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Library of Che Theological Seminary 
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 PRESENTED BY 
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BUILDING UP 
 THE MID-WEEK SERVICE 
 
 
 
 WILLIAM L. STIDGER, pb.. 
 
By WILLIAM L. STIDGER 
 
 BUILDING UP THE MID-WEEK. SERVICE 
 
 BUILDING SERMONS WITH SYMPHONIC 
 THEMES 
 
 FINDING GOD IN BOOKS 
 
 THAT GOD’Ss HOUSE MAY BE FILLED 
 
 HENRY FORD: THE MAN AND HIS 
 MOTIVES 
 
 ADVENTURES IN HUMANITY 
 
 THE PLACE OF BOOKS IN THE LIFE 
 WE LIVE 
 
 THERE ARE SERMONS IN BOOKS 
 
 FLASHLIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 STANDING ROOM ONLY 
 
 SYMPHONIC SERMONS 
 
 
 
 
 
 NEw York: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
BUILDING UP THE 
 MID-WEEK SERVICE 
 
 BY» 
 
 P 
 
 WILLIAM L. STIDGER. D.D. 
 
 NEW ws YORK 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1926, 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 BUILDING UP THE MID-WEEK SERVICE 
 Pal 8 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
DEDICATED TO 
 JACK MEREDITH 
 
 My Associate Pastor in two Churches where we 
 have worked out the ideas set forth in this book 
 
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CHAPTER 
 
 VIII 
 
 XII 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Just a Word to the Preachers of 
 America } 
 
 A New Way for the New Day . 
 
 Let Us Give It a New Name 
 
 Let Us Expect Much from That 
 Sanctuary Service i 
 
 The New Way of ena 
 Through the Great Hymns 
 
 The New Type of Personal Testi- 
 mony 
 
 Informality ne the M Bitieee 
 Meeting and How to Produce 
 It Rg REN eer 
 
 Once a Month Feature Service 
 for the Mid-Week Meeting 
 
 Group Nights at the Mid-Week 
 Meeting _ ..., 
 
 The “Food, Faith op jain jee 
 tures of the Mid-Week Meet- 
 IIo wy! 
 
 The Graded lpenures and the 
 Educational Program 
 
 Advertising This Remade M de 
 Week Meeting. . 
 
 Meeting a Real Need with ips 
 Mid-W eek Service . he he 
 
 Vii 
 
 PAGE 
 
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 cm Sati} 
 
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 7), eee 
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JUST A WORD TO THE PREACHERS 
 OF AMERICA: 
 
 What I want to say by way of introduction 
 to this little book about the modern mid-week 
 meeting is that I believe the Wednesday Serv- 
 ice can be made the greatest service of the 
 week in our churches if we take it seriously 
 enough. 
 
 I am convinced that the old type of Prayer 
 Meeting is through, except in very isolated in- 
 stances. We are in the midst of a new day 
 and we must evolve a new way. 
 
 You know and I know that the heart-break 
 of the average preacher’s life is the so-called 
 Prayer Meeting; the mid-week service. I suf- 
 fered myself in trying to make it go in the old 
 way. Then I decided to break loose from old 
 traditions and try to build a service to fit the 
 psychology, and the thinking and feeling of 
 the new day. 
 
 In two churches I failed miserably with my 
 
 mid-week meetings; and in two churches I 
 ix 
 
x A Word to Preachers 
 
 have succeeded with this mid-week meeting. 
 In St. Marks I had a chance to break away 
 from the past and we built up a Prayer Meet- 
 ing until it had an average attendance of 500. 
 That has continued to grow until it is larger 
 now, since I left that church, than it was when 
 I was there, so that is evidence that the insti- 
 tution which I established did not depend upon 
 my personality to make it go. It was the 
 method which carried the power. In my pres- 
 ent church, during my first year we have built 
 up a Prayer Hour, which we call the Sanctu- 
 ary Service, until it has had, many times dur- 
 ing the first year, an attendance of 1,000 peo- 
 ple. When my preacher readers know that 
 this church held its Prayer Meeting in one of 
 the smallest rooms in the church with an aver- 
 age attendance of about twenty, with now and 
 then fifty present on a special occasion, they 
 will understand that a jump from even fifty 
 to 1,000 is a proof that the methods which I 
 set forth in this book will work. They are 
 pragmatic. They will work in any type of a 
 church, large or small; in village or town or 
 city. 
 
 The urge to write this book has been coming 
 
A Word to Preachers Xl 
 
 to me from various sources. I have hundreds 
 of letters asking me to write a book on “The 
 Church Night,” or “The Family Night Meet- 
 ing.” These letters come nearly every week 
 due to the fact that I am writing continuously 
 for such preacher magazines as “Church 
 Management,” “The Homiletic Review,” and 
 “The Expositor.” 
 
 I have among my friends the traveling 
 salesmen for several large publishing houses 
 who sell to the religious trade. These men, 
 whenever I meet them and we talk books, say: 
 “Why don’t you write a book about your mid- 
 week Prayer Meeting? We have constant de- 
 mands for such a book.” 
 
 Letters are constantly pouring into the re- 
 ligious book stores asking for such a book. 
 
 I have never written a book which I have en- 
 joyed more than the one which follows this 
 Introduction. It was written without inter- 
 ruption. This is the first book since “Soldier 
 Silhouettes” which I have had the pleasure of 
 writing in that fashion. It is a satisfaction to 
 send forth a book when your heart is running 
 over with its ideas and its mission. When 
 one feels that he actually has something that 
 
Xil A Word to Preachers 
 
 will be a help to other preachers there is joy in 
 writing. 
 
 In that spirit I have set down the facts of 
 this book. I do not care for it to have literary 
 value. I do want it to have feeling as well as 
 method. I believe that it has. My greatest 
 reward will be the reward of knowing that it 
 has helped preachers to break away from the 
 old Prayer Meeting traditions into a new and 
 a living Sanctuary Service. That service will 
 lose none of its spiritual values, I hope. Indeed 
 it ought to be even more intensely full of the 
 spirit of prayer than the old type of a Prayer 
 Meeting. It will have young and old present. 
 
 My conviction is that, if for no other reason 
 than that it did not attract the young people, 
 the so-called old-fashioned Prayer Meeting was 
 long ago doomed to die. It was essentially 
 selfish. 
 
 This new Sanctuary Service may become 
 intensely spiritual and immensely practical. It 
 is groomed to meet a need of to-day. It will 
 meet that need, as is evidenced by the fact that 
 everywhere it is being tried it is doubling, and 
 tripling, the attendance. I have hundreds of 
 letters from preachers who have re-made 
 
A Word to Preachers Xili 
 
 their mid-week meetings over these patterns, 
 until they are holding their Sanctuary Serv- 
 ices in the main auditorium of their churches 
 instead of in the smallest rooms in these 
 churches. 
 

 
BUILDING UP | 
 THE MID-WEEK SERVICE 
 

 
BUILDING UP THE 
 MID-WEEK SERVICE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 A New Way for the New Day 
 
 I grew up on the old-time Prayer Meeting. 
 I revere its memory. 
 
 I also attended old-fashioned Class Meet- 
 ings. In addition to my boyhood experiences 
 in such meetings I have had them in my 
 churches as a pastor. I was converted in an 
 old-fashioned Revival Meeting. 
 
 Therefore, I believe that I write with as 
 much reverence as any human being can of 
 those other days and other ways. I have a 
 full appreciation of their value. But their 
 value was to another day and another genera- 
 tion. That day is gone and so have al! three 
 
 of these church institutions: The Class Meet- 
 17 
 
18 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 ing, the Prayer Meeting, and the Revival 
 Services as they were conducted in my boy- 
 hood. 
 
 However they are not gone entirely. Psy- 
 chological children of these three great church 
 institutions are still with us. We have these 
 three functions of the church, only they are 
 taking different forms now. 
 
 The old way will not work for the new day 
 so we have evolved ways that will work. 
 
 The Prayer Meeting Problem is the most 
 acute problem that a modern preacher faces. 
 He has a profound feeling that there ought to 
 be some kind of a religious service in the inter- 
 val of the long stretch of seven days between 
 Sundays, but he has learned through bitter ex- 
 perience that people will not attend the old-fash- 
 ioned Prayer Meeting. 
 
 The real truth of the matter, if that is any 
 comfort to the minister, is that they did not 
 attend this same Prayer Meeting in the old 
 days either. At least no children or young 
 people attended. They were appalled by that 
 meeting. 
 
 Evidence that the church world is greatly 
 concerned about this mid-week meeting is pro- 
 
A New Way for the New Day 19 
 
 duced ‘in the many books which are written 
 under such headings as “The Problem of the 
 Prayer Meeting,’ “What to Do About the 
 Wednesday Night Service,’ “Why Our 
 Prayer Meetings Fail,” and “Is There Any 
 Hope for Our Mid-Week Prayer Meeting?” 
 
 These questions have been raised and an- 
 swered in many books and almost innumerable 
 articles in our church papers. 
 
 If all the editorials and special articles 
 which have appeared in church publications on 
 this particular problem since I entered the 
 ministry were laid end to end, I verily believe 
 that they would reach around the earth. 
 
 There has been a general admission on the 
 part of the church world that the mid-week 
 Prayer Meeting, as it has been conducted in 
 the last twenty-five years, is not pragmatic. 
 It will not work. It does not reach the people. 
 It does not attract them. It does not even 
 make any claims to attracting children or the 
 young people of a church or of a community. 
 _ Many of us remember the old-fashioned 
 
 “tl rayer Meeting. To us, at that time, it was 
 ~~ dull and monotonous. A small group of the 
 old faithfuls were there. They sat in the same 
 
20 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 seats, they sang the same hymns, they offered 
 the same prayers, they gave the same testi- 
 monies, year in and year out. Now and then 
 a young person was dragged to one of these 
 meetings by an elder. That experience was 
 one of unholy merriment, especially if a fellow- 
 victim of like age was present. Otherwise it 
 was an hour of drab monotony, spent in listen- 
 ing to testimonies that one had listened to 
 from childhood, and which one could repeat 
 word for word. 
 
 This old-time Prayer Meeting was not taken 
 very seriously by either the church at large or 
 the preacher himself. There were exceptions 
 of course. I can remember some. But on the 
 whole for twenty-five years this institution has 
 languished and even the preachers have felt 
 that it was a weak survival. 
 
 When the preacher went to the mid-week 
 meeting he usually met half a dozen old men 
 and women who attended through a sense of 
 habit, duty, and a general lack of desire to do 
 anything else. He patiently listened to their 
 complaints and to their hackneyed testimonies. 
 He too could repeat both word for word. 
 
 The history of this so called old-fashioned 
 
A New Way for the New Day 21 
 
 Prayer Meeting runs back to the Wesleys. 
 That is the chief reason for a change. Noth- 
 ing else in church forms and customs that 
 dates back that far survives. 
 
 Who has not heard the preacher announce, 
 with a listless voice: “The usual mid-week 
 Prayer Meeting will be held Wednesday eve- 
 ning in the Primary Room. I hope everybody 
 will feel that this meeting is worthy of support 
 and be there.” 
 
 It is a lifeless announcement. He knows that 
 very few will be there. He knows that none of 
 his young people will be there. He knows also 
 that few of his Official Board will be there. He 
 really doesn’t want to go himself. 
 
 Wednesday evening comes along and at 
 seven-thirty the preacher appears. There area 
 few old-timers in the meeting, scattered about 
 the room. The preacher says, “We seem to be 
 late in gathering this evening.” He talks as if 
 that is an unusual thing. But he himself has 
 made that same opening remark for years. He 
 doesn’t expect much from that meeting and he 
 will not be disappointed. His opening sentence 
 is a psychological admission of defeat. Then 
 he continues, “So we’ll sing a few of the old 
 
22 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 hymns until a few more gather for the meeting. 
 What shall we sing?” 
 
 The preacher has not selected any hymns in 
 advance, so there is a desperately deadly pause 
 between each selection. The sleepy and aged at- 
 tendants don’t want to be disturbed. Why 
 didn’t the minister select the hymns? Now and 
 then a number is yawned out. It is usually a 
 number which has been sung to death in count- 
 less Prayer Meetings all in a row. 
 
 A tedious fifteen minutes is wasted in listless 
 singing without an organist. The organist is 
 not there. She never is. Somebody in the front 
 row volunteers to play. There is always some- 
 body who will volunteer to play. There is also 
 always somebody who will volunteer to say a 
 piece at a party. 
 
 The preacher speaks again: “Our usual or- 
 ganist is not here, but Sister Michaeljohn has 
 offered to play for us.” He groans under his 
 breath. 
 
 No further attendants appear and finally the 
 poor parson scowls and in mid-week desperation 
 makes some cheerful remark about how poorly 
 the people of that church are supporting the 
 Prayer Meeting, and that if they don’t want to 
 
A New Way for the New Day 23 
 
 have a Prayer Meeting, why not discontinue it 
 entirely rather than make a weekly farce of it? 
 
 Then there is the usual reading of the Scrip- 
 ture Lesson. 
 
 Another hymn is announced. It is droned 
 out ; sometimes with an organist, and sometimes 
 without one. There never seemed to be any 
 regular organist at this meeting. 
 
 “We will now have a group of Sentence 
 Prayers!” announces the preacher. He empha- 
 sizes that word “Sentence” with considerable 
 vehemence. He doesn’t exactly like to mention 
 names but there are one or two individuals in 
 that room at whom that emphasis is launched. 
 Everybody knows who they are. They never 
 offered sentence prayers in all their lives and 
 the preacher knows they won't do so this eve- 
 ning. 
 
 Then come the “Sentence Prayers.” They 
 are from five to ten minutes in length and they 
 seem much longer. Everybody else in that 
 room knows every sentence, every intonation of 
 each of these prayers. 
 
 I used to hear one such prayer which always 
 ended up in this grand and glorious climax, 
 every word of which I can set down from mem- 
 
24 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 ory because I heard it every Wednesday night 
 for years: “Oh, Lord, let me so live that, when 
 I am done with this earthly turmoil and trouble, 
 and I have mounted up the Heavenly Jacob’s 
 Ladder on Eagle Wings, and have entered into 
 the Golden Gate and stand in Thy Divine Pres- 
 ence, that I shall hear myself say, ‘Well done, 
 thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast 
 been faithful over a few things, I will make 
 thee steward over many!’ ” 
 
 This will not sound like an exaggeration to 
 hundreds of preachers who have heard such 
 testimonies. I certainly do not intend it for a 
 caricature. It is an honest reproduction of a 
 testimony which I heard for years as a boy, and 
 which I could easily repeat from its beginning 
 to its lengthy end, word for word. 
 
 Another old brother in our church to whom 
 I used to listen as a boy always talked about his 
 “Wonderful Kissperience with God.” 
 
 Then came the announcements. After that 
 the preacher spoke. That was the brightest 
 thing in the meeting, although even that was not 
 up to his Sunday standard and he didn’t offer 
 it as such and nobody expected it to be as well 
 prepared, nor as seriously taken. No wonder. 
 
A New Way for the New Day 25 
 
 There was nobody there and no inspiration for 
 the preacher to make a serious effort. 
 
