Power Through Prayer

It is E. M. Bounds's impassioned plea to preachers that the power of their ministry lies not in method or machinery but in prayer. His argument is single and relentless: the Church is looking for better methods, but God is looking for better men — men whom the Holy Spirit can use because they are given to prayer. In twenty short chapters he presses the case that the preacher's real work is done on his knees.

Edward McKendree Bounds was an American Methodist minister and, in his later years, a man who rose at four each morning to pray. He wrote a series of books on prayer that were mostly published after his death; Power Through Prayer, sometimes titled Preacher and Prayer, is the best known, and has become a classic call to the ministry of intercession.

Preachers above all — Bounds writes to and about the man in the pulpit. But its message reaches every Christian, because its theme is that God works through people rather than programmes, and that spiritual results come only from spiritual power. Any reader who has trusted in ability or organization instead of prayer will feel its edge.

Men versus methods. Bounds argues that the Church is forever seeking better techniques, organizations, and plans, while God is seeking praying men through whom to work. The gospel, he insists, does not depend on machinery but on the character and prayerfulness of those who carry it — 'the men God uses are men of prayer,' and nothing can substitute for that.

Because he believes the sermon is made in the closet before it is ever preached, and that the preacher's private prayer life is the hidden source of all public power. A prayerless preacher, however gifted, works in his own strength; a praying one becomes a channel for God's. Bounds will not let the reader separate the message from the man or the man from his praying.

Urgent, direct, and unsparing. Each short chapter opens with the words of an earlier praying man — a saint or missionary whose life proved the point — and then Bounds drives the argument home without softening it. He means to disturb the comfortable minister and to set the whole ministry on its knees, and the book's fervour is part of its enduring power.

Its immediate subject is the preacher, but its deeper subject is the primacy of prayer in all spiritual work. Bounds is really contending that God's kingdom advances through consecrated people who pray, not through efficiency, and that lesson applies to every servant of Christ, in the pulpit or out of it.

At the beginning and straight through — the chapters are very short and cumulative, each hammering the one theme from a new angle. It is a book to be read a chapter at a time and prayed over, not studied; many have used it as a repeated summons back to the closet and the hidden work of intercession.