Introduction
You notice that many modern churches suffer from spiritual dryness despite having large budgets, polished marketing, and clever programs. You rely on human strategies, academic orthodoxy, and entertainment value instead of depending directly on God. This leaves you feeling exhausted and spiritually powerless.
God works powerfully when a church abandons human marketing and relies entirely on fervent prayer and spiritual weakness.
Jim Cymbala shows you how the Brooklyn Tabernacle transitioned from a struggling congregation into a dynamic center of spiritual life. The book explains how to abandon modern novelties, cultivate corporate prayer, and confront hidden sin. You will learn how to turn weakness into an asset for divine intervention.
- How does true spiritual power enter a local church?
- Why do clever programs and marketing fail to change hearts?
- What happens when a community confesses hidden compromise?
- How can you make your prayer life a genuine powerhouse?
1. Waking Up to a Powerful Promise
God is powerfully attracted to human weakness and honest desperation, using brokenness to make room for His supernatural power.
When you face overwhelming obstacles and personal burnout without formal seminary training, admitting inability invites God to take over. God uses amateurs who admit their absolute need for Him. Human credentials and cleverness do not impress God.
Jim Cymbala broke down five minutes into a Sunday night sermon, sobbing and telling the congregation he could not preach because something was wrong. This emotional moment led directly to the first major spiritual breakthrough.
The Amateurs
The Brooklyn Tabernacle struggled during early years with an $85 first Sunday morning offering and a $232 monthly mortgage payment. With only $160 in the checking account, Jim and Carol Cymbala experienced God's provision starting with a one-hundred-dollar anonymous donation.
Facing an inability to pay the mortgage, Cymbala found an unaddressed white envelope containing two $50 bills on the foyer floor immediately after checking an empty post office box. Total salary received the first year was $3,800, followed by $5,200 the second year, before leaders considered purchasing the Atlantic Avenue building for a $95,000 asking price.
Catching Fire
The prayer meeting serves as the true spiritual barometer and driving engine of a church. Sunday morning attendance reflects the popularity of a church and Sunday night reflects the popularity of the preacher. Attendance at the weekly prayer meeting demonstrates how popular Jesus is and dictates God's blessing.
After returning from Florida, Cymbala announced to the congregation that Tuesday night prayer meetings would henceforth be the gauge of success and the primary engine of the church. With about 100 people attending the prayer meeting once Sunday morning attendance grew to 150 or 175, God provided unexpected miracles.
You can establish this spiritual engine by following specific steps:
- Set the prayer meeting as the central barometer and gauge of church success.
- Focus vertically on God in prayer rather than horizontally on one another.
- Utilize concerted group prayer, circles of prayer, and special burdens.
2. The Power of Prayer
The true source of spiritual life and inspirational music in a church is not a methodological formula, but genuine prayer born out of real human need.
Music distributors and church leaders often search for a secret formula to replicate the success of the Brooklyn Tabernacle. They fail to realize that the life of the church stems entirely from its intense prayer meetings rather than clever techniques or seminars.
A music distributor spent months visiting the church before realizing that the true power behind the choir's music was their Tuesday night prayer meeting.
A Song for the Desperate
After recording a low-budget custom album in 1980, music companies distributed their work nationally. This led to collaborations with major Christian artists and performances at high-profile venues like Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall. These events were strategically used to give away free tickets and plant churches in various city sectors.
When Carnegie Hall was accidentally booked by a minister who lacked an artist, the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir filled in. They drew 3,500 people and prompted police barricades, ultimately leading to sell-out nights at Radio City Music Hall.
The Greatest Discovery of All Time
Prayer is the vital sign and lifeline of the Christian church, without which orthodox teaching resembles dressing a lifeless body in frilly clothes.
Many modern churches focus heavily on teaching and attendance numbers. Without a corporate prayer life, the church remains in a spiritual coma. True New Testament normalcy is marked by calling on the name of the Lord.
The author notes that if the spirit of brokenness and calling on God ever slacks off, the church is in trouble regardless of having ten thousand in attendance.
Collective prayer and calling upon the name of the Lord predates formal religious systems and serves as the fundamental hallmark of God's people. Tracing back to Genesis 4:25-26, humanity's collective relationship with God began when people started calling on the name of the Lord. This distinguished them from those who relied entirely on human efforts and independence.
David Jeremiah called the Brooklyn Tabernacle for urgent prayer upon being diagnosed with cancer in 1994, relying on their passionate intercession rather than mechanical religious exercises.
When the author's oldest daughter Chrissy fell into severe rebellion and left home, human efforts failed. After the congregation stopped a Tuesday night prayer meeting to collectively intercede like a woman in labor, Chrissy experienced an overwhelming conviction of sin thirty-two hours later and returned to the faith.