 To-day it is all different. In our modern 
 mid-week meeting the preacher prepares as 
 carefully as he does for either of his Sunday 
 services. To his way of thinking that mid-week 
 service is the most important service of all the 
 week. The children are there, the young people 
 crowd the auditorium. There is an air of ex- 
 pectation in the “Church Night.” Everybody 
 from the preacher down expects a fine time and 
 they have it. It is an inspiration to the preacher 
 to have a great crowd at his mid-week “Family 
 Night Service” and he prepares as carefully as 
 if he was making his Sunday morning sermon. 
 
 Then comes, in that old-fashioned Prayer 
 Meeting, the closing prayer. Brother Jenkins, 
 the official Pray-er of the meeting, was always 
 expected to be asked to lead in the “Closing 
 Prayer.” I can actually remember when a new 
 preacher came to town one time, and was not 
 warned that it was Brother Jenkins’ preroga- 
 tive to make that closing prayer. Of course 
 Brother Jenkins was not called on. Asa boy, I 
 almost laughed out loud at that omission. I 
 knew the preacher was in for it. He had uncon- 
 
26 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 sciously and innocently omitted a closing ritual 
 for that Prayer Meeting which had been in 
 force for years, farther back than I could re- 
 member. 
 
 But it was no laughing matter for the 
 preacher. He found out immediately at the 
 close of that Prayer Meeting, when several 
 irate worshipers of God, including Brother 
 Jenkins himself, informed him of his mistake. 
 You would have thought that the preacher had 
 deliberately, with forethought, design, and pre- 
 meditation, offered an insult to Brother Jen- 
 kins and his dignity as a Christian. It was the 
 talk of the town for weeks. It took that 
 preacher a long time to recover from that bad 
 start. | 
 
 No doubt, a long time ago, the Prayer Meet- 
 ing type which I describe had its place and its 
 purpose. It may have been a healthy and help- 
 ful church institution. It may have been 
 crowded with people. It may have been alert 
 and alive. But not within the memory of the 
 present generation of preachers. 
 
 In the pioneer days of our mothers and fa- 
 thers it may have had its place and its power, 
 but for twenty-five years it has been one of the 
 dying remnants of an old and glorious day. 
 
A New Way for the New Day 27 
 
 The automobile, the radio, the motion-picture 
 have all come to challenge us. The youth of this 
 day cannot be interested in such a meeting. The 
 name itself is forbidding. Indeed I doubt if 
 ever there was a time when that type of a mid- 
 week meeting interested the young. That in 
 itself is an indictment against such a meeting. 
 
 I am one who firmly believes in a mid-week 
 meeting and I want it to be, and I believe that 
 it can be, a deeply spiritual hour. I know that 
 the world needs such a spiritual hour in mid- 
 week; that from Sunday to Sunday is too long 
 a space to go without this renewal of our spirit- 
 ual lives. Neither am I one who believes that a 
 supper, a banquet or a little polite Open Forum 
 on Current Events will suffice to feed the needy 
 souls of men and women. 
 
 I still believe that this mid-week meeting must 
 be a great, deep and flowing stream of spiritual 
 power, so that men, and women, and children 
 will be eager to attend this meeting; and so that, 
 when they do come, they will find refreshments 
 for their spiritual selves. 
 
 This modern mid-week meeting for the new 
 day must have even more spiritual power and 
 atmosphere than its forerunner, the old-fash- 
 
28 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 ioned Prayer Meeting. It is entirely possible 
 for it to have. 
 
 I have known both, as I have suggested, and, 
 I will wager my life that the modern mid-week 
 meeting when properly conducted is fifty per 
 cent more sensibly spiritual than the old type 
 of meeting. Godly men conducted these old- 
 time meetings and I revere their memories. 
 But they had gotten into terrible ruts themselves 
 and they had permitted this Wednesday night 
 meeting to do the same thing. 
 
 No preacher seemed to care or to dare to 
 touch the sacred ritual of that old Prayer Meet- 
 ing. If he did he was not “Preaching the Gos- 
 pel.” 
 
 But men of recent years have dared, in their 
 desperation, and in the name of God; and for 
 the sake of saving a sacred hour; and for the 
 sake of the souls of humanity, to break new 
 trails. 
 
 And they have gloriously succeeded. The 
 mid-week meeting is now an institution that 
 works. It attracts both young and old. Itisa 
 beautiful Family Night. It is rich in spiritual 
 power. It isa place for laughter and play; for 
 love and friendship. It is the meeting place of 
 
A New Way for the New Day 29 
 
 Father and Son, Mother and Daughter ; lad and 
 lass. Lovers find each other here. ‘They eat 
 together. They sing together. ‘They pray to- 
 gether. 
 
 If, for no other reason than that the modern 
 Prayer Hour interests and holds the young, it is 
 superior to the old-time mid-week meeting. 
 The children and the young have a place in the 
 modern meeting, and they did not have a place 
 in the old-time meeting. 
 
 It is of such a meeting that I write in the fol- 
 lowing chapters of this book. I talk with rever- 
 ence and devotion. I talk with the authority of 
 a man who confesses to failing in building a 
 Prayer Meeting in two churches. In Calvary 
 and First Church, San Jose, California, my 
 Prayer Meetings were dismal failures. I am 
 ashamed of them. But I also talk with the au- 
 thority of a man who has built two modern mid- 
 week services which are among the most suc- 
 cessful in America. I talk in this book with 
 reverence but with confidence. 
 
 In the next chapter of this book I shall speak 
 of the value of a new name for this mid-week 
 meeting. It is important that it be given a new 
 name. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Let Us Give It a New Name 
 
 In one of Dan Crawford’s ever stimulating 
 and suggestive books he tells of an African cus- 
 tom that fits the spirit of this chapter. 
 
 An African boy does not go to the end of his 
 days with the name that was given him at his 
 birth. He changes names from time to time as 
 some new achievement comes to him. If he 
 kills an elephant, or does a brave deed, he 
 changes names. As he grows in stature his 
 name changes. The name indicates the changes 
 that appear in his developing life. 
 
 From time to time every growing thing ought 
 to be givenanewname. The old name does not 
 fit the new institution. Particularly is this true 
 of the mid-week devotional and prayer hour. 
 It is handicapped by the old name of Prayer 
 Meeting. That has the atmosphere of another 
 day and another way about it. The mid-week 
 
 service of to-day is nothing like the mid-week 
 30 
 
Let Us Give Ita New Name 31 
 
 service of the day when it was called a “Prayer 
 Meeting.” It is a prayer meeting but it ought 
 to be much more than that. 
 
 If we write a book or an article for a maga- 
 zine and the name does not cover what is in that 
 book or that article the Editor is very apt to 
 feel that we are careless, or that we lack imag- 
 ination, and he is apt to be greatly prejudiced 
 against that manuscript. The name itself also 
 has a lot to do with attracting his attention be- 
 fore he has even read the manuscript. 
 
 A classic illustration of that is the story that 
 Ellis Parker Butler sent in his famous story 
 “Pigs is Pigs” under the title of “An Example 
 in Multiplication.”’ The Editor gave the story 
 its real name, and that name has gone around 
 the earth. 
 
 Let us give the new mid-week service a new 
 name. Let us rechristen it. Let that name 
 stand for the spirit of the new devotional hour. 
 Let the name encompass the meaning, the spirit, 
 and the program of that meeting. 
 
 If for no other reason, let us give this hour 
 a new name for the sake of variety. Let us 
 ‘give it a name that will have something of new- 
 ness about it. We are no longer living in a 
 
32 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 Horse and Buggy Age. We are living in an 
 automobile age now. The name “Prayer 
 Meeting” suggests to the young people of to- 
 day a “Horse and Buggy Age.” I do not say 
 this with disrespect, but with a heart alert to 
 the thoughts that are singing through the mind 
 of Youth. 
 
 Several names for this mid-week service have 
 been suggested and are in general and popular 
 use. I cannot see that this change of names has 
 injured the sacredness of the mid-week meeting 
 in any way. On the other hand, I can see that 
 it has helped a lot. The name “Prayer Meet- 
 ing’ is forbidding to this day and age. 
 
 Praying in public seems to this age an un- 
 warranted display of sacred things. It seems to 
 the psychology of this age to be in the same 
 class of public demonstrations as making love 
 to one’s wife in a public place; or talking over 
 one’s innermost secrets in a public place, rather 
 than in the sacred secrecy of one’s closet and 
 of one’s own home, where such matters should 
 be talked. 
 
 One of the names which has been generally 
 adopted is that of “Family Night.” Personally 
 I greatly like this name for it suggests the very 
 
Let Us Give Ita New Name 33 
 
 thing for which this mid-week meeting ought 
 to stand, and the very thing that it ought tc do 
 for the members of any church. 
 
 This mid-week service ought to be the great 
 gathering together of the church membership in 
 fellowship and friendliness. The Sunday serv- 
 ices are necessarily formal, and more public in 
 their nature. The church membership does not 
 really get acquainted with itself within the 
 church family. This is one of the great needs 
 of the average church: to have fellowship like 
 a great family within its own groups. That 
 was the identical spirit of the early church in 
 the days of the Roman persecutions. The 
 church was like a great family. They met to- 
 gether in the closest of family-fellowship. 
 
 The mid-week meeting ought in some way to 
 develop that family spirit and it ought to make 
 every member of that great church family feel 
 that this meeting is for each individual. That 
 is the genius of the new type of meeting. 
 
 Every group in the church, from the young- 
 est to the oldest, should have a distinct place in 
 this meeting. Every baby should look forward 
 to that hour. 
 
 It will build up memories in the life of a little 
 
34 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 baby that will never die. Just a few days before 
 writing this chapter a father in my church told 
 me that in just such a prayer hour in the midst 
 of my sermon little Jane Kirkpatrick, in her 
 mother’s arms, looked up and said suddenly, 
 “Dr. Stidger is talking about Jesus again, isn’t 
 he, Mother ?” 
 
 That child is not yet three years old. Every 
 child of the church ought to feel that this 
 Wednesday night meeting has a place for it. 
 
 In chapter ten of this book I shall tell how 
 we have worked out the first “Graded Prayer 
 Hour” in America and how successfully it 
 worked during my five years’ ministry at St. 
 Marks Methodist Church in Detroit, and how 
 successfully it is still working; and will work 
 in every church if the preacher desires to 
 work it. 
 
 I like this name “The Family Night.” 
 
 It not only gives the membership a chance to 
 meet together as a great family but it also gives 
 each separate family a chance to meet together 
 outside of its home, under the auspices of the 
 church. That also is valuable to every unit- 
 home. It is a beautiful thing for the father 
 to come from his office or his work and meet 
 
Let Us Give Ita New Name 35. 
 
 his family at the church on Wednesday evenings 
 for supper. There ought to be unit tables; 
 round tables; so that Family Groups may meet 
 together. 
 
 You say that they meet and eat together at 
 home? They donot. That is one of the curses 
 of this modern way of living. Seldom do entire 
 families meet and eat together even in their own 
 homes. 
 
 Let the church provide them this opportunity 
 and the church is rendering a spiritual service 
 that will be eternally blessed to any home. I 
 advocate circular small tables for the mid-week 
 supper for this single and simple reason. 
 
 In St. Marks we had circular tables and would 
 have nothing else. They take up more room, 
 but they give opportunities for families to get 
 together and sit together. This is invaluable. 
 
 These circular tables also give teachers a 
 chance to meet with their classes for that mid- 
 week meal. They also give committees a chance 
 to meet together for that mid-week meal. It is 
 one of the best ways to teach a church to center 
 its committee and class meetings on one night. 
 It is the greatest centralizing force that I have 
 ever seen at work. 
 
36 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 Before the church knows it, the members 
 have gotten into the good habit of saying, when 
 there is to be a committee meeting, “Oh, let’s 
 have our committee meeting on Wednesday 
 night at the supper. I'll reserve a table for us. 
 That will save us all an evening, and we'll all be 
 there anyhow.” 
 
 That is exactly the habit which develops when 
 this mid-week service is working at its best. It 
 centralizes the mid-week activities in one big 
 friendly “Family Night.” 
 
 One of the almost priceless values of this 
 “Family Night” is that it gives the preacher a 
 chance to meet his people face to face, to chat 
 with them; truly to get personally acquainted 
 with them. I have found it invaluable. I al- 
 ways plan to be in the church when the first peo- 
 ple begin to arrive for the supper and every 
 Wednesday evening I personally shake hands 
 with every person who comes. That means an 
 average of five hundred people before the eve- 
 ning is through in my present church although 
 we frequently have a thousand people attending 
 our mid-week meeting at Linwood Methodist 
 Church in Kansas City. On Sundays the 
 preacher, like the people, is more or less host 
 
Let Us Give Ita New Name 37 
 
 ~ to the outsiders who attend the church services. 
 
 He does not have a chance to shake hands with 
 all. He is on his dignity that day if he has any. 
 At least it is a more or less formal day all 
 around. But on this Wednesday evening if the 
 “Family Spirit” prevails he has his real oppor- 
 tunity of all the week to get wonderfully close 
 to each one of his people. 
 
 Another name which we used at St. Marks 
 has found popularity all over the United States 
 and the British Empire in church circles. I 
 originated that name at St. Marks in order to 
 designate in popular language the three-fold 
 meaning of our particular kind of a mid-week 
 Family Night Service. I called it the “Food, 
 Faith and Fun Night.” I shall discuss in de- 
 tail the features of the type of a meeting which 
 brought upon itself thisname. That discussion 
 will come in chapter nine. 
 
 However I may say briefly here that the name 
 covered the three-fold periods of our mid-week 
 meeting: First, the Supper which ran from six 
 to seven (the “Food” part). Second: The 
 various Prayer Groups (the “Faith” part). 
 Third: The Motion Pictures, Organized Play, 
 etc. (the “Fun” part). 
 
38 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 This name, “The Food, Faith and Fun — 
 Night,” is being used in hundreds of churches 
 in the United States, several in Great Britain, 
 according to letters and newspaper clippings 
 which have come to me from time to time dur- 
 ing the last five years. 
 
 Some of my preacher friends have given the 
 name a new twist by making it “The Food, 
 Faith and Frolic Night,” or “The Food, Faith 
 and Friendship Night,” or “The Food, Faith 
 and Fellowship Night.” I sometimes think that 
 I like some of the adaptations of my original 
 name better than I like my own selection itself. 
 
 Which leads me to say this: In preacher 
 groups and gatherings I often have a man say: 
 “Yes, that is all right for YOU to say that such 
 and such a method will work. Maybe it will 
 for you. Butcan we do it?” 
 
 My answer always is: “My methods are 
 merely vehicles. Anybody can use them just as 
 anybody can drivea Ford ora Lincolncar. Mr. 
 Ford makes them both, but it does not require 
 a Ford personality to drive in either. Each man 
 drives a Ford or a Lincoln according to his own 
 lights, his own ways of doing things in general. 
 My methods are merely Wehicles. Each man 
 
Let Us Give Ita New Name 39 
 
 may use them according to his own individual- 
 ity. I claim that they are workable; that 
 anybody can work them; just as anybody 
 can learn to drive either a Ford or a Lincoln 
 car. We all drive cars differently. Even my 
 wife can tell when I have been driving the car. 
 She feels that something serious has happened 
 to it; that the gears are all shot to pieces, that 
 the steering wheel has been jerked rather ruth- 
 lessly, that the tires are flatter than usual, that 
 the oil and gas and water have been allowed to 
 run disastrously low; that the water in the bat- 
 teries has entirely evaporated. 
 
