 This afternoon, we're gonna do a conversation on how to build prayer cultures in a church. And this morning, I kind of set the stage at 30,000 foot talking about building the altar of the Lord. But I know as a pastor, the question that oftentimes comes up in my heart when I hear things is, okay, how do we practically flesh this out? What does it really look like? And so I'm gonna invite a couple of friends up. One is one of our staff members, Caleb Culver, is over all worship culture and prayer culture in our church. Him and his wife, Rachel, our pastors here over our worship community and our prayer community, a vital pivotal part of what we have built here over the last several years. And so I wanna invite Caleb Culver, come on up. And... Look and dapper, look and dapper. And then also I wanna invite to end of this conversation our guest, he's really a dear friend of mine in this house. There's probably no other church in America that radiant feels a stronger connection and bond with than upper room. And I've been there several times, Miller and even some of their worship team has been up here. There's just a strong bond. And we feed off of each other. And so we're honored to have him here this week, but I want him up here to talk about this as well. So come on up, Michael Miller from upper room, come up, bro. Put you right there, yeah. And so we're gonna, I'm gonna actually turn in a little bit so I can see you guys. So this is just a conversation like we would have in the green room, scooch up. You feel like, I feel like you're a long ways away. I'm gonna scooch into it, listen. Hold me, Caleb, hold me. But these are two men that I greatly respect. And many years ago, I invited Caleb to come join our staff, him and his wife Rachel to move here. And I knew at that point that one of the things that was gonna be necessary for us to build what God had put in my heart was somebody who carries the fire for prayer and worship, not just to sing songs to the Lord, but to minister to the heart of the Lord, carries a prophetic mantle and has years and years and years in the prayer room, in the prayer culture, and him and Rachel spent 11 years, was it 11 years at IHOP in Kansas City? And so when they said yes, we were overjoyed and since that time he's just become a dear partner in ministry. And then I said this weekend when Miller spoke to our church that, I don't know, I think it was like seven years ago we were invited, a bunch of us were invited out to California pastors, like-minded churches to get together. And we sat down at the same table, his wife Larisa. David Perkins was my plus one, Jane didn't come with me, so it was David and I which felt natural, we were in San Francisco. And, kidding, kidding, take it easy. I feel bail rising up in here. And we sat down at a table and just it felt like I met a brother, some of the same things that they were contending for. And we've become just great friends and so inspired by what God has done at the upper room in Dallas. And so what I wanna do is I want you to start, Michael, and just share with everybody a little bit of the story of upper room. Maybe everybody, a lot of people might know your music but not know the story. So maybe just talk about how that all began. Well, thank you, I feel the same about you. I love this church and just I love a room filled with pastors and leaders that are going after what Lee talked about this morning, isn't it? Good to know you're not alone. That just these, I think gatherings are so crucial. And I, in 2010, we started a prayer meeting in the homosexual district of our city which is called Oak Lawn there in Dallas. And the business owner called this room, the upper room, that's how we got the name. Logistically it was on the second floor to overlook downtown Dallas and he wanted just to open it up for prayer for the homosexual community. And I really lined up with where my wife and I were at. And so we said yes, thinking we would go down from, was Passover of 2010, we thought we would go to Pentecost. I was like, I can do it for seven weeks. I didn't wanna be on the hook for anything more than that. And so we saw just God supernaturally bring community together down there. And so a church formed. It was pretty unconventional the way that it formed. I just didn't have a heart for the homosexual community. It wasn't like something I was burning for. I'm a suburbs guy, like Lord call me to the suburbs. I know the suburbs. I like the suburbs. I know the problems in the suburbs but that community specifically, I just was like, Lord, you found the wrong guy. I was getting hit on all the time. We owned a coffee shop down there that was catering to that demographic. And eventually we started moving beyond prayer and had some gatherings but no one would come. And so all the conventional ways to reach that community just weren't working. And so in my frustration, I again told the Lord, you found the wrong guy. And he said this phrase to me, so this is real important to understand the DNA of our house. He said, son, I didn't call you down to Oakland first to minister to people. I called you down to Oakland first to minister to me. And that was a challenge for me. I hadn't heard that phrase a lot, minister to the Lord. And I found it in the NASB. And in Acts 13, and I went on this journey just unpacking that, but what it looks like to first minister to him, love him. And that began to be the foundation of our community was ministry to the Lord. And so this prayer house emerged there. So that's the genesis of Upper Room. There's some more details, obviously, but... But it really started as a prayer meeting that morphed into a church. Yeah, in the name, again, the name itself, I don't know who would name their church Upper Room. Like Pentecost Sunday is just a few weeks away. Big things better happen. Pentecost Sunday, if your church just named the Upper Room. Yeah, you better bring it. You better bring it. Holy spirit, better be present. So it really, Psalms 127, unless he builds the house and I truly look back at what God's done and I know that that's true. This was his idea and in his heart. So I'm curious, at what point did you recognize that what began as a prayer meeting or a mandate to pray from that community and that location? When did you recognize this is going to become something more than that? That's going to become a church. It's going to become a family. It took about two years, I think, for me. I think everyone was acknowledging that it's a church, but about the 18 months in, people started moving into the neighborhood and I realized, oh my goodness, like we're pot committed here. If people start making life, like my spiritual father who lived in the suburbs, which is where I wanted to go, he moved downtown for the reason to build this house of prayer and I thought, man, you're doing it. And then Bob Hazelik gave us a word. He said in the early days that God was going to use upper room for the next generation to make church not a dirty word anymore. And that really hit me because I think in some regards, I felt like the Lord wanted to do something new in regards to church because in Dallas, we do church so well. You know, I mean, we're the buckle of the Bible Belt and so there are mega churches with 10,000 people that I've never heard of in my city. And so people go to church, they do church well and so this was going to be a unique, I think, approach to church and has proven to be that in Dallas, but it was about the two year mark that we ordained elders and really took on the right government for the people we were pastoring. I think it's so interesting that you did everything, and it's not like you set out to plan it, but you did everything the polar opposite of what almost every single church planning model would tell you to do. It's like you start with a prayer meeting and hope it grows into, well, you didn't even hope. It just happened. It was sovereign in some ways. We got breathed on it and