The Half-Hour Rule

“I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem; they shall never hold their peace day nor night: ye that are Jehovah’s remembrancers, take ye no rest, and give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.”

— Isaiah 62:6-7, ASV

Before the Fire

Revivals are usually remembered for their public moments: crowded meetings, weeping congregations, confessions, conversions, songs that go on past midnight. Those moments are real, and later chapters will describe several of them. But the people who were closest to the awakening that came to the Punjab in the years after 1904 were insistent that its public moments were not its beginning. The United Presbyterian mission’s own history, first published in 1909, said that the revival “had its springs in hidden resources of prayer that reached back several years.”

McGaw put it more vividly. “In every revival,” he wrote, “there is a divine side and a human side.” In the Welsh revival of 1904, which was then being reported across the Christian world, the divine side seemed to dominate. There was “no organization and very little preaching.” The Sialkot revival was different. It was, McGaw insisted, “just as certainly sent down from heaven,” but it came through human means: “organization … a certain amount of definite planning, and … seasons of long continued prayer.” He quoted the American evangelist Charles Finney, who had famously argued that revival is no more a miracle than a crop of wheat. It comes, that is, when people use the means that God has appointed.

The chief of those means, in the Punjab, was a small and very ordinary organisation called the Punjab Prayer Union.

A Union of the Willing

Carré’s book dates the beginning of the Prayer Union to “about April, 1904.” It was begun, the memoir says, by “a few souls” on whom “the burden of united prayer for Revival had been heavily laid.” Hyde was “one of the moving spirits.” Later books have sometimes called him its founder, but the early sources do not claim that, and it is fairer to say what they say. He was one of a small group of missionaries in the Punjab who, in the spring of 1904, agreed to pray together for an awakening, and who invited others to join them.

The Union was not an institution in any grand sense. It had no buildings and, as far as we know, no staff. It was a covenant among individuals, held together by a simple pledge and an annual meeting each spring. The sources do not list its members. They seem to have come from more than one mission, and to have included Indian workers as well as missionaries. What united them was a shared conviction that the church in the Punjab needed a fresh work of God, and that the first thing to do about it was to ask him.

Five Questions

The only surviving text of the Union’s pledge is the one McGaw printed in 1923. He says its principles were “stated in the form of questions which were signed by those becoming members.” There were five:

1. Are you praying for quickening in your own life, in the life of your fellow-workers, and in the Church?

2. Are you longing for greater power of the Holy Spirit in your own life and work, and are you convinced that you cannot go on without this power?

3. Will you pray that you may not be ashamed of Jesus?

4. Do you believe that prayer is the great means for securing this spiritual awakening?

5. Will you set apart one-half hour each day as soon after noon as possible to pray for this awakening, and are you willing to pray till the awakening comes?

It is worth reading these slowly, because their order is carefully thought out.

The first question begins with the member’s own life before it turns to anyone else’s. The prayer is for quickening “in your own life,” then in “your fellow-workers,” and only then “in the Church.” No one could join the Union in order to pray for other people’s revival while exempting themselves.

The second question asks about longing and about helplessness. It is not enough to think that more of the Holy Spirit’s power would be a good thing. The member is asked whether he is “convinced that you cannot go on without this power.” That is the language of desperation, not of improvement. Jesus said, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6, ASV). The Union was for the hungry.

The third question is the most surprising. After asking members to pray for power, it asks them to pray “that you may not be ashamed of Jesus.” It is a humbling prayer for missionaries to pray, people who had crossed the world for the sake of Christ. But the authors of the pledge knew their own hearts. It is quite possible to work for Jesus for years and still flinch from naming him plainly before those who despise him. Jesus warned that “whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of man also shall be ashamed of him, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38, ASV). Paul could say, “I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth” (Romans 1:16, ASV). The Prayer Union asked its members to pray for that boldness.

The fourth question is about conviction: “Do you believe that prayer is the great means for securing this spiritual awakening?” It does not say the only means. The members went on preaching, teaching, and organising. But it says the great means. Prayer is not the thing one does when all else has failed. It is the first thing.

And the fifth question is the practical heart of the whole covenant: half an hour each day, as soon after noon as possible, “till the awakening comes.”

Why Half an Hour, and Why Noon?

It is striking how modest this commitment was. The Union did not ask its members to pray all night, or to fast for weeks, or to give up their work. It asked for thirty minutes a day. A busy missionary with schools to run and villages to visit could keep it. So could a village pastor or a schoolteacher. So, today, could almost anyone reading this book.