 We drive the same car, but, according to all 
 that I hear after I have been driving it, we drive 
 it differently, and all the destructive things that 
 happen with that vehicle happen when I am 
 driving it, or when she is driving it because of 
 something that I have left undone when I was 
 driving it. 
 
 An illustration of what I mean is continually 
 coming to me. A man up in Maine, or a man 
 out in California, or one down in Texas, who 
 has been using my vehicles, writes and gives me 
 a brilliant adaptation of one of my methods 
 which I never thought of and which always 
 
40 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 pleases me greatly. The new names which have 
 been evolved over my original name of “Food, 
 Faith and Fun Night” have been better names 
 than mine. This is due to having other minds 
 at work on anidea. I like the “Food, Faith and 
 Fellowship Night” name the best of all, be- 
 cause that implies “Fellowship” with each 
 other, with the preacher and with God. The 
 name “Fun” which we first thought of is crude 
 compared with the name “Fellowship.” 
 
 Every constituency must produce different 
 problems. Different types of people make it 
 necessary that a preacher use his ingenuity and 
 produce both new methods and new names. I 
 have never used the same methods entirely in 
 any church that I have had. [I find it necessary 
 to produce new methods for new groups. Each 
 church which I have served has compelled me 
 to evolve new methods. 
 
 For instance, in the matter under discussion 
 in this chapter, I have evolved for the name of 
 our Mid-Week Meeting “The Sanctuary Serv- 
 ice.” We do not have a fine community house 
 in which to play and run motion pictures in Lin- 
 wood Boulevard Methodist Church, although 
 we shall have in a short time. Therefore the 
 
Let Us Give Ita New Name 41 
 
 type of a mid-week service which I ran in St. 
 Marks could not be exactly the type that I run 
 here. It is a different type of an auditorium— 
 finished in beautiful walnut, stately, dignified, 
 and the same things that fitted into St. Marks 
 white, unpainted walls, covered with dirty hand- 
 marks, democratic, without a single touch of 
 the churchly feeling, would not fit in here. 
 
 T saw at once that I must evolve a new name 
 for my mid-week meeting here and in a few 
 days “The Sanctuary Service” came to me and 
 it seems to fit my mid-week meeting here per- 
 fectly. 
 
 Let us not call it a “Prayer Meeting.” Let 
 us give our mid-week meeting a new name. As 
 the idea of the mid-week meeting grows and 
 changes, why should we keep the same name 
 with all of its suggestions of that dull, monoto- 
 nous and deadly hour which childhood remem- 
 bers out of the past? Let us give the mid-week 
 meeting a new name so that that new name will 
 suggest something attractive and alluring to 
 young people and to children; for every age 
 ought to be and will be in the mid-week meet- 
 ing, if we plan properly for it. 
 
 In the next chapter I am going to discuss the 
 
42 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 matter of just how important it is for preachers 
 to take this mid-week meeting seriously and how 
 pragmatic it will be when the preacher expects 
 great things from it. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Let Us Expect Much from 
 That Sanctuary Service 
 
 Last summer I was looking over Linwood 
 Boulevard Methodist Church, the outstanding 
 church of its denomination in the middle west, 
 and one of the truly great churches of the 
 United States of America. 
 
 But like most churches its Prayer Meeting 
 had died out. 
 
 They were holding it in the Ladies’ Room, 
 a small room in a rather dark corner of this 
 beautiful church. That room, all told, would 
 seat about fifty when it was full, but on Prayer 
 Meeting night for years it had averaged about 
 fifteen in attendance in a church which had a 
 membership of close to two thousand. 
 
 When we came to this small room the fine 
 gentleman who was showing me over the church, 
 and who was trying to make as profound an im- 
 
 pression on my youthful mind as possible, with 
 43 
 
44 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 the evil intention of inveigling me into becom-— 
 ing the pastor of the church, said, “This is our 
 Prayer Meeting Room.” 
 
 “What? Do you hold your Prayer Meeting 
 in a room like this?” said I, trying to look as 
 astonished and as disappointed as I could, al- 
 though I knew that that was exactly what I 
 would discover, sooner or later. I myself had 
 hada great Prayer Meeting of 500 at St. Marks 
 for years. However, I had too much sense to 
 expect to inherit this kind of a meeting in many 
 churches. Ninety-nine out of a hundred would 
 have handed down to me just that same mes- 
 sage; the message that the business man handed 
 down to me that June afternoon. 
 
 “Well, when I get here you'll hold your 
 Prayer Meeting in the main auditorium of the 
 church and there will be enough people want to 
 come to Prayer Meeting to fill it in a short time. 
 Do you ever come to Prayer Meeting?” 
 
 He was the manager of one of the largest 
 business organizations in America and, of 
 course, 1 knew that he hadn’t been coming to 
 Prayer Meeting. I would have doubted his in- 
 telligence if he had been coming. But I pre- 
 tended that I was greatly chagrined and sur- 
 
Expect Much from Sanctuary Service 45 
 
 prised that he had not been attending Prayer 
 Meeting regularly. I knew that if I did not ac- 
 cept that church my attitude would not hurt 
 him any and might make him think; and if I 
 did accept that church I could make a Prayer 
 Meeting worth his attending. 
 
 He answered my question in the negative. I 
 said, “Well, you will attend Prayer Meeting 
 when I come as your Pastor for it will meet a 
 need in your life that will be met no place else 
 in this city, and it will be so interesting that you 
 will not want to stay away. We'll start right 
 off with the Prayer Meeting in the main audi- 
 torium.” 
 
 It was at that juncture that I could see that 
 he began to doubt my sanity. I think that he 
 wondered, after all, if they really wanted me as 
 their pastor. I seemed all right in all other re- 
 spects except that talk about holding a Prayer 
 Meeting in the main auditorium, and about hav- 
 ing four or five hundred attend that Prayer 
 Meeting in a church when fifty had been a mob. 
 I could see a funny look in his usually bright 
 eyes. He looked like a man who had received a 
 great and serious disillusionment. He had built 
 up great hopes on a young man’s integrity and 
 
46 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 here he was the first thing talking such non- 
 sense as five hundred at Prayer Meeting. 
 
 He has since admitted to me that he thought 
 that my enthusiasm was overstepping the 
 bounds of possibility a little that afternoon. He 
 thought that maybe the Kansas heat had over- 
 balanced me a little since I had been used to 
 the cool breezes from Lake Erie. 
 
 I arrived in Kansas City as per schedule 
 about the middle of September, and began 
 preaching in an auditorium fairly well filled in 
 spite of an extremely hot wave of weather. At 
 the Sunday morning service I was just foolish 
 enough to announce that the auditorium would 
 be used from henceforth and forever as a 
 Prayer Meeting Room. 
 
 “We'll need the auditorium because that is 
 the only room in the church plant large enough 
 to hold the people who will want to be there. 
 We will start off our Fall Prayer Meetings 
 with about five hundred in attendance, and that 
 crowd will gradually grow to a thousand each 
 week in attendance at our mid-week meeting. | 
 This meeting will be called a Sanctuary Service. 
 The first sermon preached will be the sermon 
 
Expect Much from Sanctuary Service 47 
 
 selected by Dr. J. Fort Newton as one of the 
 ‘Best Sermons of 1925.’ 
 
 “T am preaching this particular sermon be- 
 cause I want to show you that I consider these 
 Wednesday evening services the most impor- 
 tant services in the church, even more impor- 
 tant than either of the Sunday services. I am, 
 therefore, selecting what one great preacher 
 has called my best sermon preached last year. 
 I do not say that it is my best sermon. I do 
 not even say that itis a great sermon. I simply 
 say that I am going to preach the sermon that 
 Dr. Newton calls a worth-while sermon. If 
 I consider that first Prayer Meeting, or Sanctu- 
 ary Service, important enough to expect half a 
 thousand people there, and important enough 
 to preach my best sermon before, I think there 
 will be a real necessity of holding the Prayer 
 Hour in this church auditorium.” 
 
 ‘There were five hundred people in attendance 
 that first Prayer Meeting. I had great expecta- 
 tions and the people caught the contagion. I 
 had more people at that Prayer Meeting and 
 have continued to have, than had been attending 
 both Sunday services combined for years. ‘This 
 
48 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 is no reflection on anybody. I am simply writ- 
 ing a book on Prayer Meetings and am trying 
 to show that, when you expect great things and 
 prepare for great things, and consider this hour 
 important enough to prepare for carefully, the 
 people will come. 
 
 This Prayer Meeting—to be generous in my 
 figures—has jumped from fifty in attendance to 
 an average of 500in three months. It has been 
 a thousand in attendance for the last three 
 weeks preceding the writing of this chapter, 
 and I have just been approached about broad- 
 casting this Prayer Hour. If I do it will be 
 one of the first broadcastings of a Prayer 
 Meeting in the United States of America. 
 
 But it has not always been thus with my 
 Prayer Meetings. 
 
 In fact I have had two mid-week services in 
 two churches which were, to my way of think- 
 ing, abject and humiliating failures. It was 
 because I was working on the old lines. I was 
 trying to do the same thing that the preachers 
 and the churches of my boyhood days had done 
 for centuries unnumbered. I was trying to 
 carry out the old program in the old way. The 
 fact of the matter is that I did not know any 
 
Expect Much from Sanctuary Service 49 
 
 better. I was to have to learn by bitter experi- 
 ence. I had not been taught anything different 
 in the colleges or Theological Seminaries. I 
 doubt if there is any Theological School in 
 America even to-day which really teaches a 
 preacher how to run a modern mid-week meet- 
 ing successfully. There is very little taught in 
 the average Seminary that is of much practical 
 benefit to a preacher when he actually gets out 
 into life. 
 
 Therefore for two pastorates—those of Cal- 
 vary, San Francisco, and San Jose, California 
 —I tried to run the usual type of a Prayer 
 Meeting. 
 
 The average attendance at Calvary was 
 about five. ‘The average at San Jose was 
 about thirty. The usual old faithfuls were 
 there; the usual deadly and monotonous testi- 
 monies, prayers, and songs were sung. No 
 young people attended except by accident. I 
 did not expect them to attend. I had not, as 
 yet, caught the vision of a mid-week service 
 for young as well as old. I was restless under 
 this type of a Prayer Meeting. I knew that 
 something was wrong with it, just as every 
 preacher has felt. I knew that there ought 
 
50 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 to be a way to interest young people as well 
 as adults in that mid-week meeting. 
 
 However, I allowed the benumbing influence 
 of tradition to creep over me in relation to 
 this mid-week service. I broke loose in every 
 other department of church life and did unique 
 and original and successful things. I had my 
 first great overflow crowds. I took more than 
 three hundred people into the church my first 
 year as its pastor. Everything was booming 
 but the Prayer Meeting. 
 
 T just settled down into contentment, saying 
 to myself by way of easing my ministerial con- 
 science, “Oh, well, the Prayer Meeting is a dead 
 institution, so why should I worry about it? 
 T’ll just let these old people who enjoy it oe 
 in—and do what they please.” 
 
 I didn’t expect much from it and nothing 
 much ever came of it. Now, the pastor who is 
 there, modeling his mid-week meetings much 
 along the lines of a modern Family Night, has 
 great and thriving Prayer Meetings, with an 
 educational program and great crowds, pre- 
 ceded by a dinner. 
 
 However I did have this awakening. I 
 promised myself that the next church I had I 
 
Expect Much from Sanctuary Service 51 
 
 would break away from traditions in that mid- 
 week meeting, just as I had in everything else 
 and I would experiment until I actually had 
 solved that Prayer Meeting Problem which 
 was bothering all ministers. 
 
 The rest of this book will deal, in its various 
 chapters, with the different steps and phases 
 of the development of that dream, and the 
 processes of that breaking away from tradi- 
 tions in the mid-week meeting. 
 
 I feel that I speak with the authority of the 
 fact that the Prayer Meetings at St. Marks 
 have increased in attendance and success, under 
 the ministrations of Dr. James Thomas, rather 
 than diminished. That means that the system 
 works and that I built well. It means that these 
 methods are not peculiar to my own ways of 
 doing things as many ministers say. It means 
 that it is the system which works and that any 
 man and every man can work the system after 
 his own ideas and his own personality, as I 
 have said in a previous chapter. 
 
 Dr. Thomas does not run these mid-week 
 meetings exactly as I did but the same ma- 
 chinery, the same system, the same vehicle he 
 uses in his own way. His mid-week meetings 
 
52 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 are much larger than mine were and it has be- 
 come necessary there to hold them in the main 
 auditorium of the church where the great new, 
 pipe organ is available. 
 
 When I contrast my experiences at San 
 Francisco and San Jose with my experiences 
 at Detroit and in Kansas City I know that the 
 chief reason for my failure was my unwilling- 
 ness or my fear of breaking away from the 
 traditional type of Prayer Meeting; and the 
 chief reason for my success in the last two 
 churches that I have served was because I broke 
 away from tradition and pioneered a new way 
 for the new day in the mid-week meeting. 
 
 In the next chapter I shall discuss a new way 
 of praying, which gives everybody a chance to 
 pray, and which violates no timid soul, and em- 
 barrasses no child or adult; a way which is just 
 as reverent and even more spiritual than the 
 old system. 
 
 To my way of thinking this new way of pray- 
 ing is the very heart of the new type of a Prayer 
 Meeting which we call “The Sanctuary 
 Service.” 
 
CHAPTER [V 
 
 The New Way of Praying 
 Through the Great Flymns 
 
 Prayer is not easy for everybody. 
 
 Public prayer is almost impossible for most 
 human beings. 
 
 In the old day it was the common custom 
 for the preacher or the leader to insist upon 
 public prayer being made by persons to whom 
 it was a great embarrassment and humiliation. 
 
 Most of us can remember when the preacher 
 or leader used to go up and down a row of em- 
 barrassed people and say, “Now you stand up 
 and tell us what the Lord has done for you!” 
 Generally we were too scared to refuse and 
 too nervous to know what we were talking 
 about when we got up. 
 
 There may have been those who thought that 
 was a good thing but no Psychologist would say 
 
 it was. 
 53 
 
54 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 The truth of the matter is that only a very 
 few people are trained to speak with any intel- 
 ligence or with any ease on their feet and the 
 general mass of people are frightened, hu- 
 miliated, and injured when they are forced, 
 through any show of hands, or being put in a 
 corner, to make a public demonstration of such 
 a sacred matter as talking with their God about 
 their private spiritual affairs. | 
 
 The old day is past when this can be done 
 and thank God that it is past. The way to 
 testify for God is to live for Him and work 
 for Him, and give for Him; and that is a 
 greater testimony than getting up in a Prayer 
 Meeting, frightened to death, and saying what 
 you are expected to say. 
 
 In the nature of the case only a very small 
 proportion of such testimonies or prayers could 
 be sincere and honest. One was expected to 
 say certain things and one did. 
 
 The new day must have a new way of giv- 
 ing people an opportunity of expressing their 
 spiritual joys and emotions. Just as the old 
 days when a fervent “Amen” was shouted from 
 the public audience are past, so is the old way 
 of the public testimony and prayer gone. 
 
The New Way of Praying 55 
 
 What shall we do about it? 
 
 We shall meet the new day with a new way. 
 
 We shall meet it with a way that is suited 
 to its psychology and its mass-spirit. We shall 
 give the new mind a chance to pray demo- 
 cratically. 
 