then it becomes this community and typically the opposite is true. It's like you start with a big bang and you get as many people in there and hope that you get to a point where then you can establish a prayer meeting, but it's unique that God gave you that word about reaching the next generation in the middle of, I think, probably one of the most church cities in America to reach Gen Z and millennials and to do it in a counterintuitive way. What I'm curious is, you said this a couple of years before it became a church. What were the challenges of, okay, you go from a prayer meeting in a prayer-driven mandate, now you're pastoring people and it's becoming a community. What were the temptations connected to the priority of prayer as it's forming as a church? Do you know what I mean by that? Because when you start building a church, as if you're a pastor here, you know this, it's like the demand to do kids, the demand to do youth, the demand to do small groups and men's ministry and women's minister, all these things and something's got to give. What was that process like? What were the temptations and what were the decisions that you had to make? Great question. I worked on it for a couple of days. I did four things about it. We had this phrase in the early days that we still live by, that what's born in the spirit is on God. He'll maintain, sustain and grow, but what's born in the flesh, we maintain, sustain and grow. He was so particular about, in the early days, about what we did and why we were doing it. So the early days, his no helps solidify our yes, if this may sense. So one of the things he said is don't mark, don't mark what I'm doing here. And I'm like, well, what does that mean? And so we would pray into it and it meant no media. We didn't do, we didn't have a website. We didn't do social media. We didn't have podcasts. We didn't advertise our church for the first six years. And there's a lot to that, how he arranged that. But again, it was everything the book probably says to do, which when you launch a church, you get a URL. Like, we're a church, here we are. But he, I think I paid a couple of thousand bucks for a website a couple of times and the Lord would be really clear, like this is not what I'm asking you to do. I told you not to mark it. And ultimately, we would do something when it comes to media, but he was solidifying something in our DNA and in our culture about prayer, about ministering to the Lord that if we would have taken those measures and put some of those bells and whistles onto our community at that time, I think it would have morphed our DNA and it wouldn't have been as solidified and sharp as it was once it came to a broader audience. So I think sometimes defining our yes as leaders helps define our no. And so we weren't gonna compete with some of the bigger churches that did kids ministries. It did youth, it did the things, community. All those things are awesome, but he just wasn't calling us to do that. And I think the temptation at times as leaders is to kind of offer what others are offering. We feel a demand or a need to address things maybe that he's not addressing though. And I got delivered of that in those early days of man, this is what he's called us to do. And so we hit that one key on the piano over and over and over and over and over until it's all that people heard. And then once that got into our community we could add some other melodies and sounds around it but that that key was solidified in the heart of our community. The Lord was really jealous for that in the early days. So I think what's unique in my story is we planted the church and some of you didn't. You were hired on at a church that was an existing culture. And so I think that's unique to our journey but to know the DNA of your body I think is really important and to know the sound of your community and to know what makes you you. And so our yes really defined our no in the early days. And to be clear, eventually you had children's ministry and youth ministry and everything's like that, right? Like eventually, but it was the timing of the Lord. It wasn't, you're not doing it to respond to what the expectations were. It's like, no, we have to protect this one thing. Yeah, one of the descriptions of the upper room in Luke 22 is that it's fully furnished. It's a fully furnished upper room. That's what Jesus described as upper room. And I heard the Lord tell me one morning, he said, you said, son, everything you need you have. And I think it leaders a lot of times we live thinking we don't have what we need or we live for a future season. And it just put my soul to rest that, hey, if I don't have it, I don't need it. It was so freeing, but don't have it, I don't need it. And so my wife tried to do children's ministry once and it was obvious we don't have what we need because that wasn't her assignment. But sometimes I think by default, we try to do those things just because, well, there's kids and eventually someone showed up that was burning for kids. And there was such a grace for it and it fit right into that one key. And so I think, yeah. Okay, last question for you and then we're gonna shift gears. We'll come back to you. I got a lot more for you. So upper room kind of blows up on the scene specifically for worship and what was going on out of the prayer room, out of your services and takes off. I don't even remember the process. I think it was YouTube, right? Where it kind of blows up and it becomes very prolific. Kind of takes on a life of its own. And because you're known for that and a lot of churches that are kind of known for one particular thing can almost, people in their mindset can kind of get idealistic about what something is like. Share with everybody like practically what prayer culture at upper room looks like on a day-to-day basis. Kind of how it goes. Who are your leaders? What's the focus? That kind of thing. I'm gonna talk a little bit about this tonight. Just I think the phrase house of prayer. It's Jesus' description of his house. And so that definition for us, I never wanted to get into the 24-7 model. Like I love, Corey's gonna be here tomorrow and Corey was on staff with me. I love my friends at the house of prayer. You were there. But I just, they seem like Navy SEALs to me. Like what they do. I am like, I respected and honor it, but I just didn't have any desire to try to do that. That seems, I'm a 23-year local church pastor. And to think about operating something like that. And I was reading Psalms 55. I think it's verse 17 one day and it says evening, morning and noon. I cry out to you. And since we were building around prayer, we had a morning time and evening time. I thought, let's try that. And so over time, morning, noon and night has been built six days a week. And I can't tell you how many volunteers we have, but it's all volunteer driven, hundreds of volunteers. And the main sets are morning sets, six to eight a.m., 12 to two p.m., six to eight p.m. Our full teams, which includes a band, a couple of singers and then a prayer leader. And then we have a lot of sets sprinkled in between those devotional sets and just some creative sets with dancers and those types of things. But it's really taken on a life of its own once that key set into a core group of people. A grace really fell upon our community. And I think what happened is prayer became a culture. Not just an activity. That's good, talk on that. And I think sometimes we try to incorporate prayer into our existing cultures as an activity. And it's so hard to do as just an activity. When Jesus said, my house will be a house of prayer, which is the defining mark of the culture of his house. And so I realized that I need to be present as the leader. I personally need to be present at sets because it attributes value to my community by me being present. I couldn't outsource that. How many sets, like a prayer sets practically do you, would you say that you're in or maybe even