The Prayer Room

“I am Jehovah thy God, Who brought thee up out of the land of Egypt: Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.”

— Psalm 81:10, ASV

“Come With Me to the Prayer Room”

Pengwern Jones never forgot the first time he met John Hyde.

It was at Ludhiana, probably in 1906, at the annual meeting of the American Presbyterian mission in the Punjab. Jones, a Welsh missionary from Sylhet in Assam, had been invited to speak about the revival in the Khasi Hills. He travelled all night by train from Allahabad and arrived early in the morning, tired, and anxious about the address he was to give at four o’clock that afternoon. Someone took him to have tea with the delegates, and across the table he was introduced to a quiet American missionary. Hyde’s only words were, “I want to see you, I shall wait for you at the door.”

He was waiting at the door. “Come with me to the Prayer Room,” he said, “we want you there.” Jones was not sure whether it was a request or a command, but he felt he had to go. He protested that he had travelled all night, that he was tired, and that he had to speak at four. He went anyway.

There were half a dozen people in the room. Hyde went down on his face on the floor. Jones knelt, and “a strange feeling crept over me.” Several people prayed, and then Hyde prayed, and Jones remembered very little after that except the sense that “I was in the presence of God Himself and had no desire to leave the place.” People came and went. Meals were forgotten. His tiredness disappeared, and so did his anxiety about the talk. They had gone into the room at about eight in the morning. At half past three Hyde got up, and Jones found that they were the only two left.

“You are to speak at 4 o’clock,” Hyde said. “I shall take you to have a cup of tea.” Jones said Hyde must need some refreshment too. “No,” Hyde answered, “I do not want any, but you must have some.” They washed hastily, had a cup of tea each, and Hyde walked Jones to the door of the hall. There he took his hand and said: “Go in and speak, that is your work. I shall go back to the Prayer Room to pray for you, that is my work. When the service is over, come into the Prayer Room again and we shall praise God together.”

Jones spoke through an interpreter, and afterwards could not remember what he had said. But before the meeting ended the Indian interpreter was so overcome that he could not go on, and another had to take his place. “I know the Lord spoke that night,” Jones wrote. “He spoke to me, and spoke to many.” When it was over he went back to the prayer room. Hyde asked no questions about how the service had gone. “He seemed to know it all,” Jones wrote, “and how he praised the Lord.”

“That is your work … that is my work.” Those two sentences explain the prayer room better than any description of it. Hyde did not think prayer was more important than preaching, or that preachers were less spiritual than intercessors. He thought they were two parts of one work, and he had come to believe that his own part was the hidden one.

How the Prayer Room Began

At the Sialkot Conventions there were two prayer rooms, one for men and one for women. Prayer went on in them, Jones says, “day and night, without intermission,” from the first day of the convention until two or three days after it ended. Two or three experienced Christians were always present to help anyone who needed it. Sometimes someone led in prayer as at an ordinary meeting. Sometimes there was silence. Sometimes little groups formed around a particular need. Missionaries brought anxious enquirers there to be prayed for and helped.

Jones believed that the prayer room “was the work of the Holy Spirit through Hyde.” It was Hyde, he said, “that spent the first nights on the watch-tower,” joined almost from the start by McCheyne Paterson. We have seen that the official report of 1905 describes the same room, “not empty, day or night” after the first day or two. Whatever the precise origins, the prayer room became the heart of the convention. Jones remembered a missionary attending for the first time who came to him on the third day to complain. The convention was on the wrong lines, he said. The leaders ought to be on the platform, not hiding in the prayer room all day. Two days later the same man came back with a beaming face. “Do you know,” he said, “I have found out the secret of this Convention — it is that Prayer Room. I never saw anything like it.”

Thirty Days

The most famous claim about the prayer room concerns the preparation for one of the early conventions. McGaw, following Paterson, says that before one of the first conventions “Hyde and Paterson waited and tarried one whole month before the opening day. For thirty days and thirty nights these godly men waited before God in prayer.” George Turner joined them after nine days, “so that for twenty-one days and twenty-one nights these three men prayed and praised God for a mighty outpouring of his power.”