 How? 
 
 Through the great hymns! 
 
 For six years we have been praying through 
 the great hymns of the church. We select such 
 a hymn as “Just for To-day.” 
 
 I say to my great audience of people gathered 
 in a Prayer Hour: 
 
 “Tt is hard for most of you to pray in public. 
 Youare timid. You find yourself so frightened 
 that you do not get anything spiritual out of 
 it when you do muster up courage enough to 
 do it. I am going to give you a way of pray- 
 ing that you can do easily, without embarrass- 
 ment and that will bring to you a better spir- 
 itual reaction than even the old way of praying 
 publicly. 
 
 “We are going to sing a great and beautiful 
 Prayer-Hymn. It was originally written as a 
 prayer. It has the phraseology of prayer in 
 every line. It has the spiritual pulse of prayer 
 
56 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 in it. If you will sing it as a great prayer it 
 will be such to you. That will give every person 
 in this great crowd an opportunity to pray. In 
 the old way, in a large crowd like this, only a 
 few persons could pray at most. ‘Through 
 this Prayer-Hymn everybody in this room can 
 truly pray if he will. 
 
 “Let us sing the first verse of this Prayer- 
 Hymn in full voice: 
 
 “Lord, for to-morrow and its needs, I do not 
 pray ; 
 Keep me, my God, from stain of sin, just for 
 to-day. 
 Help me to labor earnestly and duly pray; 
 Let me be kind in word and deed, Father, 
 to-day!’ 
 
 “Then we shall sing the second verse of this 
 great Prayer-Hymn softly—making it a prayer 
 as we sing, for it is truly that: 
 
 ““Let me no wrong, or idle word, unthinking, 
 say ; 
 Set Thou a seal upon my lips through all 
 to-day! 
 
The New Way of Praying 57 
 
 Let me in season, Lord, be grave, in season, 
 pray ; 
 
 Let me be faithful to Thy grace, dear Lord, 
 to-day!’ ”’ 
 
 May I interrupt the quotations to say that, 
 by this time, my audience is in a beautiful mood 
 of prayer; that it is singing softly those lines 
 of fervent and practical prayer, put in phrase- 
 ology which few people could command in ex- 
 temporaneous prayer. The lines of poetry 
 themselves have a profound, dramatic effect, 
 and a spiritual reaction on all of those who are 
 singing this prayer. Poetry is ever the 
 language of the spiritual. Even the reading of 
 beautiful poetry brings a spiritual reaction and 
 the united singing of Prayer Poetry brings 
 even a deeper spiritual value. 
 
 There is a tense atmosphere of prayer. The 
 mood of the blessed Upper Room is on this 
 ereat crowd of worshipers. It is always so. 
 I have never known it to fail in six years of 
 using this democratic system of prayer. Nota 
 single time has it failed to produce a spiritual 
 reaction in a Prayer Room and I am told by 
 hundreds of individuals that this way of pray- 
 
58 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 ing is the most spiritual thing that happens 
 in our Sanctuary Services. 
 
 I go on with the quotations and speak to my 
 meeting again: 
 
 “The third verse we will hum. You close 
 your eyes and hum this verse as a prayer and 
 I shall read the lines softly to you and offer 
 your prayer for you to God through that last 
 beautiful verse. While Iread the Prayer-Cross 
 will be lighted and the rest of the lights in this 
 auditorium will be turned off. You do not 
 need to close your eyes unless you wish. Look 
 into the face of this lighted cross, hum the lines 
 of that beautiful prayer, and I shall read them.” 
 Then I touch a button beside the pulpit, the 
 lights in the church go off; and a beautiful 
 white Prayer-Cross goes on, gradually. The 
 organist plays. The audience hums that last 
 verse while I read it: 
 
 “And if to-day this life of mine shall ebb 
 away, 
 
 Give me Thy sacrament divine, Father, 
 to-day. 
 
 So, for to-morrow and its needs, I do not pray; 
 
 Still keep me, guide me, love me, Lord, 
 through each to-day!” 
 
The New Way of Praying 59 
 
 The audience has hummed this last prayer- 
 verse as I have been reading it softly. The 
 lighted cross has been shining into their faces. 
 
 There is a magic effect about the preacher 
 reading that last verse while the audience hums 
 it. I tried this over the Radio at one of our 
 Vesper Services at Christmas time. I had my 
 choir hum the last verse of “Silent Night, Holy 
 Night” and I received hundreds of letters from 
 all over the United States telling me how 
 dramatic and magic the effect of that reading 
 voice on that last verse was, with a background 
 of humming. 
 
 Take such a beautiful old Prayer-Hymn as “I 
 Need Thee Every Hour,” and sing three verses 
 of it in the way that I have suggested, giving 
 your audience to understand that it is to be 
 sung as a devout prayer. It was written as a 
 great, throbbing, pulsing prayer and it is easy 
 to sing it in that spirit. Its spiritual reactions 
 on an audience will be immediate. Sing the 
 first verse in full tone, the second softly and 
 the last verse, hum. If there is a Prayer-Cross 
 equipment in your Prayer Room use the Cross 
 on that last verse. Let your Organist play the 
 Vox Humani Stops, or the Chimes. | 
 
60 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 “T need Thee every hour, 
 Most gracious Lord; 
 No tender voice like Thine 
 Can peace afford. 
 
 Chorus: 
 T need Thee, 
 Oh, I need Thee; 
 Every hour I need Thee! 
 Oh, bless me now, my Savior, 
 I come to Thee!’ 
 
 (Second verse softly) 
 “T need Thee every hour, 
 Stay Thou near by; 
 Temptations lose their, power 
 When Thou art nigh.” 
 
 (Hum the last verse) 
 (Preacher reads it softly) 
 
 ‘I need Thee every hour, 
 Most Holy One; 
 
 Oh, make me Thine indeed, 
 ‘Thou blessed Son!” 
 
The New Way of Praying 61 
 
 Any preacher with imagination, or even the 
 slightest bit of spiritual feeling, can take a 
 Prayer-Hymn like this and remake the spirit- 
 ual atmosphere of his meeting any time. Such 
 a hymn will do ten times more to produce a 
 mood of real prayer than the most fervent 
 prayer of the old time brother; either preacher 
 or layman; who used to bring the very stars 
 down as he slapped his thigh and yelled at the 
 Lord. 
 
 The Hymn Book is full of Prayer-Hymns. 
 Some of them are petitions, some are confes- 
 sional, some are praise prayers. ‘There are 
 Prayer-Hymns to suit every mood and need 
 and they ought to be used as prayers, for that 
 was what they were written for. 
 
 This way of praying for the new day works. 
 It fills a need of prayer which each soul has. 
 It gives the audience and the individuals that 
 make up that audience a sense of having prayed, 
 a Spiritual reaction, and a feeling of well-being; 
 as those who have walked and talked with God. 
 
 I do not want to fill up this chapter with 
 Prayer-Hymns, but I will suggest titles of a 
 few Prayer-Hymns that we have used with 
 magical results: 
 
62 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 (1) 
 (2) 
 (3) 
 (4) 
 (5) 
 (6) 
 (7) 
 (8) 
 
 (9) 
 (10) 
 (11) 
 (12) 
 (33) 
 (14) 
 (15) 
 (16) 
 (17) 
 (18) 
 (19) 
 (20) 
 
 “T Am Coming to the Cross.” 
 
 “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross.” 
 
 “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” 
 
 “Love Divine, All Love Excelling.” 
 
 “More Love to Thee, O Lord!’ 
 
 “Nearer, Still Nearer.” 
 
 “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Me.” 
 
 “T Am Thine, O Lord, I Have Heard 
 Thy Voice!” 
 
 “There is a Fountain.” 
 
 “Just as I Am.” 
 
 “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” 
 
 “Abide with Me.” 
 
 “Lead, Kindly Light!’ 
 
 “Savior, Lead Me Lest I Stray!” 
 
 “My Jesus, I Love Thee?’ 
 
 “Nearer, My God, to Thee!’ 
 
 “Take My Life and Let It Be!” 
 
 “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross!” 
 
 “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” 
 
 “IT Must Tell Jesus.” 
 
 I could go on indefinitely. I just set down 
 these titles of the old and the more modern 
 hymns which fill every type of a hymn book to 
 show that there are innumerable Prayer- 
 Hymns which may be used in this magic way. 
 
The New Way of Praying 63 
 
 The source is unfailing; the method is prag- 
 matic; the spiritual reactions are a blessing to 
 preacher, to each indiviual and to the audience 
 as a whole! 
 
 As a preacher trying to meet modern prob- 
 lems and perplexities, trying to adopt my 
 program to the usages, the customs, the 
 language, and the psychology of the new day, 
 I have never worked out a plan for prayer 
 which is half so effective as this one is—year 
 in and year out. | 
 
 It meets aneed. It gives a poor timid soul— 
 and there are many of them—the chance to 
 release those dammed up Prayer-Complexes 
 which the modern Psychology is telling us 
 about. This method releases emotional com- 
 plexes which have had need of a source of ex- 
 pression fora long time. Therefore those who 
 attend such a service have such a feeling of 
 spiritual warmth and help that they want to 
 come back. They do not always know just why, 
 but they “Know What They Want” spiritually. 
 
 It is a democratic way of praying. It gives 
 people a chance to pray in crowds, like they 
 yell at ball games. People of this age are more 
 gregarious than ever and they like to do things 
 in mass. 
 
64 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 It releases Emotional Complexes for nervous 
 ‘people. It gives them about the only emotional 
 release they have all week. I have seen men 
 and women sitting before me, looking up into 
 that white cross, humming the prayer of an old 
 hymn, with the tears running over their cheeks. 
 In fact this is a common experience every time 
 we use this method. 
 
 In the next chapter I shall discuss the new 
 type of testimony. In some way our modern 
 Prayer Meeting must give those who attend 
 and who desire, a chance for self-expression. 
 Many will not wish this, but for those who do, 
 a new way must be provided. People are not so 
 elib as they used to be about publicly express- 
 ing their deeper spiritual emotions. It is not 
 that they do not have them, because they do— 
 more than ever human beings had them; but it 
 is just that we are a little less eager to talk 
 about our private affairs and our deeper feel- 
 ings ina public place. I personally most heart- 
 ily sympathize with this new shyness. I think 
 that it is just as genuine for this day as the 
 eagerness to expose one’s spiritual state was 
 in the older day and way. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 The New Type of Personal 
 
 Lestimony 
 
 It is a good thing for a human Bene to have 
 self-expression. 
 
 There was that much of value in the old- 
 fashioned personal testimony. 
 
 Not every person could talk. Even if they 
 did they did not want to talk about things so 
 intimate as their spiritual status. 
 
 “T am living close to the Lord. I pray daily 
 and fervently. I have lost my temper many 
 times this week but the Lord has forgiven me 
 for that.” Thus ran the general tone of the 
 old type of personal testimony. We all remem- 
 ber. It was generally the same thing over each 
 week. I have no particular fault to find with 
 a Christian who wants to tell, nor who did, in 
 the old days tell, about his intimate spiritual 
 condition. I used to do so myself when a boy 
 in the old type of a Prayer Meeting. 
 
 65 
 
66 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 I have no objection to a person who likes that — 
 way of doing having a chance to talk even 
 in the new Sanctuary Service. But what I 
 do say is, that people of this day and age do not 
 desire todoso. That does not necessarily mean 
 that they do not have anything to think about. 
 It does not mean that they are not deeply and 
 reverently religious. It does not mean that 
 they are any less devoted to Christ than our 
 dear friends of another day, many of whom 
 survive in our churches to-day; to deplore, 
 rather critically, that the days of the “Old 
 Gospel” are gone. They imply that the church, 
 and the preachers, and the people of to-day have 
 gone to the dogs spiritually. 
 
 They have a way of saying that a preacher 
 who does not do things in the way they used 
 to be done is not preaching “The Gospel.” 
 Most of the folks who offer this criticism do 
 it in rather an unkindly and an un-Christian 
 manner. Many of them are not far short of 
 fault-finding in this type of criticism. In fact 
 they are violating the very foremost tenets 
 of Christ’s teaching. 
 
 Christ had and taught a great reverence 
 for the other person’s opinion. He taught that 
 
New Type of Personal Testimony 67 
 
 there was nothing more sacred than Personal- 
 ity. That meant another person’s opinions. 
 That implied another generation’s views. And 
 yet the defenders of the old way of doing 
 things do not hesitate to speak most bitterly 
 of the generation that lives to-day and does 
 not care to parade its show of piety before 
 the throng; and therefore does not take to 
 personal testimony readily. 
 
 Now, what “The Gospel” actually means is 
 “The Good News.” ‘That is as fair a defini- 
 tion of it as can be given. Yet most of these 
 people who criticize the present generation be- 
 cause it is not shouting from the housetops 
 the spiritual condition of its soul, insinuate that 
 this generation does not know what salvation, 
 regeneration, and religion mean. 
 
 Having lived in both generations, and hav- 
 ing been converted in an “Old-fashioned Re- 
 vival Meeting’; and believing firmly in the 
 reality of that experience; and having seen 
 the results of both types of a Prayer Meeting, 
 I sincerely believe that the present type of 
 Family Night is more helpful, more deeply 
 spiritual, and closer to practical Christian liv- 
 ing and doing than the old type. 
 
68 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 The old type of a Christian meeting was 
 made up largely of testimony which was con- 
 tinually alluding to what the “Lord has done 
 for ME!” It was distinctly a selfish type of 
 testimony. It was mostly talk about what to 
 get and keep for one’s self, with little thought 
 of a religion that had to do with service to 
 others. 
 
 A few days ago I was talking with Sinclair 
 Lewis, author of “Main Street,” “Babbitt” and 
 “Arrowsmith,” about the difference in the 
 church of the old day and the church of this 
 day. He is writing a book on the church. I 
 told him that I felt that the difference consisted 
 in this: In the old day the Christian was trying 
 to get something for himself; in the new day 
 he is trying to give something. 
 
 The difference is in getting and giving. In 
 the old Prayer Meeting the testimony generally 
 consisted of what God had given and done for 
 the man making the testimony. The present 
 spirit seems to be a testimony as to what God 
 is helping us to do for somebody else. 
 
 As for me I believe that the latter day is 
 better than the former. 
 
New Type of Personal Testimony 69 
 
 Religion of to-day is essentially a religion of 
 service. 
 
 Religion of yesterday was essentially selfish. 
 
 Therefore the type of testimony, or self-ex- 
 pression, which fits in with the spirit of to-day 
 in church work is one of action. 
 
 “Good news” is the theme of to-day’s testi- 
 mony. It is “The Gospel” just as it was before 
 but it is the Gospel in action. _ 
 
 Therefore we have worked out a type of 
 Testimony, or Self-Expression, in the modern 
 Sanctuary Service which I call the “Gossip 
 Period,” or “Good News Period.” 
 
 Churches have always suffered with a bad 
 kind of Gossip. It has been the great tempta- 
 tion of the other type of church member, be- 
 cause he was essentially selfish in his religion. 
 Every preacher will testify that Gossip; par- 
 ticularly in small-town churches has been vi- 
 cious in church circles. 
 
 So in our modern type of a mid-week meet- 
 ing we have tried to, and have succeeded in de- 
 veloping, a morale for a good kind of Gossip. 
 
 Gossip in its fundamental constituency is 
 really Conversation. Conversation is good. 
 