participate? I lead one a week and then I'm probably in another five hours a week. So I'm probably in there five to seven hours a week. Yeah, I think that's vital. And it ebb and flows. I think in the early days I was there at almost every set just because we're hitting that one key. But I think we as the senior leaders carry the culture. And so what we value, culture will value. And so I think prayer becoming a culture in our midst and that's really been the nucleus for us. We have small groups. We do a lot of now the traditional things that churches do, but prayer is the nucleus. It's at the center. And it kind of permeates everything else and every other factor because it was the primary thing. And in your situation, again, what's so unique is it started that way. You weren't trying to retrofit an existing church and make it a praying church. It was like, it's a prayer meeting that becomes a church and that's really unique. Caleb, tell everybody how I wanna know. I don't know if I've ever even asked you, but how did you end up at the International House of Prayer from upstate New York there? And why in the world did you stay for 11 years, man? Come on. My parents and my home church of life church is actually in the room today. And so I've been blessed to be able to do prayer in so many different contexts. And just as a teenager, my parents and our church was really touched by the Toronto outpouring that happened. And our church and my dad started leading intercessory prayer meetings at 6 a.m. And that's kind of where I cut my teeth. Leading worship and building prayer just at the local church there. And then I heard about, hey, there's this prayer meeting that's 24 seven, it doesn't stop. And I went and went to Kansas City and I was there and worship began and all of a sudden two minutes in this guy started shouting on the microphone. It was chaos. I was like, oh my gosh, there's like somebody, there's an intruder, we gotta tackle this guy and come to find out is Mike Bickel. And they pray in the middle of worship. I've never seen it ever in my life. And this was this. What year would that have been? That would have been 2001. It was like the ravaged heart of the Bridegroom God Conference. Was it like the double wide mobile home at that point? Yep, IHOP was in the double wide. The conference wasn't there. It was at a bigger venue, but they were just in that double wide trailer. And I remember walking into that double wide and seeing 18, 19, 20 year olds who were just in love with Jesus, who loved the word and this new model of worship and prayer together. And it just, two things that always lived in me. And so after I graduated high school, I went and was at the International House of Prayer for nine years and it's actually been, I mean, everywhere I've gone has been kind of that prayer and worship culture. So when I stepped in here at Radiant, when Pastor Lee asked me, it was exciting because it was something that had been living in your heart on the corporate side of worship and prayer for so long and the Lord. It's just been, whether I didn't even set out to choose it, but the Lord just had it every, since I was born all the way until now, He's put me in these praying and worshiping cultures. And so when you were at IHOP, International House of Prayer, for those who think it's Pancake Place, the IHOP, when you were there, obviously you went through the school, but then when you led sets because they're 24 seven, like practically during a week, how many sets were you in and how many were you like leading and what were those like? Yeah, so all full-time staff are in there for 24 hours a week, just for the prayer meetings in particular. And so I was either on one or two worship teams at a time. So we would do either 12 or 24 hours of live worship and prayer. And I was on sets with my wife, Sean and Natasha at Downs were here. And so we would do two hour sets and it would alternate between worship and intercession. And we'd always start by leading worship, but then in the worship sets, we would pray through the Bible called worship of the Word and then intercession, we would lead worship and then somebody would intercede on the microphone and we would did what they called the Harpenbowl model, which is then they would sing those prayers back. And so yeah, during those days, I mean, I was probably in the prayer room on average, like 30 to 35 hours a week and leading worship, you know, somewhere between 15 and 20 hours a week, which sounds like a lot and that's because it was, it was a lot though. But I mean, just it became normal, just that posture of we're here to minister before the Lord. Sometimes there's 10 people in the room, sometimes there's 400. Yeah, that's amazing for like nine years. What do you want to say to him? Navy seals. Navy seals for real. Let me be clear, I was not ministering to the Lord the entire time. My mind wandered. He's checking Instagram, he's scrolling for Jesus. Yeah, maybe not the Navy seal, maybe, I don't know, maybe Army Reserve. I so appreciate it though, because it's forced a conversation. We were talking earlier, just, I mean, how rare it is in church history to have something like this. And it, to me, it's forced me to think about my, my perspective of the church and house of prayer and how does this fit into the culture of the church? And I'm just really grateful for what you pioneered. So thank you for your yes. It's amazing. I think I, yeah. And all of us, we all know this. It's like we owe such a debt to those who have laid that foundation, you know, to like even Mike Bickle, who has become a dear friend and mentor to us and several people in the room. And, you know, he's the one who will tell us, he's like, do not try to do 24 hours. Don't do it. And, you know, you would think if, if you built a model of 24 seven prayer, you would think you'd want everybody to do that. And he's like, no, do not do that, but encouraged at least us. I don't know what he's talked with you, but it's like just start and just get prayer off the ground and get it to where it saturates. And it's integrated into every part of the church, you know, because from my perspective, you know, Jane and I planted radiant 27 years ago this September, we started with a prayer meeting that was really our goal right off the bat and adding and having a vision. We didn't really know how it would be fleshed out, but to have prayer at the center of everything that we do as a church. And that was when we were a church of 50. That's when we were a church of 100. That's when we were a church of 500. And I can tell you as a local pastor, a local church pastor, I did it different than you did it. Because we didn't start like as a prayer meeting that became a church, we became a church that wanted to be a praying church. But what that meant was as you're building a church, trying to get people to in your local church, they have families and jobs and businesses to get a vision outside of the norm of what church looks like. And to convince them that prayer is more than like, okay, we do kids, we do youth. And then we have a prayer meeting once a week, but actually prayer is at the center of everything that we wanna build. I've equated it like this. It's kind of like rolling, putting your shoulder to a huge rock and trying to push it up a hill. As a leader, as soon as you take your shoulder off of that rock, it rolls right back down to where you started. In over 27 years, leading a church that has grown and expanded and gone from one location to multiple locations. Pushing that boulder up the hill of prayer has come with a lot of failures and a lot of bruises and a lot of mistakes. And then you can look at IHOP and you can go, dang, they've got all the best musicians and they got 24 seven and angelic visitations. And all I got is four grumpy people that said they were gonna show up and then didn't show up and music's terrible. Our first prayer meeting, we had a boom box. Remember those? We'd play like cassette tape worship. Remember those? And we'd have people praying over things that aren't biblical. Remember that? And passive aggressive intercessors. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? Or they're preaching at the pastor through their prayers. Oh God, we're praying the anointing would finally come to radiant. Or do you speak to Pastor Lee about this while I'm in the room? And I remember trying to build that infrastructure into the church and how it just fell overwhelming at times. And I'm so grateful for those that have led the way, stayed true to it. And even like their vulnerability to say, you don't have to do it this way. You know, there's a unique expression to every house. Jesus loves diversity. He loves the different ways. He loves our different styles of worship and He loves different styles of how prayer is expressed in a local church. There's models, there's harp and bowl. There's, you know, contemplative. There's Corey Russell intercession where it's like the roar of the lion and a grunt. I mean, roar! And I love that. And then you go into, like if you saw Asbury, Asbury was not that. It was just this beautiful purity, this glory of God that showed up in a prayer meeting. And to me, I don't know about you guys. But that's just so encouraging because it just shows you that wherever you're at, wherever your starting point is, Jesus is just looking for the trajectory of our heart to just say, will you just come after me? Will you just take one step towards me? Will you just make it a priority? Caleb, you know, you went from IHOP then into the local church. What was your experience? And you can talk about here. You can talk about wherever you're at or wherever you've been at. But what was your experience coming out of a 24-7 prayer, revival, swirl, global impacting prayer movement into a local church as a person carrying this fire and a conviction about prayer? Yeah, yeah, they, I went right from Kansas City and David Perkins and Dan Perkins are here hired me on desperation, like, hey, we're building prayer in the World Prayer Center in the local church. And that was such a brand new challenge to go from because IHOP really is a prayer room, you know, and they, you know, kind of also meet as a church, but I mean, it's just the main thing they do. So then to step into an environment with a rich prayer heritage, you know, but also in the context of the local church, the first thing I think just for me, understanding really that, you know, authority structure and why God has chosen and uses the local church was really paramount to kind of make sense for me and to feel his zeal, you know, from Isaiah 56-7, that his house would be called a house of prayer. Like that's not a separate entity. His house is the church that he desires to see that prayer in the church. And so to be able to step in and work in prayer and worship is difficult when, you know, like, okay, God, he loves everything, but he has a priority. There's the one thing calling into, to want to build that one thing calling. It's tough to do that and not be elitist or sound elitist to say, no, this needs to be the priority. Well, everything needs to be a priority. There's a sacrifice. There's contention because alignment has to happen. And, you know, the main things I've learned, one is I mean, it has to live in the senior leader. They have to be there leading it. And, you know, that's what we see, you know, here at radiant and upper room is two men, you know, Lee is leading every eight, not every, but the mornings he's here at 8 a.m., he is leading prayer and intercession. Michael Miller is leading prayer and intercession. And if it doesn't live in the heart of the senior leader, then it will be a program. And prayer as a program, it's better than no prayer. I mean, let's at least do that. That's great, but to build it as a priority, it starts in the senior leadership and then it's just paying the cost. It's the thousand no's to say the one yes. And to pay that cost, and the cost is not just the cost of sacrifice, but it's the cost. I mean, there's so much spiritual warfare that comes along with that yes, that moment you say yes. I mean, it's David's 20 year journey from anointing. It's just mostly persevering through difficulty and trial for that one yes of what bringing the presence of God to the place of priority in Israel. And it's paying that cost and really, you know, as a senior leader knowing like it's gotta live in me and then who can I empower to burn for that? And so, you know, for me to have that here at Radiant, I'm empowered to burn for that one thing. And, you know, because the senior leaders giving that to me and then there's permission to even run further with the hours and how I serve in that area. So good, Kale. While we're talking about praying churches and constantly coming back to this idea of putting prayer front and center in the church, I think it's important for us to answer and maybe even ask ourselves a question that then answer is, okay, why? Why is it that prayer is so vital and so important to the church? Why is it, we're talking about, we have to build praying churches. I can almost hear, you know, in the hearts of some leaders, maybe we would never even verbalize it. That's like, okay, why? Why isn't it just the preaching of the Bible? Why isn't it evangelism? Why is prayer at the center of it? Michael, what would you say to that? I think this word prayer is elastic. I think, you know, if we were to ask us to find prayer, I think we would get a lot of definitions in the room that are probably right definitions, but I think we have to grapple with what prayer is. And for us in our world, give you my definition and it's across the board, but when you hear prayer, it's synonymous with relationship. So prayer is relationship and to be a house of prayer, it's a house that's in relationship with a God that's living. So good. So that definition is not us asking God for something. To me, I intercessions a form of prayer. You know, if there's an activity associated with prayer, it's probably worship because it's the right response to the one that we're in relationship with. But I think a house of prayer, it's a group of people that's collectively in relationship with the Lord together, in space, in time. It's not, I mean, I think we do need to equip and send out, but I think there's something about people living in proximity to the presence of God regularly. You just wrote a book on it, Psalms 132. Eden, Genesis one and two, there's a guy named G.K. Bill that is a theologian that wrote a ton on this that's just really marked me and really reframed my understanding of the Garden of Eden, but he makes the case that any deity that would begin to design something in Moses' day, so Moses is writing, anytime a God begins to design something, he's not designing something for man, he's designing something for himself. And so he makes the case that Eden was actually not built for Adam and Eve primarily, it was built for God. It was his tabernacle in sanctuary. Yeah, it's temple. And so when God showed up in the coolness of day, he who is everywhere desired to show up somewhere. Think about that. That Eden's design reveals God's desire. And that desire is still in his heart. He's looking for resting places on the earth. So house of prayer, it's not a style of church. It's not what charismatic do. It's a desire in God's heart to rest among people, to be and to dwell and communicate and manifest in a place. I just, it blows, I'm like, ah, emoji head blown, that that's his desire. And so a house of prayer, his definition of his house, it's for him to have a resting place, not an hour a week. And I mean, for me as a leader, I'm just convicted that he's, yeah, I feel like I'm preaching my sermon tonight. Come on. I can preach another one tonight. You wrote the book with Psalms 132. If you're a leader in this room and you're not well acquainted with Psalms 132 and the vow David