10. Pray Together

Church fellowship—designed to be a powerful way to advance the kingdom—in my context has often been reduced to having coffee and donuts between Sunday school and the worship service or to a Wednesday evening meal together….When Paul talks about being able to understand what is beyond understanding “together with all the saints,”⁠10 I believe he means that the members of the body of Christ need each other in order to understand what is otherwise beyond understanding. Every culture’s understanding of the Bible is conditioned to some extent by its own cultural assumptions. This is both helpful and a detriment. It is helpful because every culture reflects God’s glory in special ways. So, the church in every culture has insights into the meaning of God’s Word that tend to be less obvious to other cultures. Fellowship and prayer across cultures thus helps us get a broader and deeper view of who God is and what he has done. We need each other to gain a fuller understanding of God’s Word…. So, when Paul talks in Ephesians 3:10 about the multicultural church reflecting the multifaceted wisdom of God and thus teaching the angels⁠14 more of the depths of that wisdom, this is one of his implications: We will not see the power of the gospel unleashed as it could be in a given area until we learn just how much we have been affected by our own culture…. Corporate prayer helps us overcome the hidden (even to ourselves) self-centeredness and ethnocentricity of our prayers. It also brings our different personality and cultural perspectives on God’s Word—which are all in Scripture, but some of which are more visible to certain people than to others—to bear on our prayers and how we formulate them.