the morning will go well. At the end of class, I again ask someone to pray to close us. Again, I usually have to call on a student. Again, it is sort of this rehearsed prayer. I did a series on pray to see if I could confront this issue in an indirect way and it doesn’t seem to have helped.
I was in church yesterday and we had a guest speaker come in to give the sermon. He is the principle at a local public high school. He was talking about how he walks out his faith in a place where you cannot talk about Jesus. He was telling some stories of when he had been looking for opportunities to talk about Jesus. One was actually quite funny. Two students came in to his office with a disagreement or discipline issue, I can’t remember which. Neither was telling the truth. He looked down and noticed that one of the students was wearing a WWJD bracelet. He turned to her and ask her what Jesus would do and it was resolved.
But that is not the point. After he finished talking about how life is for him as a Christian and principle, the church took an opportunity to pray for him and his wife. So we got them up front and just did an open call to anyone that wanted to come down and pray for them, as we usually do.
Not a single student from that school went down to pray for him…
I am so confused by this. Here is the leader of a school trying to walk out his faith as best he can in what I would call a hostile enviroment and none of the students will walk 25 feet to stand in prayer for him.
Do students think that standing around a flagpole once a year fullfills their God given responsibilty to pray? Do students think that prayer is not necessary? Why is it that it is so easy for students to sit in a classroom and say all the right answers and go to school and do all the wrong things? Why is it that when asked to pray honestly students just lock up?
Why do we seem so afraid of prayer?
I’ve come by this same thing with some youth. It ends up that most of them don’t see there own parents pray. The only time they see them pray might be at church. The thing is that most youth or kids aren’t being taught in there own homes about prayer. It’s kind of one of those teenager attitudes. If my parents aren’t doing it then I’m not going to do it. I have seen some change there own lives when they have been believing for something. I told them to pray for those things. They were reluctant on it. They did the traditional stile prayer. At that time I told them to stop praying. It told them to talk to God like they would to to there own father. Saying that God wants them to talk to Him as the Heavenly Father. So they started to pray that way. Well when they recieved what they were praying for they were more eager to keep praying. It’s a tough thing to be in. We have to get the parents get involved just as much as the youth. Same thing came down about reading there Bible. Most youth weren’t because they didn’t think it was important because there parents were not reading the Bible. Keep doing what you are doing. You’ll have the break through that you need.