70 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 Therefore let us have good conversation, and 
 good gossip, and Good News; and let us drive 
 out of the church the old petty, mean spirit of 
 Gossip by developing a technique of good 
 Gossip. 
 
 To that end in our “Good News Period” the 
 church is trained to bring to that period all 
 the good news it can find in the church, on the 
 streets, in the papers. Cora Harris in one of 
 her books tells about an idea she once had of 
 editing a page for the newspaper which would 
 be called “The Good News Page.” She tried 
 it out and it worked. It was so sensational 
 that it boosted circulation. She searched out 
 the husbands and wives who had lived together 
 for fifty years and had raised large families 
 and sent them out into the world; all as good 
 citizens. She published the photographs of 
 these old folks in the middle of that page and 
 wrote a good story about them. That page got 
 to be the most popular page in the newspaper. 
 It worked because it was so rare to find “Good 
 News” in the papers. 
 
 It will work in exactly that same way in the 
 “Good News Period” of a mid-week meeting. 
 
 Mr. Jones has just heard a bit of good news 
 
New Type of Personal Testimony 71 
 
 about the church: “I was riding on a street 
 car yesterday and I heard a couple of young 
 people talking about our Sunday evening church 
 service. They were planning to be here next 
 Sunday evening because they had such inspira- 
 tional times whenever they came that they said 
 they would rather come here than go to a 
 show.” | 
 
 Mrs. Johnson heard a neighbor woman say 
 that her husband, who had not been in the habit 
 of churchgoing for ten years, was coming regu- 
 larly to this church now; wouldn’t miss a Sun- 
 day evening service for anything. 
 
 Another man gets up and tells about a poor 
 family that a certain class in the Sunday school 
 helped and how grateful the family was. 
 
 Up jumps a little wiry man and says: “TI 
 never thought much of that testimony stuff they 
 used to expect of us, but I’m glad to report 
 that a fellow in the lobby of this church was 
 so pleasant with me last Sunday morning and 
 invited me to this Wednesday night meeting 
 so cordially that I’m here and I’ve enjoyed it 
 so much that I’m coming regularly, and I just 
 thought this would fit in with your ‘Good News’ 
 idea.”’ 
 
72 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 And so it goes. Some person has heard — 
 Good News about the preacher, about his ser- 
 mons, about the choir, about some solo. He 
 has heard good news about a _ neighbor 
 church. He has heard good news about some 
 Missionary enterprise. He wants to tellit. He 
 likes to tell it. 
 
 Another read a striking poem in the paper 
 that helped him spiritually and he wanted to 
 pass this “Good News’”’ on to others so he reads 
 the poem. 
 
 Another has read a good book which he 
 wants others to know about so he passes the 
 name of that good book on. 
 
 Every Wednesday evening will see this part 
 of the service full to the limit of time. A great 
 Chicago churchman visited our “mid-week” | 
 recently and said after it was over: “I liked 
 that ‘Good News’ period because tit popped 
 every minute.” 
 
 “It popped every minute” is a good descrip- 
 tion of such a meeting. There are no long- 
 drawn-out, monotonous testimonies but “It 
 pops every minute.” That is the difference. 
 One listens to these testimonies of service and 
 his spiritual self is quickened. He goes out of 
 
New Type of Personal Testimony 73 
 
 that meeting on the alert for “Good News.” 
 He wants some “Gospel” to bring to the next 
 one. There is seldom time for all who want 
 to talk. There is a sense of alertness over 
 the entire hour. That “Good News,” or “‘Gos- 
 sip” or “Gospel Period,” is the most stimulat- 
 ing part of the entire service, although we sel- 
 dom give more than ten to fifteen minutes for 
 it in one of our Sanctuary Services. 
 
 ‘This “Good News” period has a by-product 
 that is most useful. The wise preacher will 
 have a stenographer present or will himself 
 jot down the more interesting human-interest 
 things that are said and use them in his church 
 bulletin the next Sunday. 
 
 A quickening element in a church bulletin is 
 the human interest paragraph. It does not 
 need to be a “personal item” like newspapers 
 run, but an actual quotation from this “Good 
 News” that comes on Wednesday evening in 
 this open talk-fest. 
 
 We publish a bulletin that goes all over 
 America in a paid subscription list of five hun- 
 dred. It is full every week of human-interest 
 paragraphs which I glean from this “Good 
 News Period’ in the Sanctuary Service., The 
 
74 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 people read it with great eagerness because of 
 that human-interest material with which its 
 pages throb every Sunday. 
 
 Personally I believe that this type of testi- 
 mony is more vital and more deeply spiritual 
 than the other kind and I have taken part 
 in, and listened to, both kinds. I have been 
 working this “Good News” in mid-week serv- 
 ices for six years and it grows stronger, more 
 practical, and more spiritual every week. It 
 is a tried and tested method. I believe that 
 it is the method for this day and for this 
 generation. 
 
 The old day when a mid-week meeting was 
 judged by how many testified and how many 
 prayed is gone. It is not how many pray or 
 how many testify that judges a good or a bad 
 meeting to-day but it is what they say and 
 what sort of a spiritual atmosphere and quick- 
 ening that “Good News” produces in the hearts 
 of men. 
 
 In the next chapter I shall briefly discuss the 
 informality of this new type of a mid-week 
 meeting; and how to produce it and still retain 
 the spiritual values. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LInformality of the Mid-Week 
 Meeting and How to Produce It 
 
 The Prayer Meeting of other days was for- 
 midable. 
 
 It was forbidding and children were awed 
 by it. Young people were bored by it, and 
 consequently did not attend unless they were 
 forced to go. 
 
 Most American meetings of a secular sort 
 in colleges, in high schools and elsewhere have 
 a certain amount of democratic informality. 
 
 I believe that the mid-week meeting should 
 be informal, without losing its spiritual dignity. 
 
 The two Sunday services are formal enough 
 to serve that need of humanity. In fact my 
 program has a place for only one formal, 
 stately, dignified service and that is in the 
 morning of a Sabbath Day. In the evening I 
 have always made my service informal and 
 
 popular, and I have always had great throngs 
 75 
 
76 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 at these Sunday evening services, also I have 
 had more accessions to the church from this 
 evening service than I have had from the more 
 formal morning service. 
 
 This is due to the fact that, with the more 
 popular and informal evening service, I have 
 always reached the unchurched people. My 
 appeals for Christ and the church, therefore, 
 have fallen on ears that were in need of the 
 church and out of the church. Those who 
 attend the more formal morning services have 
 always been the old and regular church mem- 
 bers. 
 
 It is for this reason that I believe that the 
 successful modern mid-week meeting must be 
 informal. 
 
 To that end the first difference I make in 
 the Sunday services and the mid-week service 
 is to eliminate formal dress. I wear a busi- 
 ness suit. I get closer to my people in this 
 way. It is more of a “Family Night” when 
 I dress in that manner. People feel more at 
 home and so do I. 
 
 The second thing that we do to make the 
 meeting informal is to have the preacher stand 
 down on the main floor in front of the altar 
 
Informality of Mid-Week Meeting 77 — 
 
 rather than in the pulpit. He thereby puts 
 himself down on a level with his people. They 
 like this feature. It makes this meeting differ- 
 ent from both Sunday services and that is well. 
 It makes it even more informal than the popular 
 Sunday evening service, and that also is as it 
 should be. 
 
 I have always stood before a small desk on 
 the floor of the church auditorium throughout 
 the entire service, never sitting down, always 
 on my feet, always directing everything that 
 goes on in that service; always keeping a hand 
 on the emotional waves that throb through that 
 sacred hour. 
 
 The third thing that I do to make this meet- 
 ing informal is to have a “Billy Sunday Big 
 Sing.” I give it that name to make it sound 
 informal. I select these hymns myself, and 
 most carefully, before the service. I shall speak 
 of this more in detail in the twelfth chapter 
 of this book. 
 
 I never leave anything to chance in this meet- 
 ing from beginning to end. I do not want any- 
 body to feel that it has not been carefully and 
 prayerfully planned for. I want it to be infor- 
 mal but not slipshod. I make just as careful 
 
78 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 preparation for the informality of this hour as 
 I do for either Sunday service. That is where 
 many of us preachers fall down into failure. 
 We do not take this mid-week meeting seriously 
 and neither does anybody else if we do not. I 
 spend all of Wednesday morning planning every 
 detail of this informal meeting. 
 
 I myself direct this “Big Sing.” I have a 
 piano and an organ, and sometimes a cornet in 
 addition, to help me lead it. I also have from 
 one to two song-leaders who actually stand up 
 informally in front of the crowd and lead the 
 singing, but I myself direct it, announce the 
 hymns, tell that crowd how I want them to sing 
 the hymns. I do that because I want a certain 
 unified effect to be produced and everything 
 must work to that end. 
 
 As I direct this “Big Sing’ I walk down 
 among the people; up one aisle and down an- 
 other. I see a strange face here and one there. 
 I shake hands if I can. I smile a greeting to 
 those who are so far inside the seats that I can- 
 not shake hands. I see a young man or a boy. 
 I want him to know that I am especially aware 
 of his presence and that I am glad he is there. 
 I see a lonely face in that crowd and I shake 
 
Informality of Mid-Week Meeting 79 
 
 hands with that man or woman. I may not 
 even get a chance to talk, but a handclasp will 
 tell a lot to alonely man or woman. I walk up 
 and down the aisle of my church while people 
 are singing so that my going and coming will 
 not attract a lot of attention. People like to get 
 close up to a preacher if that preacher interests 
 them at all. 
 
 I’m not much to look at but I like people. I 
 have had hundreds say to me, “TI like your go- 
 ing up and down the aisles of the church. Even 
 if you don’t speak to me; just a smile; just to 
 know that you are passing by helps. I look for- 
 ward to the moment in the service when you 
 walk up and down.” 
 
 I do not know that all preachers can do this. 
 It must be done naturally or it will seem stilted, 
 stiff, and melodramatic. But I offer it to those 
 who can do it naturally as a good way to make 
 a mid-week meeting informal, friendly, home- 
 like, and heart-warming. 
 
 Joseph Parker said, “If I had my ministry to 
 live over again I would preach more to broken - 
 hearts.” 
 
 He was right. Every crowd has a good many 
 broken hearts in it. We know of only a few of 
 
80 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 them. They come to a Sanctuary Service be- 
 cause they need help. 
 
 I was walking through my crowd this week— 
 the week I write this chapter. I was reaching 
 out here and there shaking hands. I came to 
 one of my most prominent business men, a man 
 of wealth and power inthe community. I didn’t 
 think that he needed my poor feeble friendship 
 very much and I was about to pass him by when 
 I noticed a lonely, stricken look in his face. I 
 reached out my hand, with that instinctive elec- 
 trical outpouring of sympathy that we human 
 beings may sometimes have. The tears came 
 into his eyes. I said, “Stop and see me a min- 
 ute after the meeting.” He said, “TI will, thank 
 you!” 
 
 Hecame. I had not heard the dreadful news 
 that his partner had that very afternoon com- 
 mitted suicide. He had been with that man for 
 fifteen years and loved him like a brother. It 
 meant a terrible upheaval in his business life. 
 It had wrenched the very foundations of his 
 life. I would likely not have caught that man 
 in his most dreadful hour of need if I had not 
 been walking down among my people. I would 
 
Informality of Mid-Week Meeting 8! 
 
 have heard in a day or two, but when he needed 
 me was at that very hour. 
 
 Informality does not mean foolishness. A 
 Sanctuary Service is no place for clownishness, 
 nor for tricks. It is a deeply consecrated hour 
 to do the weary souls of men and women good; 
 to get them closer to God; to lift them out of 
 their troubles and make them forget. It is an 
 hour devoted to the sublime spiritual task of 
 giving them new strength for the battle of life. 
 It is a midway point between Sabbaths which 
 all men and women need. 
 
 In the next chapter I want to talk about that 
 special feature—service at least once each 
 month to add variety to the mid-week meeting 
 and to give your crowd a chance to hear an out- 
 side voice, preferably a preacher. This, to my 
 way of thinking, is vitally important. 
 
CuHapter VII 
 
 Once a Month Feature Service 
 
 for the Mid-Week Meeting 
 
 Once a month in this most successful mid- 
 week service one ought to have an outside 
 voice. 
 
 I try to bring the best preachers of America 
 to my people. 
 
 It is possible to get them on Wednesday eve- 
 nings but not on Sunday. A great preacher will 
 not want to leave his church on the Sabbath 
 but he will leave now and then on Wednesday 
 evening. 
 
 This gives a variety and a sense of impor- 
 tance to the mid-week meeting that it has not 
 had before. If you consider it important enough 
 to invite the great bishops, preachers and pub- 
 lic speakers of America to address it, your peo- 
 ple will consider it important. 
 
 I am aware of the fact that small churches 
 
 cannot scour all America to get speakers, but 
 82 
 
Once a Month Feature Service 83 
 
 they can get speakers of note from their town, 
 and county and state. 
 
 I finance this by taking a collection every 
 Wednesday night. 
 
 There is no reason to feel shy about this. 
 People are glad to pay for something that is 
 worth while, and if you let it be understood that 
 this weekly collection goes into a fund to im- 
 prove that very meeting and to provide this 
 once-a-month outside speaker they will be glad 
 to contribute. This also makes the mid-week 
 meeting different. Ordinarily a collection is 
 not taken at a Prayer Hour—but why not? 
 
 We average about $25 a week in this collec- 
 tion. That makes a fund of a hundred dollars 
 a month. One hundred dollars a month will do 
 a great deal toward getting outside speakers. 
 In addition to this source of income, on the night 
 that the outside speaker appears the collection 
 will double itself according to our experience, so 
 you really have $125 to $150 a month in your 
 Prayer Meeting collection fund. 
 
 In lieu of a speaker for this meeting I often 
 have a religious pageant at that once-a-month 
 meeting. My organized classes put these page- 
 ants on and they are very valuable spiritually as 
 
84 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 well as in other ways. They are valuable spirit- 
 ually to the young people who put them on. On 
 the night that a certain organized class puts a 
 pageant on, that class is very likely to attend 
 the mid-week meeting in a body through a 
 sense of class-pride. And always many get in 
 the habit of attending regularly in that way. 
 
 I have never yet seen a single pageant of this 
 kind put on that the effect on the Wednesday 
 evening audience was not profoundly and beau- 
 tifully spiritual. JI have stood in all parts of 
 the audience and have watched the deep impres- 
 sion these religious pageants make on people. 
 Even the most simple presentation of the life of 
 Christ and of the scenes in the Bible impress 
 people when these scenes are presented in tab- 
 leau or in picture form. 
 
 One pageant which the Criterion Class of 
 Linwood Boulevard Church put on was as sim- 
 ple as it could be. It was the story of Christ’s 
 life presented in picture form. The stage set- 
 ting was simply a large frame, like a picture- 
 frame. This setting was put on the pulpit, with 
 the organ console directly back of the frame 
 and a curtain between the frame and the organ. 
 The organist played the old hymns of the 
 
Once a Month Feature Service 85 
 
 church which were appropriate to the various 
 scenes in the Life of Christ. 
 
 For instance, when the Bethlehem scene in 
 the manger was presented, ‘Silent Night” was 
 played softly and a girl in the wings sang that 
 old and beautiful hymn. The effect was 
 magical. 
 