Chrissy suddenly appeared at her parents' house on a Thursday morning, sobbing on the kitchen floor. She asked who had been praying for her on Tuesday night because God had dramatically pulled her back from an abyss.
3. The Day Jesus Got Mad
Jesus violently cleansed the Jerusalem temple because religious commercialism had corrupted its original purpose as a house of prayer. On two occasions, Jesus drove out merchants, money changers, and animal sellers who were exploiting worshippers with exorbitant prices and surcharges. He rebuked them for turning God's house into a mall and a den of robbers, emphasizing that the atmosphere around God must be prayer and worship rather than commercial enterprise.
Preaching and music are important, but prayer must be the defining, overriding mark of God's dwelling place.
In John 2 and Mark 11:15-18, Jesus overturned tables, blocked merchandise, and even made a whip out of cords to physically drive people and animals out of the temple courts.
The Temple and Prayer
The Bible never designates God's house as a house of preaching or music, but repeatedly calls it a house of prayer for all nations. You can achieve more in people's lives during ten minutes of real prayer than in hours of sermons, yet modern churches often lack even basic prayer meetings.
Instead of engaging in political activism or hand-wringing over cultural decline, you can rely entirely on prayer. The Brooklyn Tabernacle experienced profound breakthroughs by letting ministries be born in prayer and reaching out to the most broken individuals.
A street outreach team prayed for the male subculture at the salt mines on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Through sustained prayer and compassion, street hustlers making 400 to 600 dollars per night, including Ricardo Aparicio known as Sarah, were brought to church after three months to get Ricardo into a drug rehabilitation program. Twenty-seven guys were brought from the salt mines to church and radically transformed.
A Time for Shaking
Many modern churches have institutionalized lukewarmness, confusing positive spin and success with true spiritual vitality. You see Christians boasting of being rich and lacking nothing while spiritually wretched, poor, blind, and naked.
George Barna reports that 64 percent of born-again Americans and 40 percent of evangelical Americans deny the existence of absolute truth, and more than three-fourths of current church growth being transfer growth from other churches.
When faced with opposition and threats, the early church responded not with political protests, but with united, energetic prayer. When Peter and John were arrested and threatened by authorities, they immediately joined other believers to pray for boldness rather than seeking safety or political leverage. Their prayer resulted in a physical shaking of the meeting place and a fresh infilling of the Holy Spirit in Acts 4.
Recognizing that human cleverness and programs cannot change human hearts, the Brooklyn Tabernacle established a dedicated Prayer Band of over four hundred people that intercedes continuously before and during church services.
During a Sunday service while Pastor Kenneth Ware's Prayer Band was interceding upstairs, an unbalanced man walked down the aisle with a loaded 38-caliber revolver aimed at Jim Cymbala. Mid-sermon, the man experienced intense conviction, dropped the gun on the pulpit, and cried out for help, resulting in a major harvest of souls.
You can apply these practical steps to shift the spiritual atmosphere:
- Organize a Prayer Band to intercede on a continuing schedule during church services.
- Write every received prayer request on a little card and lift it to the Lord for thirty days.
4. The Lure of Novelty and Marketing
Modern churches are increasingly chasing unbiblical novelties and trendy shortcuts instead of relying on the plain gospel.
The Lure of Novelty
Pastors often search for dynamic new strategies and exotic teachings such as generational curses or territorial-level spiritual warfare. These man-made techniques are impotent and distract from the traditional biblical call to wait on the Lord and preach the Word. Technicians, revisionists, and idea men promote concepts entirely absent from the New Testament.
The author heard conference speakers claim that believers must remove ancestral generational curses or engage in strategic territorial warfare against regional demons.
Believers must confront real satanic activity through mere Christianity rather than relying on ritualistic hocus-pocus or physical gimmicks. The New Testament portrays resisting the devil and casting out demons as standard spiritual ministry rather than complex ceremonies like stamping feet, wearing military fatigues, or mapping topographies. True deliverance happens through the name of Jesus, the power of his blood, and earnest prayer.
During a Tuesday night prayer meeting at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, a five-foot-one-inch drug-addicted teenager named Diana violently attacked the author before being completely set free within minutes through prayer in Jesus' name.
You can apply these practical steps to avoid diversions from God's best:
- Forget novelties and prevail in prayer
- Resist the devil through old-fashioned spiritual endurance
The Lure of Marketing
Contemporary churches have replaced apostolic priorities with a new holy trinity of attendance, buildings, and cash.
Unlike New Testament believers who focused on helping the poor and proclaiming the Word without obsessing over headcounts or budgets, modern pastors constantly evaluate their success based on Sunday attendance numbers, building expansions, and gross income. This A-B-C framework guides the decisions of many religious leaders.
When asked about the progress of the Lord's work, pastors today typically answer with statistics regarding their Sunday headcounts, building wings, and annual income.
