E. M. Bounds — The Apostle of Prayer

Who He Was Edward McKendree Bounds was born on August 15, 1835, in Shelby County, Missouri, trained as a lawyer, and answered a call to Methodist ministry in his mid-twenties. Captured by Union forces during the Civil War and held as a prisoner of war, he returned to pastoral ministry after the conflict and eventually spent his final years in Washington, Georgia — rising at four o’clock every morning, giving the first three to four hours to prayer, and then writing until the day’s other obligations called. By his death in 1913 he had written eleven books on prayer, almost all published posthumously, which have shaped the prayer lives of ministers and ordinary believers around the world for more than a century. He is the most quoted man on the subject of prayer in the history of the English-speaking church.

His Core Teaching on Prayer The organizing conviction of Bounds’s entire life and work was this: the church’s most urgent crisis was not theological error or moral compromise — it was prayerlessness. Not the absence of prayer meetings or the neglect of devotional forms, but the deeper, more devastating prayerlessness of ministers and believers who had lost the sense that prayer was the most consequential activity available to them. Everything else was downstream from this. A church without prayer was a church operating on human energy — and human energy, however impressive it might appear for a season, would eventually exhaust itself and accomplish nothing eternal.

Bounds wrote with prophetic urgency: “What the Church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use — men of prayer, men mighty in prayer.” James had put it bluntly: “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (James 5:16, NIV). And Elijah’s example in the following verse — a man “just like us” who prayed and shut the rain, then prayed again and opened it — demonstrated that this power was not reserved for extraordinary people but was available to ordinary men and women who were willing to pray with extraordinary consistency and fervency.

Bounds was passionate about the fervency of prayer — a quality he distinguished sharply from the mere frequency of prayer. A man could observe the ritual of prayer twice a day for fifty years without ever truly praying, if his words were not fueled by genuine spiritual desire and desperate dependence on God. Fervency, Bounds taught, was not emotional excitability or dramatic display; it was the condition of a heart that had truly grasped the gravity of its need and the magnitude of God’s supply. Fervency, in Bounds’s understanding, was simply faith feeling its own weight.

He dwelt extensively on the relationship between time and prayer, insisting that there was no substitute for sustained, unhurried time given exclusively to God. He drew on Jesus’ pattern: “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35, NIV). If the Son of God, in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwelt, found it necessary to rise before dawn and spend extended time alone with the Father, by what logic did His followers conclude that fifteen minutes before breakfast would suffice? Bounds pressed the question insistently and unapologetically. Prayer was not something to fit around the edges of a busy life. It was the foundation on which a life worth living was built.

Bounds also wrote powerfully about the relationship between the Holy Spirit and effective prayer, drawing on Paul’s assurance that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans” (Romans 8:26, NIV). He taught that one of the Spirit’s primary ministries was to transform the pray-er — to take a cold, distracted, self-absorbed heart and warm it with divine desire. Jude 1:20 commanded: “But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit...” — and Bounds believed that command was as practical as it was demanding.

Finally, Bounds understood prayer as the seedbed of all genuine ministry. The prayer that happens in private is the root system of the fruit that appears in public. Hebrews 7:25 described Jesus as the one who “always lives to intercede” — always, without interruption, without vacation. The minister who served that interceding Lord was called to reflect, however imperfectly, that same posture of perpetual, dependent, expectant prayer. As Bounds put it in his most famous line: “Prayer does not fit us for the greater works; prayer is the greater work.”

Every other act of ministry was, in a sense, the outworking of what had already been settled in prayer.

A Prayer: Lord, awaken in us the holy dissatisfaction with prayerlessness that E. M. Bounds carried all his days. Teach us to rise early, to linger long, and to pray with hearts on fire rather than lips merely moving. Let our intercessions be the engine of Your Kingdom’s advance in our generation. Amen.