 In the Gethsemane scene, which was nothing 
 more or less than a human reproduction of the 
 Hofmann painting, “Alas, and Did My Savior 
 Bleed!” was the hymn, and in the scene where 
 Jesus is gathering little children to him “I 
 Should Like to Have Been with Him Then’ 
 was played softly, and sung. 
 
 This simple production, which can be staged 
 by any church, large or small, with simple cos- 
 tumes, and an inexpensive stage-setting, will 
 produce one of the most spiritual atmospheres I 
 have ever seen in a Prayer Hour. 
 
 When I inquired where my young people got 
 the costumes I learned that most of what looked 
 like shepherd and angel costumes were old 
 bath robes, white dresses and simple things, 
 which, under the colored lights, appeared to be 
 costumes made by the most expert costumers of 
 the city. 
 
! 
 
 86 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 The toal cost of this particular production of 
 “The Life of Christ’ in pictures was twelve 
 dollars and the collection on that night under 
 the mellowing spiritual influence of that beauti- 
 ful portrayal was close to fifty dollars. 
 
 I like to have one evening devoted to what my 
 friend Dr. Nelson Pace calls “Poetry which 
 Preaches.” On this evening [ take the poem of 
 a great poet, like Edwin Markham’s “How the 
 Great Guest Came,” “The Shoes of Happiness’’ 
 or some other poem which really preaches, and 
 give an evening to the spiritual interpretation 
 of this poet and his poetry. Youcan have some- 
 body read some of the briefer poems of this 
 writer. You can have somebody sing some of 
 this writer’s poetry which is often put to music. 
 You can often have the poet himself appear. 
 Then you have the half hour for your own mes- 
 sage from “Poetry which Preaches.” 
 
 In “Pictures which Preach” you can do the 
 same thing. You get a copy of Hofmann’s 
 Gethsemane for illustration. You put it up in 
 your Prayer-Hour room, and focus a spotlight 
 on it during the prayer period. Then you 
 preach on that picture. 
 
 These once-a-month Feature Services get 
 
Once a Month Feature Service 87 
 
 many people in the habit of attending the Sanc- 
 tuary Service who otherwise might not be at- 
 tracted, even by such an alluring type of a mod- 
 ern service as I am trying to set forth in this 
 book. I have seen hundreds of people get their 
 start by attending one of these special once-a- 
 month Feature Services on Wednesday eve- 
 nings and become habitual attendants. 
 
 Another way to increase attendance, and 
 make habitual attendance probable, is that 
 “Group Night Plan” which we have worked out, 
 and which I shall discuss in the next chapter. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Group Nights at the Mid-Week 
 Meeting 
 
 The first thing that a preacher must do to re- 
 make the mid-week meeting is to build up mo- 
 rale among his church members for that meet- 
 ing. 
 
 He must teach the church to hold that night 
 sacred. 
 
 If he does not take this thing seriously he can- 
 not expect the church to take it seriously. 
 
 It may take a little time, but I have seen such 
 a morale developed in a church that a group 
 would as soon think of having something else 
 at the hour of the Prayer Meeting on Wednes- 
 day as they would think of scheduling a dance 
 on Sunday morning. 
 
 A church is nearly always willing to cooper- 
 ate with a preacher who takes this Wednesday 
 evening meeting seriously. If he proposes to 
 
Group Nights at Mid-Week Meeting 89 
 
 the various church organizations that they re- 
 frain from scheduling other meetings between 
 the hours of 6:30 and 8:30 on Wednesday eve- 
 ning I believe that he will find them eager to 
 help preserve those hours sacredly. 
 
 The first thing the minister must do in this 
 propaganda of education is to make the church 
 understand that this is a great spiritual hour. 
 He must make the church constituency under- 
 stand that seven days between spiritual refresh- 
 ment is a long time; that the church needs the 
 Spiritual impetus which this meeting can give 
 and that that hour is set aside for no small 
 thing. He must make his church group feel 
 that, in his eyes, that Wednesday night meeting 
 is just as important, just as sacred as either of 
 the Sunday services. 
 
 If he himself takes this hour in that serious 
 way, if he himself prepares his sermons for this 
 Wednesday evening meeting just as carefully as 
 he prepares his Sunday sermons; if he himself 
 advertises this meeting just as seriously, then he 
 can go to the church and ask the church to re- 
 frain from scheduling other meetings at this 
 hour. 
 
 Let there be a general slogan in the church 
 
90 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 life: “Nothing Else on Wednesday Evening but 
 the Sanctuary Service.” 
 
 Then come your Group-Night plans. 
 
 Every church, large and small, has in it or- 
 ganized classes. These will be an Adult Bible 
 Class, a Boy Scout Group, a Criterion Class 
 made up of young people of both sexes; a Win- 
 some Class, made up of young married people, a 
 Mothers’ Class, made up of the young mothers 
 of the church. 
 
 In order to interest each one of these groups 
 of the church in the Sanctuary Service it will 
 be helpful to have a month or two of what I 
 call Group Nights in the Prayer Meeting. Call 
 these Group Nights by the name of the groups 
 which are to be special guests on the various 
 evenings. For instance, recently, we had the 
 Criterion Class of Linwood Boulevard give a 
 beautiful pageant of Christ’s Life in the Prayer 
 Hour. I took this opporunity of inviting the 
 Criterion Class as a group to attend the mid- 
 week meeting. Fifty of them came. It was 
 their night. I always find that following such 
 a special Group Night many of the various 
 groups get interested and become regular at- 
 tendants at the Prayer Hour. 
 
Group Nights at Mid-Week Meeting 91 
 
 I learned this lesson through the Group 
 Nights which for years I have planned for the 
 Sunday night services. For years I have been 
 having International Night, Masonic Night, 
 Odd Fellows’ Night, Lion’s Club Night, Rotary 
 Night, etc. I have learned, through experience, 
 that, from each one of these nights, when these 
 organizations come in a body as our “Guests of 
 Honor,” many of them get into the church- 
 going habit and become regular attendants. I 
 have never had a Masonic Night that I have not 
 seen, as a direct result of each of these special 
 nights, several regular attendants and new 
 members come into the church. 
 
 So it is with these Group Nights within the 
 church organization. It serves to interest cer- 
 tain individuals who never attend the Prayer 
 Hour in becoming regular attendants. It al- 
 ways works in this way. From each of these 
 Prayer Hour Group Nights we see a few new 
 attendants at the Prayer Service. This nucleus 
 naturally attracts others and, before long, you 
 will find a large proportion of these various 
 groups attending the mid-week meeting. They 
 will hardly know just how they got interested, 
 but if you yourself get to talking with them and 
 
92 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 will trace it back you will learn that hundreds 
 started in the first attendance at Prayer Service 
 of their particular class. 
 
 I have not attempted to extend this Group- 
 Night idea outside of the church organization. 
 It is my idea that the mid-week meeting should 
 be confined to the church membership and be- 
 come in the truest sense of that phrase a “Fam- 
 ily Night.” There is no distinctive Family 
 Night in the whole church schedule save this 
 one on Wednesday night. In the modern 
 church, run on efficiency lines, the Sunday serv- 
 ices are more or less crowded with strangers 
 and outsiders. . There is no chance to get ac- 
 quainted with each other within the church 
 membership. Let us keep this mid-week hour 
 sacred for the Family of the church. 
 
 I always ask my choir director to have his 
 practice with his choir on Wednesday evenings. 
 The choir has to practice one night, and it is 
 just as easy to make it Wednesday evening as 
 Friday evening. They usually start to practice 
 about eight or eight-thirty, so this coming on 
 Wednesday evening does not, in any way, take 
 any more time. And it does serve to centralize 
 the life of the mid-week church meeting on 
 
Group Nights at Mid-Week Meeting 93 
 
 Wednesday evening. This is just an additional 
 step towards that centralization, and it is an ex- 
 ceedingly important step, I can assure you. 
 
 This gives you the additional asset of the 
 presence of the choir at the church mid-week 
 meeting. You can have special music then with- 
 out any great additional burden to your choir 
 or to the leader. The right kind of a leader will 
 be glad to do this. He will be willing to help and 
 serve in any way that he can. The right kind 
 of a choir will also feel the same way about it. 
 Besides, there is the additional attraction of a 
 bright, happy evening. 
 
 I give my choir something to do in the “Big 
 Sing.” 
 
 I call on individuals to “sing a verse’ of a 
 certain hymn, while the congregation joins in on 
 the chorus. 
 
 I get four of them up and organize on the spot 
 extemporaneous quartets. Then I ask two of 
 them to sing a duet. They like it. There is the 
 spice of uncertainty and informality about it. 
 I ask those who are not usually asked to sing 
 solos in the Sunday service to sing a verse of 
 some old, familiar hymn alone. I give the choir 
 something to do and make them help me in the 
 
94 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 singing at that mid-week meeting. This-adds 
 one additional popular value to the mid-week 
 meeting. | 
 
 In addition to asking the choir to have its 
 weekly practice on Wednesday evening I also 
 hold all Official Board Meetings on Wednesday. 
 I thereby interest the members of the Official 
 Board in this mid-week service and that in itself 
 is anachievement. However, asa result of this 
 system, I can honestly say that in two churches, 
 for six years I have had at least ninety per cent 
 of my Official Board present at the mid-week 
 service. 
 
 I say to them: “You are busy men and I do 
 not see any reason why I should ask you to come 
 out two evenings, one for the Board meeting 
 and one for the Prayer Meeting. So we will 
 save a night for you and have the regular 
 monthly Official Board Meeting following 
 Prayer Service. That is the time we usually 
 begin the Official Board Meetings anyhow.” 
 
 The result is that the Official Board gets into 
 the habit of attending the Prayer Meeting and 
 they come regularly in a few months. 
 
 I also ask the Sunday School Board to have 
 its regular meeting following the Prayer Hour 
 
Group Nights at Mid-Week Meeting 95 
 
 on the second Wednesday of each month, and 
 for the same reason. This naturally gets each 
 teacher in the Sunday School interested in the 
 mid-week Prayer Hour and this is a great asset, 
 both for the teachers themselves and for the 
 Prayer Service. 
 
 But most important of all is getting a church 
 into the habit of scheduling all committee meet- 
 ings for Wednesday evenings after the Prayer 
 Service. Every active church has literally hun- 
 dreds of committee meetings. If the preacher 
 can get a morale established in a church, or a 
 habit established that all committee meetings 
 come on Wednesday evenings following the 
 Prayer Hour, he has added a great asset to that 
 mid-week service. 
 
 Personally I have not found this a difficult 
 task. We are all gregarious animals and we 
 like to meet with our kind. 
 
 I believe that the great secret of success in the 
 attendance on the mid-week meeting is in a 
 centralization of the life of the church on 
 Wednesday evening. 
 
 Plan everything you have authority over for 
 that night. Ask the church leaders to help you 
 to establish this centralization in the church. A 
 
96 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 few months of this type of centralization will 
 see your Prayer Hour grow up by leaps into a 
 gathering that will, as in our case, require the 
 main auditorium of the church for its meeting 
 place. 
 
 In the next chapter I wish briefly to review 
 the “Food, Faith and Fun” features of this 
 mid-week meeting, in spite of the fact that I 
 have already covered this particular contribu- 
 tion in my book, “Standing Room Only.” I 
 make no particular apologies for this rewrite 
 because there are constantly changes and new 
 ideas coming up in an active ministry. Each 
 new church adds new features to an old idea. I 
 think that my readers will find the next chapter 
 will be necessary to complete a full-rounded dis- 
 cussion of the mid-week meeting of to-day. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 The °‘ Food, Faith and Fun’’ 
 Features of the Mid-Week 
 Meeting 
 
 As I have said in a preceding chapter on a 
 new name for the mid-week meeting, this 
 “Food, Faith and Fun Night” has also been 
 called “The Food, Faith and Frolic Night,” 
 “The Food, Faith and Friendship Night,” and 
 other names. 
 
 However, all of these new names encompass 
 the real meaning of the new type of a mid-week 
 service. 
 
 That is: They indicate in the very name itself 
 that the evening will consist of physical food, of 
 spiritual food and of social food. 
 
 The schedule of a “Food, Faith and Fun 
 Night” should run about like this: 
 
 (1) Supper, 6:00 to 7:00. This is the 
 “Food” part. 
 
 97 
 
98 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 (2) Prayer, 7:00 to 8:00. This is the 
 “Faith” part. 
 
 (3) Play, 8:00 to 10:00. This is the 
 “Fun” part. 
 
 The heart of such a mid-week meeting should 
 consist of these three distinct features. They 
 encompass the meeting. 
 
 I have had the experience of seeing the 
 women of a church in their “Circles of Service” 
 serve from three to five hundred people regu- 
 larly, year in and year out, from six to seven, 
 with everybody through their generous supper 
 and up in the Prayer Room by 6:45, ready to 
 start the meeting with fifteen or ten minutes 
 of a preliminary “Big Sing.” This was true 
 at St. Marks in Detroit and it is now true in 
 Linwood Boulevard Methodist Church in Kan- 
 sas City, Mo. 
 
 In neither of these two large churches have 
 I ever known a single Prayer Hour to be de- 
 layed a minute because everybody was not 
 served and through within the hour allotted to 
 this part of the “Food, Faith and Fun Night.” 
 
 I am often asked the question: “Do you find 
 it possible to serve large groups of people with- 
 
“Food, Faith, and Fun” Features 99 
 
 in the hour and not have confusion about peo- 
 ple straggling into the Prayer Meeting late?’ 
 
 My answer is that such a thing has never 
 happened in my ministry. The “Food” part 
 of this schedule can be so carefully arranged 
 that the whole thing will run like well-oiled ma- 
 chinery. 
 
 At St. Marks the Circle that was to serve the 
 supper on Wednesday evening was in the 
 kitchen early in the morning. Their menu had 
 been published in the Bulletin the Sabbath be- 
 fore. Everybody knew what was coming. The 
 women in that particular “Circle of Service” 
 had their work planned for the day. Two 
 women were scheduled to peel the potatoes. 
 Two other women were assigned the task of 
 cooking the meat. Two others each Wednes- 
 day were allotted the task of getting the dessert 
 ready. Five or six were given the task of serv- 
 ing at the Cafeteria tables. The dinner was 
 dished on one plate and ready. One woman sold 
 tickets at the far end of the Gymnasium, and a 
 line formed at the windows for service. As this 
 line passed in front of the windows the plates 
 were ready without delay, and the people car- 
 ried their full plates to any table which they 
 liked. 
 
100 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 The pastors do not eat on Wednesday eve- 
 ning. They go about from table to table greet- 
 ing their members, sitting a moment at this table 
 and that one. This gives a preacher an oppor- 
 tunity of meeting and greeting his people in a 
 way that is invaluable. He can eat his dinner 
 after the evening is over just as he does on 
 Sunday nights, if he is a wise Shepherd of his 
 flock and really seriously desires to meet and 
 talk with them about the Family Table. 
 
 I have always said that this mid-week type 
 of a meeting is simply following the Master’s 
 favorite method of getting at people. He al- 
 ways cured their ailments, fed their bodies and 
 looked after their physical wants first and then 
 preached to them and tended to their social and 
 their spiritual needs. The immortal stories of 
 the Loaves and Fishes, the story of the Pluck- 
 ing of Corn, the Wedding Feast, even that beau- 
 tiful Last Supper, illustrate what I mean. It is 
 my belief that the way the Master worked with 
 people is the best way even in this hurried day. 
 