A friend in Calcutta, quoted by McGaw, dated this vigil to 1906, “when the Convention was opened for the first time to all Christians.” He had heard of it from Turner. When the two men were alone, he pressed Turner for details. Turner was very reluctant to say anything. “I cannot go into details,” he said, “but it was a time in the Mount with God.”

We should read this story carefully. It comes from people who loved the three men and were not present for the whole month. It should not be pictured as thirty days of unbroken kneeling. The prayer probably went on alongside the ordinary needs of life, and it may have included times of rest and work. But there is no reason to doubt its substance. Three missionaries set apart a month before the convention to wait on God together, and Turner’s refusal to talk about it is itself a mark of authenticity. People who have truly been “in the Mount with God” are usually slow to describe it.

“Wide, Lord, Wide”

What did Hyde actually do in the prayer room? Jones and McGaw both describe it, and their pictures match.

The prayer room at Sialkot was in the Scottish church. Some of the seats were moved aside and a carpet was laid over the open space. Sometimes there were hundreds of people in it, sometimes only two or three. “Right on his face on the ground is Praying Hyde,” Jones wrote, “this was his favourite attitude for prayer.” Hyde would utter a petition, then wait. After a little time he would repeat it, and wait again, “and this many times until we all feel that that petition has penetrated into every fibre of our nature, and we feel assured that God has heard.”

Jones remembered one prayer above all. Hyde was praying the verse at the head of this chapter: “Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it” (Psalm 81:10, ASV). “I think he repeated the word ‘wide’ scores of times with long pauses between,” Jones wrote. “‘Wide, Lord.’ ‘Wide.’ ‘Open wide.’ ‘Wide.’”

It is worth reading the verse in its setting. God speaks through the psalmist to Israel, reminding them that he brought them out of Egypt and offering them more than they have dared to ask. And then he mourns: “But my people hearkened not to my voice; and Israel would none of me” (Psalm 81:11, ASV). The tragedy of the psalm is not that God was unwilling to fill his people but that they would not open their mouths. Hyde’s long repetition of the word “wide” was a prayer that the church in the Punjab would not make that mistake. He was asking God to enlarge their expectation, so that they might receive what he was ready to give.

Another way Hyde prayed struck people just as deeply. He would simply address God by name, over and over. Jones heard him say, “Oh, Father! Father!” and felt that “even before he asked anything … the Father knew what he was going to ask for.” A missionary woman who knelt near him at a convention in Jubbulpore never forgot hearing him plead, “Jesus — Jesus — Jesus!” It seemed to her, she said, “as if a baptism of love and power came over me.”

Dancing for Joy

It would be a mistake to imagine the prayer room as a place of unbroken gloom. Jones describes what often happened when Hyde finished praying. Perhaps half a dozen people would be sobbing. Hyde would go to one of them and others to the rest. With his arm around the man’s neck, he “speaks but little but his well-worn Bible is used,” and before long the two men would stand up together with smiles. Then Hyde would begin to sing the old hymn, “’Tis done, the great transaction’s done.” And “he is so full of joy that his whole body begins to move, he claps his hands and then his feet begin to move, and look, he begins to dance for joy and others join him until the whole place rings with God’s praises.”

That picture of a shy, deaf, formerly morose Presbyterian missionary dancing for joy on a carpet in a Scottish church in the Punjab does more than any argument to correct the idea that Hyde was a gloomy ascetic. His prayer was often agonised. But it ended in praise, and it was full of joy.

Hidden Places and Unused Beds

Sometimes Hyde wanted to be alone even at the convention. Jones heard of him climbing into the church belfry. There, in the dark, high above the others, he prayed aloud, and people below heard the echo of his voice and knew he must not be disturbed.

His bed was a small tragedy of the convention. Hyde’s “boy,” as Jones calls him, was a lad of about sixteen whom Hyde had taken into his home and his heart. He brought his master’s bedding to Sialkot and made his bed carefully. It was never used during the convention. More than once Jones saw Hyde, when the prayer room was full, go aside into a corner and throw himself on the floor to sleep. Yet if the room began to empty and the prayer began to flag, “he somehow seemed to know it and was up immediately.” He rarely came to meals. Sometimes the boy, or a friend, or Gulla the sweeper would carry a plate of curry and rice to the prayer room, and Hyde would eat it in a corner. “How his ‘boy’ used to cry,” Jones remembered, “because he would not eat properly and would not go to bed to sleep.” It is a tender detail. It is also, as later chapters will show, a warning.