made, it's confronted me. It's, to me, it's Mount Everest of the Psalm. It's what created the Psalter. It was something that was birthed in the heart of one man. And then what came forth from that? But I think, to answer your question, I think we've got to grapple with prayer and our understanding of prayer because we've looked at it as a quiet time activity. It's something I do in my closet. And I think there is a place and purpose for that. But corporately, what does it look like? Because that culture shows up on Sunday morning. What happens Monday through Saturday, the overflow of that is Sunday. That's absolutely right. And when the lost come into a culture of prayer, they can, you know, we worship, and this is just our world. So we have an hour worship. Every, we have three services a week and it's an hour long. And most of our salvation's happen at the end of that hour. I mean, we preach the gospel, but it's oftentimes presented at the end of that hour because they're in a culture of worship and first love and it provokes something in the heart. What are they doing? How do they sustain this? But that's, that muscle for our communities, like developed in the Monday, 6 a.m., that are a little lead on. Talking about the desire of the Lord, that it's his desire. That is so key. It's like the very first, if the garden is God's temple and the end of the Bible ends with heaven coming down and the new Jerusalem, you know, heaven and earth becoming one. Right in the middle, you find David who taps into this revelation of the heart and the desire of God. Everybody's trying to get God to do something for them. David's like, what can I do for you? I want to build you a house. And God's response to David is, I've never even asked you to do this. Where did you come up with this? It moved the heart of God. And that Psalm 132 is David saying, I want a resting place for the Lord, not so that I can control God, but I want to give God what he's always wanted, which is a resting place. When you remove, this helps, this helped me. Hopefully it'll help you, but when prayer gets removed from the legalistic action that you have to do in order to get God to perform, and it actually becomes us giving God what he wants, which is communion, which is relationship, which is that connection with him. Then the second part of that Isaiah scripture, it talks about my house, shall be called a house of prayer. It says, you shall be joyful in my house of prayer. How many have been in unjoyful prayer meetings? I mean, those prayer meetings you go into, and there's just, it's dry, and it's contentious, and it's brutal. And I'm saying even those prayer meetings are probably blessing God way more than maybe they even bless us because we're doing it. But if we're not careful in the church, we can actually begin to take something that was meant for relationship to connect heaven and earth, to become that Jacob's ladder, where heaven is moving into earth and back and forth and God's presence is evident and known, we can turn that actually into an idol of prayer. And if we're not careful, it can become drudgery instead of joyful. Yeah, I think prayer has to, just those that are starting prayer meetings, if we're not looking at quantity, how often are you doing it? Let's focus on quality. And to me in the early days, the mark of our meetings was, did God come? Did we, it says when we draw near to him, he'll draw near to us. So learning, the Bible has prescribed a way to rightly approach him. So our words matter. He hears us any prayer, but there's mature expressions of talking to him corporately. And the Holy Spirit responds. He's enthroned upon our praises. So what is praise? Not every song's praise. So that we're, it's particular. I'm particular about entering in with Thanksgiving. Courts of praise. Praise is different than worship. And all of that affects him, because it's for him. And so for me, the litmus became, it became the presence of God, that prayer was under the presence and we became students of his presence. The debriefs were challenging. Hey man, you prayed too long. Like we had these hard conversations about, I sensed you grieved him, did you? Because we're in relationship with him. So we would really try to understand where unity was, where faith was. And here's what I learned is that the reason you said there's joy in the house of prayer is because in the presence of God is fullness of joy. And so there's joy in the house of prayer because his presence is in the place of prayer. We're two or more gathered. I'm with you. And I just think sometimes the presence of God has become ethereal. It's like we talk about the gifts, the fruits, but the presence of God is the person of Jesus. And our response to the presence of God is actually our response to him. And I wanna constantly keep a yielded will in his entry, that he's the guest of honor, but as soon as he shows up, he's the host. That's real. Come on. And so I just, I'm pretty meticulous in my world about, if you're gonna lead, we're gonna talk you through why you sing what you said, why you set the list up the way that you set the list up the way that you did. Just because we wanna grow in honoring him and his house and how we're responding to him. So, yeah. I noticed that I was with you about a month ago and it was a Sunday night service and the room was full of Gen Z and it was going crazy at worship. And you were irritated and you looked over and he was like, I don't know why they didn't start with Thanksgiving. Why are they starting with the song? And he like went right up during communion and pulled the worship team together while the keyboard's playing and he's like correcting them, giving them instructions. It was gentle. Anybody else in the room would have thought this, anybody else in the room would have thought worship's off the hook, but. Well, the truth is, is in our world, so I don't know your culture, but in our culture, there's so much young zeal. And so I think someone could sing about deodorant and like, oh my gosh, it's deodorant. But to cut through and I think the key is that you're finding not our zeal, but his and to slice through all that and to find him. And that's where faith, faith, the substance of faith shows up. And it just takes a lot of maturity to cut through that in my world. So, but in the early days, it took a lot of waiting and learning and so it just depends on the season you're community's in, but here's what I can tell you a hundred percent is that he wants to come. The manifest presence of God, he wants to, he will show up and he honors our response to him. That's beautiful. Caleb, if prayer is about relationship, it's about him. It's about hosting his presence, creating a resting place in our community on a regular basis. And I think we're all knowledgeable. It's like you read the book of Acts, which is like a biopsy of the early church, right? And we look at it and we see that, I heard one guy say that the book of Acts is actually the Acts of the Holy Spirit in between prayer meetings. And if that's true, why do you think prayer is so difficult in the church? Because if we joke about it, we can talk about that. And even the fact that we're having to have conferences and that emphasis trying to turn a big shit like an American church just to come back to not just a church that may be praised but actually praying churches. If prayer is so central, because Jesus is so central, why is it that prayer is so difficult, especially in our context? Yeah, I think it is just so simply our self-sufficiency. I mean, we can do so much without prayer and without God in our culture, you know, talking to missionaries in a nation where you can get executed. They say we start every day in four hours of prayer because if we take the wrong step, we're dead. And that's necessity. They don't have the luxury of being prayerless because they have to be spirit letter, they lose their lives. And we don't have that urgency because our