 The “Food, Faith and Fun” night is merely 
 an adaptation of the Master’s method of deal- 
 ing with people. 
 
 It is a curious and a well-tried psychological 
 
“Food, Faith, and Fun” Features 101 
 
 fact that business men find their prospective 
 customers in a better frame of mind to talk 
 business when they have been satisfied physi- 
 cally. This has led toa development of the idea 
 of doing business in modern America over the 
 lunch-table. Some business man who ought to 
 know says that one-half of the business of the 
 United States is done over the lunch-table these 
 days. 
 
 People are the same about religion. A well- 
 fed body is a body that is ready to sit down and 
 enjoy spiritual things. Jesus knew that right 
 well, and therefore he cared for their bodies, 
 and fed their stomachs before he attempted to 
 preach to them. 
 
 In challenging my women to their part of this 
 service I call their attention to the fact that they 
 are carrying out the plan of Jesus when they 
 feed men and women; that this was Christ’s 
 plan, and that they are doing a practical and a 
 vital thing when they are willing to provide the 
 physical food in order that the preacher may 
 provide the spiritual food for great crowds of 
 people on Wednesday evenings. 
 
 It is no small task for various groups of 
 women to keep this work up through the years; 
 
102 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 this menial task of cooking food, washing dishes 
 and serving people over greasy stoves, and 
 smelly food. I always thrill to this story of the 
 willingness of women to service. I look back 
 upon five years of this kind of service in St. 
 Marks with the deepest sense of admiration for 
 several hundred women, many of whom had 
 servants in their own homes, who were willing 
 to cook and wash dishes for the Lord. 
 
 In the church that I serve at the present time 
 a chef does the work and gets what profits there 
 are. However, I am frank to say that this takes 
 away a vital touch of personal service which I 
 miss greatly. I am also frank to say that the 
 absence of women in the kitchen takes away 
 that homey touch which I like. I am also forced 
 to say, for the help of my preacher readers, that 
 the presence of women in the kitchen gives a 
 much better variety to the menu than a profes- 
 sional chef. I advise, by all means, when it is 
 possible, and the women of a church care 
 enough about the spiritual life of a church to do 
 this service work for the mid-week meeting, to 
 have the women of the church do it. 
 
 The profit on such a Wednesday evening 
 supper, when it is sold for forty cents a supper, 
 
“Food, Faith, and Fun” Features 103 
 
 and from four to five hundred attend regularly, 
 is about twenty per cent, and this means a good 
 deal of money for a Ladies’ Aid Society in a 
 year. 
 
 It is hard work for the women of a church 
 but it is soul-satisfying service for the Master. 
 
 The “Faith” part of the “Food, Faith and 
 Fun Night” of course is the spiritual part of 
 the evening. In St. Marks this part consisted 
 of the five Prayer Meetings that ran every year 
 for four years. These meetings were graded 
 and I shall discuss the graded features of this 
 plan in the next chapter, because I think that it 
 is of enough importance to devote a chapter to. 
 It is also an absolutely original contribution 
 which I have had the honor to make to this new 
 mid-week meeting in the life of the church of 
 Christ. 
 
 The “Fun,” or “The Frolic,” or the “Friend- 
 ship” part of the evening can be organized in 
 various ways. 
 
 For several years in St. Marks we had mass 
 play. The various members of our staff organ- 
 ized the various groups into play. There were 
 eight or ten rooms available for this play. 
 There were Bowling Alleys which were always 
 
104 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 going in full blast and there was the big Gym 
 Floor for Indoor Base Ball games, and indoor 
 tennis. There were schedules and tournaments 
 of Fats, Slims, Red-Heads, Black-Heads, Old 
 Folks, Young Folks, and various other Class 
 Groups. There were Spelling Bees, Big Sings 
 and Games of every sort in this “Fun” period. 
 
 During the last two years of my ministry in 
 St. Marks we introduced a motion picture 
 schedule for the “Play” period of the mid-week 
 meeting. Jam frank to say that I do not believe 
 that this succeeded as well as the mass play 
 did. People do not get so close together in a 
 picture play period as they do on a gym floor 
 playing, yelling, laughing, and exercising. 
 Since I have left St. Marks, Dr. Thomas and 
 his staff have gone back to the old mass play 
 periods, which is better. 
 
 In the next chapter I shall not only discuss 
 the Graded Idea as we introduced it into the 
 mid-week meeting but I shall also discuss the 
 Educational features that ought to have a place 
 in every well-organized and serious-purposed 
 Family or Church Night meeting. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 The Graded Features and the 
 
 Educational Program 
 
 IT have not had the honor of contributing 
 many absolutely new church methods. I do not 
 claim to have done so. Most of the methods 
 which I have advocated in my books are meth- 
 ods which I have learned and adapted from 
 other men. 
 
 However I do claim originality, as much as 
 any man can claim originality for anything, in 
 the invention of the Revolving Cross, the Prayer 
 Cross, the Dramatic Book Sermon, the Drama 
 Sermon, the Symphonic Sermon and the Graded 
 Prayer Meeting. 
 
 We were forced to a Graded Prayer Meet- 
 ing at St. Marks in Detroit. The Prayer Meet- 
 ing plan which we had developed brought the 
 entire family to the church supper at six o’clock. 
 That meant that the children of all ages, as well 
 as mother and father, were there to remain for 
 
 the evening. 
 105 
 
106 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 The only available room outside of the audi- 
 torium was overflowing. I noticed that a third 
 of that audience was made up of children. I 
 knew that it was impossible for any man to give 
 a sermon that would interest the fathers and 
 mothers; and, at the same time, interest the 
 children. 
 
 Then I worked out a plan for two meetings. 
 There was to be an adult meeting and a chil- 
 dren’s meeting. After a few months it became 
 necessary to grade these groups further and we 
 developed four different grades: Adult, High 
 School, Junior and Intermediate groups, follow- 
 ing the same system of grading as the Sun- 
 day School has had in use for years. 
 
 Later we added the Primary Group, due to 
 the fact that the younger fathers and mothers 
 who didn’t want to miss that Family Night 
 brought their wee babies. We often had, and 
 they still have at St. Marks, thirty and forty 
 babies. I wanted those babies taken care of so 
 that at that Prayer Hour they would actually 
 get some kind of a spiritual message, so we had 
 story-telling teachers, who were experts in this 
 line. 
 
 This Graded Prayer Meeting has been going 
 
Features and Educational Program 107 
 
 in St. Marks for four years and during the last 
 year it has been going stronger than ever. 
 
 One evening a Detroit clergyman came to 
 speak before my adult Prayer Group and got 
 lost on the way coming through the building. 
 Finally, after stopping to see two of our meet- 
 ings he at last reached the group which he had 
 been invited to address. He later said that he 
 “had to wade through three Prayer Meetings 
 to get to the one that he was to speak before.” 
 
 Each one of these five Graded Groups had a 
 similar program for its service. The first part 
 of that program consisted of the “Big Sing.” I 
 have learned that singing is one thing that all 
 ages have in common; and that children get as 
 much joy out of lustily singing as the old folks. 
 It was, therefore, a common and an exhilarat- 
 ing experience to hear all over that great church 
 the various Graded Groups singing the old 
 hymns. 
 
 There is a real spiritual education in the sing- 
 ing of the old hymns of the church. The pres- 
 ent generation knows too little of the old hymns. 
 One of the richest spiritual heritages that the 
 church and the home of yesterday handed down 
 to us was a knowledge of the old hymns. The 
 
108 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 present jazz and ragtime craze has robbed the 
 children of to-day of this heritage to a great ex- 
 tent. Few children of to-day will ever hear the 
 old hymns sung in their homes by their fathers 
 and mothers as we did. 
 
 One of the most beautiful memories some of 
 us have is the memory of standing about an old- 
 fashioned organ singing the old hymns with 
 mother or father pumping away and leading 
 us. That is a beautiful twilight memory which 
 I shall carry on into Eternity with me. The 
 children of this day and age do not hear the old 
 hymns sung in their homes, and they are liter- 
 ally bombarded by jazz everywhere else they 
 go. Therefore, if the church does not teach 
 them the old hymns, and teach them to sing 
 these old hymns, they will lose this rich spiritual 
 inheritance. 
 
 Therefore a serious part of the educational 
 program of these five Graded Prayer Meetings 
 was and is to teach each group the beautiful and 
 sacred old hymns. 
 
 After this “Big Sing” in each Prayer Group 
 the leader developed his meeting to suit him- 
 self and the needs of his auditors. The Asso- 
 ciate Pastor, Mr. Jack Meredith, took the High 
 
Features and Educational Program 109 
 
 School Group. The third group, the Juniors, 
 was handled by the Deaconess. The fourth 
 group, or Intermediates, by two preachers’ 
 wives; and the Primary Group by one of the 
 women of the church who was and is an expert 
 story-teller. 
 
 The Sunday School worker is always asking 
 why this “Church Night” should not be turned 
 into an Educational Evening. I have hearty 
 sympathy with that idea and feel that an edu- 
 cational program ought to be adopted as a part 
 of the midwinter schedule in this type of a 
 Family Night. However, I think that it ought 
 to be a part of the Prayer Hour and that it 
 ought not to drag over into the “Fun” part of 
 the evening. 
 
 In case there is a group of teachers who 
 would like to have a Normal Class in Religious 
 Education, that class could be set aside as a 
 separate group at the time that the other meet- 
 ings are going on. Indeed, I believe that this 
 would be a good thing to do. 
 
 An expert teacher could be secured and this 
 group turned over to that teacher as an addi- 
 tional group in that Wednesday evening 
 “Faith” period. If a complication arose, and 
 
110 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 the teachers did not care to leave the inspiration 
 of the Adult Prayer Meeting, it could be ar- 
 ranged to have this Normal Class for Sunday 
 School teachers and parents at the hour running 
 from 8 to 9, while the recreational program was 
 going on in another part of the church. The 
 two would not interfere in the least. 
 
 This grading of the Prayer Meeting gives it 
 a unique appeal to the various groups which are 
 reached. Children like to speak of “Our Prayer 
 Meeting.” ‘They have a sense of pride in their 
 own group just as a Junior Church takes pride 
 initsgroup. Wecalled the High School Prayer 
 Meeting “The High School Club.” However, 
 it was a Prayer Meeting in the truest sense of 
 that word. Giving that group the name that we 
 gave it, instead of calling it a Prayer Meeting, 
 took away some of the atmosphere of the old- 
 time Prayer Meeting. It made the High School 
 group less timid about attending. There were 
 often as many as 150 in this High School Club 
 Prayer Hour. 
 
 In the next chapter I shall discuss another 
 essential feature of this mid-week meeting; that 
 of advertising. I am convinced that the atti- 
 tude on the part of the preacher which will as- 
 
Features and Educational Program 111 
 
 sure the success of this mid-week meeting will 
 be an attitude which makes the church at large 
 feel that the preacher himself considers this the 
 most important meeting in the church. They 
 will not feel that the preacher considers this in 
 that light if he advertises the Sunday services 
 and does not advertise the mid-week service. 
 Therefore it is highly important that this mid- 
 week meeting gets its full share of publicity 
 from some source if it is to be the type of a 
 meeting that it ought to be. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 Advertising This Remade Mid- 
 Week Meeting 
 
 The church must feel that you the preacher 
 consider this a very important hour. 
 
 They will look upon it as important to the 
 exact degree that you the preacher give it em- 
 phasis in a new way. 
 
 The old way used to be for the preacher to 
 say on Sunday morning: “We will have the 
 usual mid-week meeting next Wednesday at 
 seven-thirty. I hope that a large number of 
 people will find it possible to attend this meet- 
 ing.” 
 
 That was the end of the publicity that that 
 poor mid-week meeting received. That was all 
 the attention it got. Consequently the people 
 of the average church did not take that meeting 
 very seriously. 
 
 In the first place this mid-week meeting 
 112 
 
Advertising Mid-Week Meeting 113 
 
 must get a lot of attention in the Church Bulle- 
 tin. I have just looked over the church bulletins 
 in two of my churches for six years and I find 
 that my Wednesday night meeting has an aver- 
 age of five separate paragraphs per Bulletin de- 
 voted to it. I quote from my most recent Bulle- 
 tins to show the various ways one may approach 
 this matter of publicity for the Prayer Hour 
 through the Bulletin: 
 
 (1) 
 
 “DID YOU GET YOUR SOUVENIR 
 Bulletin and Booklet of Lincoln last Wednesday 
 evening? It was distributed to those who at- 
 tended the Sanctuary Service. It had in it an 
 original Lincoln Poem and Hymn by the Pas- 
 tor, the outline of an address to be given before 
 the De Molay Boys at the Tomb of Lincoln in 
 Springfield. Five hundred were set aside for 
 
 our Prayer Meeting and they were gone in no 
 time.” 
 
 (2) 
 
 “YOUR SANCTUARY SERVICE is at- 
 tracting attention all through the church world! 
 Has it attracted your attention as yet? Last 
 
114 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 Wednesday we had several visiting clergymen. 
 They were astonished at the friendly warmth of 
 our meeting. The George H. Doran Co., pub- 
 lishers, of New York City, have asked your 
 preacher to write a book called ‘REMAKING 
 THE MID-WEEK PRAYER MEETING,’ 
 Have you visited this Sanctuary Service? Itis 
 unique, friendly, informal, spiritual, and help- 
 ful!’ 
 
 (3) 
 
 “THIS . Is A‘, YOUNG) (PE@OE aa 
 CHURCH! That is the hope and the goal of 
 the present administration. We hope that the 
 various departments and classes in the Sunday 
 School will follow the lead of several groups 
 and meet with us for supper on Wednesday 
 evenings and then attend our mid-week service. 
 It is a pleasant hour to spend together. Seven 
 or eight members of the Criterion Class knelt 
 at the church altars last Sunday. The church 
 services on Sunday and the Sanctuary Service 
 on Wednesday evening are planned with the 
 young people in mind and all of these services 
 are rapidly filling up with Youth. We are 
 happy for this spirit and this tendency.” 
 
Advertising Mid-Week Meeting 115 | 
 
 (4) 
 
 “MR. CLARK, WHO IS THE HEAD of 
 the campaign for a larger Brotherhood Class, 
 said: ‘I like the way the people hang around the 
 auditorium on Wednesday evenings and visit. 
 That is the most hopeful sign I see about thé 
 church.’ The preachers feel that way about it 
 also.” 
 
 (5) 
 
 “A NEW SERIES OF TALKS will start 
 soon in the Sanctuary Service. See the themes 
 on the Red Cards which will be issued to-day 
 and sent out in the letters.” 
 
 I selected these five quotations—all different 
 —about our mid-week meeting from the cur- 
 rent issue of our Church Bulletin. This Bulle- 
 tin was not purposely filled up to provide this 
 illustration. Any preacher who cares to can 
 read any Bulletin issued in any of my churches 
 and he will find an average of five mentions 
 made of the coming “mid-week service” with 
 as much variety as I can put into that type of 
 publicity. 
 
116 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 If the preacher advertises in a town or a city 
 newspaper he must include in that Saturday 
 space a prominent reference to his mid-week 
 meeting. This places that meeting on an equal 
 footing with the Sunday services. 
 