A friend in the prayer room noticed a small exchange during the 1905 convention. The lunch bell rang, and Hyde whispered, “Father, is it thy will that I go?” There was a pause. Then he said, “Thank you, Father,” rose with a smile, and went to lunch. It is easy to smile at such a story, but it shows that Hyde’s abstinence was not a rule. He did not stay in the prayer room because he despised food. He went to lunch when he believed he should.

Every Tent a Bethel

Jones noticed that Hyde prayed not only for the meetings but for everything connected with them. While the organisers were putting up the tents, arranging the cooking, and laying on the water supply, Hyde and his companions were already on the ground in prayer. As soon as the great marquee was erected, Hyde and his party entered it to dedicate it to the Lord, “to make the spot a real Bethel where God would meet with His people.” When the dining tent went up, they went there too, so that God could use even the mealtimes for blessing. Jacob, waking at Bethel, said, “Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not” (Genesis 28:16, ASV). Hyde wanted every corner of the convention ground to be a place where people could say that.

Jones believed the prayers were answered even at the tables. He never heard gossip in the dining tent at Sialkot. Indians and Europeans ate together, often sitting on the floor. People in spiritual trouble would go to a meal together to talk it over. When someone found peace with God, a hymn or an Indian bhajan would break out, and “in an instant the whole place is full of praise,” with the servers, the waiters, and the diners all singing.

And when the convention ended, the praying did not. While others pulled down the tents, the prayer room parties stayed behind to pray that the fruit would last. Paterson always said that the time for the most earnest prayer is immediately after a meeting. As Jones put it, it is then that the birds come to devour the seed.

“Let Us Meet Together to Pray”

The prayer room was also where the convention’s hardest disagreements were settled.

At the first convention Jones attended, there was a crisis over public confession of sin. At the previous convention, some shocking confessions had been made by missionaries and Indian workers. Some people were outraged and wanted the committee to forbid public confession, or at least to separate men and women so that such things were not said in mixed meetings. They demanded a meeting to debate the question. The committee’s reply was, “Let us meet together to pray over the matter.” The objectors refused. It was useless, they said, to pray until the question had been decided. One young man thumped the table in rage and shouted, “I’ll smash the whole Convention.”

Jones talked quietly with Hyde, who was on the committee. He was struck by how “tender, loving” and “sane” Hyde was through it all. Hyde said that the committee had never called for confessions, and that it was the Holy Spirit who had moved people to confess. To make rules about it, he thought, even to set apart special meetings for confession, would be “taking the matter out of the Holy Spirit’s hand.” He believed the sin behind many of the confessions was far more common among Christians than anyone had imagined, and he said gently, “Some men, I fear, are guilty and are afraid that the Holy Spirit will compel them to confess.” Yet he spoke of the objectors with tenderness, and his face, Jones said, “was full of joy for he knew that victory was assured.”

Victory came in the prayer room. The objectors went there, meaning to argue. They found Hyde and other committee members praying, and were welcomed so warmly that they knelt and prayed too. After a while Paterson spoke quietly, showing that no one on the committee had ever urged public confession: “All that the Committee desired was implicit obedience to the Holy Spirit.” The objectors agreed that they wanted the same. Someone began to praise God, all joined in singing, “and the Prayer Room became once more a Praise Room.” Jones said he learned that day that the best way through a church quarrel is often to “keep quiet in a corner, praying that the Holy Spirit might come and reveal His Will.” He tried it many times afterwards, and found that it worked.

For Reflection

The early church met in an upper room, and the Acts of the Apostles says they “with one accord continued stedfastly in prayer” (Acts 1:14, ASV). When they prayed again after their first persecution, “the place was shaken wherein they were gathered together; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spake the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31, ASV). Hyde’s friends believed they had seen something of that in the prayer room at Sialkot.

Very few churches have a prayer room that is never empty. But any church can decide that preaching and praying are two parts of one work, and that someone should always be doing the hidden part. “Go in and speak, that is your work. I shall go back to the Prayer Room to pray for you, that is my work.” Who is doing that work for your church, or for you? And is there someone for whom you could do it?