self-sufficiency in the West. But what's happening now is that urgency is being created because we're now seeing the spirit of the age come in and take hold of our kids and our children and there is real desperation. And it's like, we can't sustain this ourselves. And what we see, like the resting place, you know, it's the place of the corporate altar. I mean, we're in the hour of Second Chronicles 20, you know, when Israel's surrounded and Hezekiah says, what are we gonna do? Well, they already had the corporate altar established. He had the personal altar established. They all gather together, they cry out to the Lord and then it's an ace fight. Somebody who's been trained in the house of the Lord at the corporate altar for literally generations steps in, delivers the word and the Lord brings supernatural deliverance because a prophetic word that happens in the midst of the prayer meeting. And you see it and, you know, acts too. I mean, you see Joel too, that when there's a corporate crisis, the only response is the establishing and the building of the corporate altar and crying out to the Lord for mercy. And I think that prayerlessness, I believe is coming to an end because we're reaching that fever pitch because there was an hour where we didn't need to pray and the loss for coming into our church services. We didn't need to pray. And we had, you know, a certain culture that was being built, but now we are in that hour of urgency. And that's where it's like, if we don't have that corporate altar built, that resting place of God's presence, you know, we won't be able to survive in that hour to come. And so I think the Lord is the one sovereignly who's making that adjustment. I don't think the church is the one waking up to prayer. The church isn't like, oh, we should probably pray. This is the Lord's sovereignty. He's moving the chess pieces in the earth to create prayer in his people in his church. And we are just simply responding to what God is doing in this hour. Yeah. I think it's God grabbing the hold of the church and restoring the lampstand of first love. It's like, come back, you've done all the right things. You've been faithful. You know, it's the Ephesian church and Revelation chapter two. I know your works. I know the things that you're doing. You've got all the right programs. You've got the right doctrine. You've endured, you've gone hard, but the first love piece of it is what Jesus is really focused on and addressing it. And I think the challenge for many of us in the context, in the culture that we're living in, is that many of us were raised up during peacetime and now there's a wartime necessity that requires a different set of skills and a different set of priorities. And so let me paint a picture for you. If you went to school to be a librarian, which I love books, if you've been around me, I love books. I do love books. And I love theology. Literally, I could nerd out and go into a library for like days, never see me again. But if you went to school to be a librarian and because you love books and you love quiet environments and you love being around people who are studying and kind of that feel, and you get a gig as a librarian on a cruise ship because it's gonna be at sea and it's gonna be peaceful, that's wonderful. But if you are the librarian on the Titanic when you just struck an iceberg, how many know your expectations for quiet, peaceful, sitting at a table, leafing through books goes out the window? It's because now it's all hands on deck. And I think there are a lot of church planners and a lot of pastors who sowed their church during peacetime, learned peacetime models of church. And now we find culture has shifted and we're being confronted with wartime realities. And Jesus is bringing us back to the first place. And he's like, this is not just because it is wartime, this is what it should have always been. But there was a period of time where you could create an atmosphere in an environment by your own personal skills instead of building around the presence of God. And I think what's happened is there's like this jolt in the body of Christ right now going, what do we do? And I think the Lord is like, put eyes back on me. Put eyes back on me. I literally have sat down with church planters, young guys in their 30s who have said, I went through church planning boot camp and some of the largest church planning organizations in the country and they told me, do not pray in your Sunday morning service. Do not open the altars for ministry. That's what you do at another service. Do not do intercessory prayer in your services. People won't know what to do with that. Choose your songs based on this, this and this. And there's no consideration. Are we choosing our songs because these are the ones that are gonna give Thanksgiving and minister to the Lord. And we're not interceding because people won't understand it. And it's like, how can we create churches that are gonna change and shift atmospheres and cities when the very weapons of our warfare were folding up and putting away in a chest. And so now what's happening is young church planters, some of you are in this room are like, you know what, that model was great during peacetime, but the weakness of it is now being exposed and I need more. And this is why, so I think that the reason, one of the reasons why prayer is so difficult in local churches is because the enemy, Ravenhill used to say this, the enemy is content with you preaching the Bible and having potlucks and youth ministries and all those types of things as long as he can keep you from praying because prayer, corporate prayer and corporate adoration of Jesus is the nuclear reactor of the church that will have a critical mass response in the community. And I believe that that's one of the reasons devil wants to keep us distracted. Don't pray. And that's on a personal level and that's on a corporate level. Okay, so let's take the next few moments and let's talk about practical realities. Okay, how do you, if you're in a church, you're leading a church or you're a youth pastor or you're a worship leader and you're trying to bring and maybe you don't have a prayer meeting in your church. Let's start there. Or maybe you're trying to shape your worship culture around more of a prayer Jesus centric instead of a performance model. What are some practical things that you can do? Let's start with like, Michael, if, no, you're going. No, don't, you're not brushing it off on him. Well, you'll do worship leader. We'll have you do worship leader, but talk about if you're a pastor and you're just like, I want to put prayer at the center of my church. What are some practical things that you would recommend to start doing? Just do it. Let's pray. I do, I think we're busy. We're busy. The last thing I want to do oftentimes is go sit in that room, but I do it. And again, that one yes means a lot of no's and what you prioritize, your people will prioritize. And I think not only you, but your senior staff and maybe your elders and just once a week, try it. Take a lunch. One of the things in my culture, I keep having a return to this. And so one of the things I did all last year is for the first six months, every Wednesday from 12 to one, my core team, my teaching team, my campus pastors, my core worship leaders, we studied Psalms 132 for six months. And then I took my entire Levitical community for six months through Psalms 132. So we spent a year in that chapter. And it was just again, solidifying and purifying this call to minister to the Lord. So I'm constantly fine tuning this in my world to keep it the main thing because there's so many competing agendas that are urgent and important, but they're not primary. And I think if this is what the Lord's leading you to do, you need a strategy for it and you need to do it. And even if it's once a week, getting the right people in a room for an hour and learning how to engage the presence of God, studying the presence of