Apostolic ministry requires bold, confrontational proclamation of God's whole will and conviction of sin rather than market-sensitive messaging. The apostles did not ask what people wanted to hear or how to draw crowds; they aimed for a piercing of the heart and repentance. Yielding to an anti-authority culture by softening messages about sin compromises the power of the gospel.
Dwight L. Moody deeply regretted waiting a week to call his Chicago audience to decision on the cross just before the Great Chicago Fire struck in October 1871. Three hundred people died in the Great Chicago Fire starting on October 8, 1871, and ninety thousand people were left homeless by the Great Chicago Fire.
You can apply this practical step to maintain faithful ministry:
- Faithfully and boldly proclaim that sin is real but Jesus forgives those who confess
5. Too Smart for Our Own Good
The first step in any genuine spiritual awakening is the demolition of hidden sin and rationalized compromises within the heart and community.
Many inner-city churches possess flawless theological orthodoxy regarding the divinity of Christ or the Virgin Birth yet remain empty and spiritually dead. True spiritual impact requires God to manifest His power through signs, wonders, and changed lives rather than relying solely on human arguments and lectures. You see this in a famous downtown sanctuary featuring 1,400 seats that was packed in the 1930s and 1940s but abandoned for regular Sunday worship since the 1960s. When churches lack fervent prayer, they degenerate into theological wrangling that alienates outsiders. God calls believers to reach out compassionately to messy and broken people with the expectation of supernatural transformation.
The Lure of Doctrine Without Power
Argued theological positions cannot replace the raw, supernatural manifestation of God's power in answer to prayer. You must seek God passionately until He opens the heavens and shows Himself powerful. Spiritual maturity and past victories can lead leaders to rely on human cleverness and strategic maneuvering rather than continually seeking God. Believers who have built a track record of success often drift into a state of self-sufficiency, trusting in human solutions, wealth, or political treaties instead of crying out to God during crises. When rebuked by prophets, hardened leaders often respond with anger and oppression rather than repentance.
King Asa successfully relied on God against a massive Cushite army early in his reign, but decades later he used temple treasuries to buy a political treaty with the king of Aram when faced with a smaller threat, and subsequently imprisoned the prophet who rebuked him. This descent ended in the 41st year of his reign when King Asa died with severe foot disease without seeking help from the Lord.
Demolition Before Awakening
Just as King Asa initiated his reign by smashing foreign altars and removing idols, believers must tear down accumulated spiritual junk such as gossip, slander, and cultural loyalties. Without clearing out these sins that grieve the Holy Spirit, individuals and churches cannot receive God's ongoing blessings. King Asa removed foreign altars, smashed sacred stones, cut down Asherah poles, and even deposed his grandmother Maakah from her throne for maintaining a repulsive idol. You can apply these practical steps to maintain clean spiritual speech:
- Stop any member speaking an unkind word or slander against anyone in midsentence.
- Ask the critical person who hurt, ignored, or slighted them.
- Offer to go directly to the pastor's office to get an apology and pray for the restoration of peace.
- Deal honestly and fully with sin in personal life.
- Repent of wrongdoing and give first loyalty to God.
Conclusion
God works powerfully when a church abandons human marketing and relies entirely on fervent prayer and spiritual weakness.
You must integrate these truths by moving away from worldly strategies and returning to spiritual basics. True renewal begins when you trade self-reliance for honest desperation before God.
- Confess any hidden sins and abandon rationalized compromises in your personal life and community.
- Prioritize corporate prayer as the absolute center of every church gathering and ministry activity.
- Reject novel marketing schemes and trendy gimmicks in favor of the plain, uncompromised gospel.
- Cultivate an atmosphere of spiritual weakness where you depend completely on the Holy Spirit rather than human talent.
- Listen honestly to divine correction and let righteous zeal cleanse your priorities.
10 Key Ideas
- God works powerfully when a church abandons human marketing and relies entirely on fervent prayer and spiritual weakness.
- God is powerfully attracted to human weakness and honest desperation, using brokenness to make room for His supernatural power.
- The prayer meeting serves as the true spiritual barometer and driving engine of a church.
- The true source of spiritual life and inspirational music in a church is not a methodological formula, but genuine prayer born out of real human need.
- Prayer is the vital sign and lifeline of the Christian church, without which orthodox teaching resembles dressing a lifeless body in frilly clothes.
- Preaching and music are important, but prayer must be the defining, overriding mark of God's dwelling place.
- Modern churches are increasingly chasing unbiblical novelties and trendy shortcuts instead of relying on the plain gospel.
- Contemporary churches have replaced apostolic priorities with a new holy trinity of attendance, buildings, and cash.
- The first step in any genuine spiritual awakening is the demolition of hidden sin and rationalized compromises within the heart and community.
- True renewal begins when you trade self-reliance for honest desperation before God and prioritize corporate prayer as the absolute center of every gathering.