The choice of noon was probably practical too. In the Punjab the heat of the day brought most outdoor work to a halt. In many households the middle of the day was already a time to withdraw indoors. But the choice also had a deeper logic. A fixed hour meant that members all over the province would be praying at roughly the same time, each in his own place, but together. The psalmist wrote, “Evening, and morning, and at noonday, will I complain, and moan; and he will hear my voice” (Psalm 55:17, ASV). Daniel, even under threat of death, “kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime” (Daniel 6:10, ASV). Peter went up on the housetop to pray “about the sixth hour,” that is, at noon, and there received the vision that opened the church to the Gentiles (Acts 10:9, ASV).

Set times of prayer are not a substitute for praying at all times. But they are a scaffold. They protect prayer from being crowded out by the urgent. The half-hour at noon was a promise kept daily, and a small promise kept daily can outlast a great resolution made once.

“Till the Awakening Comes”

The most demanding part of the fifth question is its last clause. The member did not promise to pray for a season, or until the next annual meeting, or until he felt he had done his share. He promised to pray “till the awakening comes.”

That is the language of Isaiah’s watchmen, the verse at the head of this chapter. God sets watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem who “shall never hold their peace day nor night.” And he tells them something astonishing: “ye that are Jehovah’s remembrancers, take ye no rest, and give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.” God commands his people not to let him rest. He invites persistence. He wants to be reminded of his promises until he keeps them.

Jesus taught the same thing in a parable: “And he spake a parable unto them to the end that they ought always to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1, ASV). The widow in the parable kept coming to the unjust judge until he gave in. If even an unjust judge yields to persistence, Jesus asks, “shall not God avenge his elect, that cry to him day and night?” (Luke 18:7, ASV).

Isaiah 62 became something like the motto of Hyde’s circle. McGaw says that at the 1905 convention the words of that passage “were burned into his brain as a command from God.” The circular that Pengwern Jones edited for the Bengal and Assam Prayer Union was called The Remembrancer, evidently after the same verse. The intercessors in the prayer rooms at Sialkot spoke of themselves as “watchmen” and “the Lord’s remembrancers.” They took the passage literally. Their business was to keep reminding God, day and night, of what he had promised to do.

A Season of Prayer Across India

The Punjab Prayer Union was not alone. In the same years, groups of Christians in many parts of India began to pray together for revival, often stirred by news from Wales. In January 1905 Pandita Ramabai called the young women of her Mukti mission near Poona to pray for an outpouring of the Spirit. By June hundreds were meeting twice a day, and at the end of that month revival broke out among them. In the Khasi Hills of Assam, where Welsh Presbyterian missionaries worked, an awakening was already spreading from village to village by the middle of 1905. It was the Khasi revival that Pengwern Jones had come to describe at Ludhiana when he first met Hyde.

In January 1906 The Missionary Review of the World surveyed what was happening. It listed Sialkot alongside Mukti, Assam, and other places where “God is mightily working.” It also noticed something they had in common: the revivals “followed closely upon the formation of Prayer Circles.” There is no record that Hyde had any direct link with Mukti or the Khasi Hills. They were parallel movements of the same season. But they tell the same story. Before the fire came, people had been gathering the wood.

The Spring Meetings

Each spring the members of the Punjab Prayer Union held an annual meeting. According to McGaw’s informant, the leaders prepared for it with “much time in prayers and fastings and all night watching.” At the meeting itself they looked to God “for guidance during the coming year.”

The spring meeting of 1905 left a deep mark on those who attended. “God laid on our hearts,” one of them wrote, “the burden of a world plunged in sin. We were permitted to share to some extent in the sufferings of Christ.” Carré’s account describes the same meeting: “all felt the great burden of the Indian Church, and her need of Revival, so very keenly as to be inexpressible in words.” The leaders attributed that burden largely to Hyde’s teaching about “the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings”, the idea that intercessors are invited to share, in some small measure, in the grief of Christ over sin. We will return to that theme, and to its dangers, in a later chapter. Here it is enough to notice that the Prayer Union was not only a scheme for organised prayer. It became a school in which a handful of missionaries and Indian workers learned to feel what God feels about the church and the world.

And its members were convinced that it was the spring meeting of 1905 that prepared the way for the great convention that autumn.

For Reflection

The Punjab Prayer Union asked very little: five honest questions and half an hour a day. It is easy to overlook, because it was so ordinary. But its members believed it was the hidden root of everything that followed.

That should hearten anyone who longs for revival in their own church or town and feels powerless to bring it about. Few of us can pray as John Hyde prayed. Almost any of us could answer those five questions honestly and keep a half-hour at noon. The Union’s pledge could be signed today, in any church, by any small group of Christians who are willing to begin with their own lives, to admit that they cannot go on without the Spirit’s power, to pray not to be ashamed of Jesus, and to keep praying till the awakening comes.