God and what that looks like in your context. I think he'll give you wisdom in, but I think you've got to do it at least once a week, at least once a week, maybe multiple times a week, but at least once a week, you and your senior team are in a room doing it. And then if you invite the broader community into that, you can, but I think it has to start with a core group of people. So once a week? Once a week? Does it matter who's in a room? I think the core team has to be in the room. I think people that are positional authority, people that have authority in your world have to be in that room, committed to it and learning how to do this together. Cause it's a, he's jealous for the journey and yeah, so I think just go on a journey together, commit to doing it for six months. Take Psalms 132, maybe you study that once and then you for 30 minutes and then you pray for 30 minutes. I don't know what it looks like, but I do know the Lord will give you a strategy to begin to implement this. And as it sets in with a few, it'll trickle to the many. Caleb, talk about some practicalities. Yeah, I think on the worship and prayer side, Miller was hitting it so well that there's an extricability to it. Prayer is telling God, they're asking God to do what he wants to do and worship is telling God who he is and there's just that reality together and if worship isn't about ministering to him, if it's about ministering to people or getting something out of people, then you've already turned the worship away from the trajectory that it needs to be for prayer and so there's a unity that happens within purifying worship and prayer when you start putting them together because if they aren't vertical, then both of them don't work and make sense. It changes that function of it and so when you start putting them together, that synergy of praise and prayer and intercession and that flow, that inhale, exhale, that just naturally happens in the presence of God, which is what Psalm 27.4 is. He's talking about beholding him. He's talking about inquiring in the temple, all working together and I think just for churches to practically try mixing that worship and prayer together for the prayer meeting and letting young worship leaders make mistakes and not making it about performance, but okay, let's pick the Wednesday night, we're gonna do the prayer meeting and we're gonna throw people on stage as the worship leaders and we're not gonna primarily critique them for how they're leading people, but we're just saying, hey, minister to the Lord right now in this context and as we minister to him, we're gonna come up and we're gonna pray around it and then let's try to sing off that together and that's something we do here. Singing choruses in prayer meetings just helps it make, like, unify the room. I mean, with one mind, one mouth, we glorify the Lord is what Paul says and what better way than to all sing a prayer together in a moment and in that reality and so I think what you're saying about the consistency, I mean, Isaiah 62, I've set my watchman on the wall. With prayer, it's gotta be consistent. This is my time once a week and I don't care if the president comes in town, I'm not gonna move for that and Mike Bickels lived that life where four star generals will come in or senators and say, hey, can you meet? I'm only in town and Tuesday at 10 a.m. is like, oh, I'm sorry, I can't. Why not? I think to set your watchman on the wall and just say worship, this is our most, this is our primary thing that we do. If we miss something else, that's okay but this set where we minister to the Lord is that's where we start and then we work our week from there so we cancel the other meetings and we lighten the load elsewhere so that we can kind of hit this place of ministering together and then I would say just for pastors, lots of briefings and debriefings with worship teams. Do it in team ministry. It's fun when you join together and have the music and prayer and intersession. You get to kind of work through that and it ends up binding those two realities together and pastors and worship leaders as well so it is kind of as simple as just do it in some senses. It's like a Nike commercial up here. Just do it. I would add to both those because they're both, I love that idea of just do it. Sometimes we got to think and strategize and blueprint things out so much instead of just initiating but I would say prayer will never live in your people more than it lives in you. It just won't. You can say, well we need prayer ministry in our church, our people should pray but it has to start with you and so I would encourage every, it doesn't matter who you are. You might say, well I'm not in leadership in a church but you are infectious by the way you live your life. And so live your life in a constant state of Psalm 63 hunger and desperate need for the Lord and live a lifestyle of prayer. And if that means getting up way earlier than you want to and going to sleep way later or earlier than you wanted to in order to prioritize a place of prayer. Started in you and if you're a pastor specifically, I think I said this last year but prayer will never take root in your culture if it is not initiated and led and championed by you. You have to, it has to be senior pastor led. You can't outsource prayer. It doesn't mean that you're leading every prayer. For many years I did. For many years our prayer culture at Radiant was me and Mike Popeneggan on an acoustic guitar. And I don't even know if Mike's not here today but Mike was my worship leader for 17 years and it was him on an acoustic guitar and me praying because music, practically you need the idea of praying with worship makes life so good because it's the presence of God just comes and you're not just hearing yourself. You've got something to sing. It primes your spirit, gets it awake. So you can start with that but it has to live in you. And then I would say once it lives in you start a prayer meeting, just one prayer meeting and call your key leaders to it. You lead it and champion it. Talk about it on Sunday mornings. Talk about what God did. Talk about what God is speaking to you. In your preaching, preach out of your prayer life. Preach out of your prayer life. It has to come out of your prayer life. And one of the things that I do on a regular basis is I have one book that I, well two books I read every single year. They were books that as a 15, 16 year old young person that encountered the Lord felt called the ministry. I read these two books and they marked my life. One was The Preacher in Prayer by Ian Bounds. It's about 57 pages. It's a small old book, I read it every year. It says men are looking for better methods, God's looking for better men. And I mean it just starts like that and it doesn't slow down for 57 pages. The other book that I read is David Youngie Cho's book called Prayer, the Key to Revival. One of my pastors gave it to me when I was 16 years old and it's the story of how revival came to Korea through David Youngie Cho, the largest church in the world, started with him in a World War II US Army tent in a post-Korean war depressed Korea with widows who were tithing their grains of rice. And he started a prayer meeting under a tent. And when he passed away two years ago, he had 850,000 members in his church, small church. And he owned his own island and his own mountain, the mountain's called Prayer Mountain, with a prayer chapel with 10,000 seats in it. And on Friday nights, they would have 15,000 people pray from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. every single Friday night. And it's how 30% of Seoul, Korea was born against spirit-filled one singular generation. And I remember that marking me just saying, if God can do that in Korea, where in 1901, there was less than 100 known Christians. If God can do that, what can he do in our generation? And I still read those books every year because that gets in me and it feeds me and it feeds my vision for prayer. I live a lifestyle of prayer. And then you gotta preach on prayer. Guys, we preach on stewardship because we want our people to give. We preach on evangelism because we want our people to share their faith. We have to preach on prayer. And it's difficult to preach on something you're not practicing. So it starts with us, become a person of prayer. If you don't have that desire, just do it. Just get in there and here's what I know is what you do out of obedience, God will meet you with joy. When we willingly and obediently do something that we don't feel but we do it out of sacrificial obedience, the gift that God gives to us in that place is joy in doing it. He'll meet us with joy. And so if you do those things, just get one prayer meeting going. Find some kid that watched Jesus' revolution, wants to see revival in your city and say, do you got a guitar? Hey, join me on Wednesday nights and you play guitar and sing at the top of your lungs. I'm gonna grab the mic and pray and I'm gonna tell the whole church to come. And if they don't come, they're gonna miss the rapture. And that's, and we're gonna pray and guilt and manipulate your church into your prayer meetings. You will build a praying church. What do you want to say? That just took a hard right. I was there, oh, no, just do it. It was the rapture thing. It was the rapture thing, yeah. No, what a, I mean, what a unique thing on a Monday afternoon to be talking about what we're talking about. I just, I'm really encouraged that we're talking about this. So thanks for leading this conversation, man. It's really good. So you guys ready to do it? Okay, let's go. Let's stand up. We're not gonna just talk about prayer. We're gonna lean in. We're gonna have a prayer meeting. We're gonna take the next several minutes and we're gonna corporately together. We're gonna pray. We're gonna kind of model. You know, one of the, stay up here. Don't walk away, guys. One of the things I used to love about John Wimber, who was the founder of the vineyard movement was so profoundly used by God in signs and wonders and activating people and praying for the sick and that kind of thing was, he would teach and then he would do lab, lab time where he would pull people up and say, okay, now we're gonna show you how to do this. Some of the most profound lessons on praying for the sick, the five step prayer model, you know, came because he just didn't teach theory, put it into practice. And that's how we feel about prayer is we don't wanna just call people to prayer, teach theory about prayer. We had prayer meetings between sets. Tomorrow we're gonna have prayer meetings, but we're just gonna take this afternoon session and we're gonna worship for a little bit and then we're gonna come back and us three are just gonna lead the room and we're gonna intercede and we're just gonna go for it just a little bit. Give you a taste of, you don't have to have a full band. You can do this with just a guitar, a keyboard player. You can have it with a prayer room set off of YouTube, playing on a video with music going and you with a microphone and 10 other people in a room and we can intercede and we can pray and we can minister to the Lord. So all over the room before we do anything else just lift up our praise and lift up our hands and lift up our countenance to the Lord. And what I want us to do all over the room right now is we're gonna enter into his gates with thanksgiving. Come on, let's just thank the one who's invited us, who's redeemed us, who saved us. If you wanna sing in the spirit, you can sing in the spirit. If you wanna make a melody in your heart, a spiritual song to the Lord, a song out of your own heart of adoration and thanksgiving, let's begin to lift that up. Praise opens up the gates. Praise opens up the gates. So let's lift up our voice right now. Thanksgiving. This is in our hearts where we've chosen many things where we've been busy and anxious and worried about many things. We say, return again. We cry out to the one solution. Lift your hands. We're singing this chorus. There's a prophetic word from Jim LaFoon where he saw the Lord walking up and down this nation. And Jesus looked up to heaven, had tears in his eyes and he was saying, one more time, Father, one more time would you send revival to this land? We're gonna be praying for revival in America out of Acts two. And it shall come to pass in the last day, says God, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy and your young men shall see visions. Your old men will dream dreams and on your men servants and maid servants, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they shall prophesy. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth beneath. And we join with the intercessory prayer of Jesus. We lift our eyes to heaven and we say, Father, one more time would you send revival to this land? Like you did in the first great awakening and the second great awakening in the Jesus movement, Lord, in the renewal movements. Lord, that you would look on the threats of the enemy right now and Lord, that you would have a response from heaven to the spirit of the age. Lord, that you would have a response. God, I ask that your church, Lord, we would rise up and encounter fusion and sexual brokenness where we've been angry. Where the spirit of confusion from Jezebel has bound a generation, Lord, passion at heart, intercession saying, spare your people. And so, Lord, we others, Lord, for Gen Z to this nation and this land, would you once again pour out your spirit on all flesh? Lord, that your church would rise up, Lord, that Asbury would truly be the signpost and the indicator of what you do in this one localized place, that you would do it in an entire nation. And God, just like in Ninnah. Storm clouds and he will give them showers of rain to everyone, the vegetation in the field. For the household gods, utter nonsense and the diviners see lies. They tell false dreams and give empty consolation. Therefore, the people wander like sheep, Father, you said to ask for rain in the seasons of rain. And so, Lord, right now we're praying and we're asking for you to send rain upon this generation. Send rain to the cities that are represented in this room. Lord, we're praying that the balls of intercession over every city represented in this room would begin to fill up and that in response you would send the rains of refreshing, that wash away the sins, wash away the systemic, structural, spiritual strongholds that have had roots in our cities for far too long. We proclaim the kingdom of God has come to lift up your city. And I want you to say, Lord Jesus, send rain and then name your city. Send rain over your nation. By all say, God, send the rain. We're asking the false teachers have deceived, refreshing the way. Take the next 20 seconds and contend in your city. Contend for the spiritual. Praying for rain. As we were praying for rain, I just felt so strongly that the Lord is going to, He's gonna break dams. And just as leaders, as leaders called by God, we present ourselves first as followers. And Lord, what you've entrusted to us is yours. And Lord, anything we've built that's hindering the flow of your spirit, Lord, we ask for you to confront right now. And so as we're asking for rain, as we're asking for an outpouring, Lord, where are your shears? Where are your shears on our vine? And Lord, we welcome your pruning. Lord, we welcome your correction. Lord, we ask that you start with us. God, send your rain to our house. Send your rain to our lives personally. Lord, there is a leadership crisis in our house. We surrender, we return to that first love. We say you are worth it, our time, our attention, our money, our focus, to have a resting place for you in our hearts and in our cities, in our church and in our people. You are worth it. So let these words, let this teaching let it root into our hearts. As we say yes to creating a resting place for you in Jesus' name, amen, amen.