 IT see to it that in every Saturday church ad 
 the Sanctuary Service is given a prominent 
 place and attention that makes it stand out. I 
 get the best of results from this system. 
 
 In addition to this I advocate the buying of 
 white space in the newspapers of Wednesday 
 morning to advertise that Wednesday evening 
 meeting. I would do this particularly if I were 
 in a small town which had a “Daily.” The very 
 uniqueness of advertising the Wednesday eve- 
 ning service gives the town, the church, and the 
 city a thrill. It is unusual and he who does the 
 unusual appeals to humanity. 
 
 This space may seem to cost so much that a 
 preacher does not dare to do it, even in a small 
 town, but my experience has been that the 
 preacher who advertises attracts enough addi- 
 tional people to his services to make that ad pay 
 for itself and add additional funds to the church 
 treasury. 
 
 Advertising always pays its own way if the 
 
Advertising Mid-Week Meeting 117 
 
 preacher dares to break loose from ancient tra- 
 ditions and do the advertising. 
 
 The third way of advertising is to send out a 
 letter to the church on Monday morning, care- 
 fully prepared, telling the entire church mem- 
 bership about that Wednesday evening meeting. 
 If the letter is sent out on Tuesday morning it 
 will reach most of the people on Wednesday 
 morning and they will have a fresh reminder of 
 that Wednesday evening meeting. I believe 
 that this is one of the most effective forms of 
 publicity for the Wednesday evening meeting. 
 It works miracles with us in Linwood Boulevard 
 Methodist church and I commend the system 
 most highly to all preachers. 
 
 The Kansas City Star recently made careful 
 investigations of such business organizations as 
 Beauty Shops and institutions which made their 
 only advertising appeal to women in the Sunday 
 paper. This was the system when Beauty Shops 
 first came into existence. But a few of the wise 
 managers of these Beauty Shops learned that 
 the long haul from Sunday to Sunday needed 
 something in between to call the attention of the 
 city to these business institutions. So they 
 started to advertising on Wednesday as well 
 
118 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 ason Sunday. Business picked up instantly and 
 now the average Beauty Shop advertises every 
 day. 
 
 This paper makes the appeal to preachers 
 which [I heartily endorse: that the distance in 
 time from Sunday to Sunday needs bridging 
 over. The spirit lags between Sunday and Sun- 
 day. That mid-week meeting is important to 
 the spiritual welfare of people. The long drag 
 of seven days is too much without spiritual re- 
 freshment in between along the way. The 
 Wednesday night meeting gives this oasis in 
 the spiritual desert of the week. 
 
 But if it is worth conducting at all it is worth 
 doing to the utmost of one’s ability. If it is 
 worth while for two or three, or ten or fifteen 
 people, it is worth while for two or three hun- 
 dred; or for a thousand or fifteen hundred peo- 
 ple. 
 
 If it is worth while for fifteen hundred, then 
 the whole city ought to know about it; ought 
 to be told about it in the most direct way possi- 
 ble and that is by a paid ad in the Wednesday 
 morning paper each week. 
 
 This system is absolutely guaranteed to do 
 _ two things: To pay for itself if the preacher 
 
Advertising Mid-Week Meeting 119 
 
 will have the nerve to stick to it for six months; 
 and second, it will fill the church full of people 
 for that mid-week service. 
 
 I have copied from several of my newspaper 
 ads the following references to our Sanctuary 
 Service: 
 
 (1) 
 
 THE GREAT SANCTUARY SERVICE! . 
 
 WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT LINWOOD 
 BOULEVARD! 
 
 From 7:30 to 8:30 witha “Billy Sunday Big 
 Sing”; that popular “Gossip Period,’ and the 
 crowd of a THOUSAND FOR PRAYER 
 MEETING.” 
 
 (2) 
 
 A MID-WEEK MEETING THAT WILL 
 REMAKE YOUR LIFE! 
 
 Not the old-fashioned “Prayer Meeting,” but 
 something new! 
 
 A Meeting that attracts a thousand people in 
 mid-week—why? Why? 
 
 “There’s a REAL Reason” for this unusual 
 phenomenon in church circles! 
 
 LINWOOD BOULEVARD METHOD- 
 IST CHURCH. 
 
120 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 (3) 
 
 WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT? WHY DO 
 THEY GO TO CHURCH WEDNESDAY? 
 
 ANSWER: “BECAUSE THERE, I5 
 SOMETHING DIFFERENT, UNIQUE, 
 HELPFUL! THAT JS WHY  YOUssea 
 THE CROWDS POURING INTO LIN- 
 WOOD!’ 
 
 (4) 
 
 “THE. CHURCH WITH THE: GRGse 
 THE CHIMES AND THE CROWDS!” 
 
 LINWOOD BOULEVARD METHOD- 
 IST—WITH THE GREAT MID-WEEK 
 SERVICE! 
 
 (5) 
 
 “THE LARGEST MID-WEEK PRAYER 
 SERVICE IN AMERICA! AT LINWOOD 
 BOULEVARD METHODIST. ONE 
 THOUSAND AVERAGE!” 
 
 I could fill these pages up with copies of these 
 ads which I used for the mid-week service, but 
 these few will suffice to illustrate what I mean 
 by giving this Sanctuary Service publicity at- 
 tention. 
 
Advertising Mid-Week Meeting 121 
 
 If nobody was impressed with this advertis- 
 ing except your own church people the full ob- 
 ject of the advertising would be accomplished. 
 In fact, as I have said repeatedly heretofore in 
 this book, I feel that the mid-week service ought 
 to remain essentially a Family Meeting. Then 
 why the advertising? 
 
 Because the quickest way to gain the respect 
 of your own church people for this meeting is 
 for them to see it advertised in the papers. This 
 will make your own church and your own con- 
 stituency know that you yourself consider this 
 meeting a very important matter. 
 
 The last chapter of this book, which I have 
 purposely kept down to the minimum of space, 
 will deal with the heart and soul of the reason 
 for the existence of this type of a mid-week 
 meeting. 
 
 The editor of a certain prominent weekly 
 magazine which is not a church magazine asked 
 me to write an article about my Prayer Meeting 
 on the general theme, “(How I Satisfy a Human 
 Need in My Prayer Meeting.” J have written 
 that article. I was greatly pleased that a Prayer 
 Meeting in a mid-western city had attracted the 
 attention of an eastern magazine editor so that 
 
122 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 he felt it worth while to devote several pages of 
 his publication to a strictly church institution, 
 
 I am not going to duplicate that article in the 
 last chapter of this book, but I am going to give 
 the philosophy which must be back of this mid- 
 week meeting and this mid-weekly effort to 
 make this meeting one of the most important 
 meetings of the church. 
 
 I have left this chapter to the last of the 
 book because it is like that famous phrase from 
 the New Testament: “And the greatest of these 
 is Love!” 
 
 So I might say that I consider the greatest 
 of all church meetings the mid-week meeting. 
 So I might say that I consider the “greatest of 
 these” chapters in this book is the one which is 
 to come. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 Meeting a Real Need with the 
 Mid-Week Service 
 
 I have mentioned many methods in this book. 
 
 I have also set forth the machinery which will 
 make such a meeting successful. But I have, 
 finally, to say that the meeting will not be a suc- 
 cess unless it meets a spiritual need of your 
 church, 
 
 I am not saying that because it is the usual 
 thing to say in such a book but because it is the 
 truth. By the test of years I have learned that 
 a mid-week meeting will not survive unless it 
 meets a spiritual need of the community. 
 
 In order to meet that spiritual need of your 
 community the first duty that devolves upon an 
 alert preacher is that of the most careful prep- 
 aration for this mid-week meeting. He must 
 take infinite patience and care about the pub- 
 licity, as I have tried to show. He must also 
 
 take just as great care with his preliminary “set- 
 123 
 
124 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 ting up” of the program for this meeting. 
 Nothing must be left to chance in the mechan- 
 ical preparation for this hour. Every minute 
 must be carefully scheduled. 
 
 I put as much care in on the selection of 
 hymns as 1 doon my sermon. I try to make the 
 hymns not only a unit in themselves in the meet- 
 ing, but I try to make them lead up to the mes- 
 sage of the sermon. 
 
 To that end, on one evening I will select all 
 of the hymns of the meeting. Let us say they 
 are all childhood hymns. I mean by that, hymns 
 which are really written for children. It is 
 curious how grown-ups like to sing these child- 
 hood hymns now and then. Why? Because it 
 gets them back into the psychology of childhood 
 and because it brings back blessed memories of 
 childhood days: Home, the old church, the old 
 ways; all of which are sweet to think about. 
 
 All well-edited hymn books have a section of 
 these Hymns of Childhood, but usually they are 
 only sung in meetings for children. But I will 
 guarantee to any preacher that he will have the 
 surprise of his life some Wednesday evening if 
 he will get his grown-ups to singing these 
 hymns. 
 
Meeting a Real Need 125 
 
 Take that beautiful hymn, “I Would Be a 
 Little Sunbeam,” or, “When He Cometh,” and 
 watch the hearts of your adults melt into a 
 smile and then into tears as they sing: 
 
 “When He cometh, when He cometh 
 To make up His jewels, 
 All His jewels, precious jewels, 
 His loved and His own. 
 
 CHORUS: 
 
 “Like the stars of the morning 
 His bright crown adorning 
 They shall shine in their beauty 
 Bright gems for His crown.” 
 
 Or take such a hymn as “I Think When I 
 Read That Sweet Story” and watch the hard 
 exteriors of your grown-ups break down in 
 
 singing the beautiful, memory-laden lines such 
 as: 
 
 “T think when I read that sweet story of old, 
 When Jesus was here among men, 
 How He called little children as lambs to His 
 fold, 
 
 I should like to have been with them then. 
 
126 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 “T wish that His hands has been placed on my 
 head, 
 That His arm had been thrown around me, 
 And that I might have seen His kind look when 
 He said, 
 ‘Let the little ones come unto Me.’ 
 
 “Vet still to His footstool in prayer I may go, 
 And ask for a share in His love; 
 And if I now earnestly seek Him below 
 I shall see Him and hear Him above.” 
 
 It seems almost ludicrous but “I'll Be a Sun- 
 beam for Jesus” is a favorite with adults when 
 it is clearly understood that everybody is sing- 
 ing these old childhood hymns at the same time, 
 just as a unique spiritual adventure. It takes 
 them back to childhood and anything which does 
 that is helpful spiritually. Jesus understood that 
 when he took a little child, put it in their midst 
 and said, “Of such is my Kingdom,” and, when 
 He told His disciples that if they desired to in- 
 herit Eternal life they must become as little chil- 
 dren. You can quote this beautiful scene in the 
 introduction of this evening of the “Hymns of 
 Childhood” and you will find that your congre- 
 
Meeting a Real Need 127 
 
 gation will enter into such an unusual singing 
 hour with enthusiasm; and that they will come 
 forth from it witha profound spiritual blessing. 
 I have never known it to fail. 
 
 On another evening you can select ‘““Hymns 
 About Christ.’ The audience soon detects the 
 fact that you have made careful preparation for 
 this service when they notice that even the 
 hymns have been selected with forethought and 
 care. 
 
 One evening I selected “Main Street 
 Hymns.” I happened to have Mr. Sinclair 
 Lewis as my guest that evening. I talked on 
 the theme, ‘“Homesick for ‘Main Street.’” I 
 used the Symphonic Theme from Joyce Kilmer: 
 
 “T never knew a vagabond who really liked to 
 roam 
 All up and down the streets of the world and 
 never have a home.”’ 
 
 I used the story of the Prodigal Son for my 
 Scripture lesson; that boy who was homesick 
 for “Main Street.” I selected such hymns as: 
 “The Old Rugged Cross,” “ ‘Whosoever’ Means 
 Me,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” “When We All 
 
128 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 Get to Heaven,” “There'll Be No Dark Val- 
 ley,” “Lead Me, Savior,” “The Church in the 
 Wildwood,” and many others which suggest 
 home. It made a beautifully impressive eve- 
 ning. 
 
 Some evenings I select Hymns About Nature. 
 In fact, the entire month of May and June it is 
 beautiful to feature these Nature Hymns. It 
 will be surprising to the average preacher how 
 much the hymn writers have used the symbolism 
 of Nature to teach spiritual truths. When the 
 warm weather comes, and the world is beautiful 
 without, people like to sing these hymns of the 
 out-of-doors. They are varied and many: 
 
 “Abide with Me” 
 
 “Beautiful River” 
 
 “Dear to the Heart of the Shepherd” 
 “Down in the Valley” 
 
 “Encamped upon the Hills of Light” 
 “From over Hill and Plain” 
 
 “He Hideth My Soul” 
 
 “His Mercy Flows” 
 
 “Rock of Ages” 
 
 “I Come to the Garden Alone” 
 “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” 
 
Meeting a Real Need 129 
 
 “Tn the Rifted Rock I’m Resting”’ 
 
 “T’ve Reached the Land of Corn and Wine” 
 “Lead, Kindly Light” 
 
 “There Shall Be Showers of Blessings” 
 “There'll Be No Dark Valley” 
 
 Then you can select a group of “Hymns 
 About the Church,” or a group under the title 
 of “Hymns of Youth,” “Hymns of Loyalty,” 
 “Hymns of Hope,” “Hymns of Penitence,”’ 
 “Prayer Hymns,” etc. You do not need 
 to follow the divisions which are set forth in 
 the indexed hymn books but make your own 
 divisions to fit your thought and your need. If 
 the day has been gloomy and your audience 
 is depressed sing ‘““Hymns of Dawn and Sun- 
 shine.” If it is cold and wintry and the winter 
 has been long and the people are tired of it sing 
 “Hymns of Springtime and the Promised 
 Land.” If something has happened in your 
 town that week with which it is possible to link 
 up your “Big Sing” by all means do it. A 
 spiritual story may be told in the singing of the 
 hymns, 
 
 Another way to meet a spiritual need is to 
 select most carefully one or two literary gems 
 
130 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 of poetry to read or to have read in the Prayer 
 Hour. The best books I know to have at hand 
 for that purpose are “Forty Thousand Quota- 
 tions,” “One Hundred and One Famous 
 Poems,” “The World’s Great Religious 
 Poetry,” “The Golden Treasury of Songs and 
 Lyrics,” “High Tide,” “It Can Be Done,” “The 
 Book of Mother Verse” and “Famous Single 
 Poems.” There are many others but these are 
 the best for ministers. I use them constantly. 
 This literary gem, brief and well-read, will do 
 much to brighten up this mid-week meeting and 
 it will answer a spiritual need in many souls. 
 
 At every meeting I try to read at least one 
 prayer from some great book of prayers. 
 There are many such. I use Bishop Quayle’s 
 “Climb to God’ and “The Throne of Grace” 
 most of the time because they are the most 
 human and the most spiritual prayers I find 
 in book form. Bishop Thierkield has also made 
 a strong editorial selection of prayers in his 
 little “Book of Prayers.” One prayer from a 
 great soul like Bishop Quayle will remake the 
 spiritual atmosphere of a meeting. Why not? 
 Why not have these great men in your meet- 
 
Meeting a Real Need Tony 
 
 ing in the only way we can have them now? 
 In most of our churches it is not possible to 
 bring the great of the earth because they are 
 engaged elsewhere or are in Heaven. But it 
 is possible to have the thoughts of their hearts 
 and that isa tremendous thing. I often wonder 
 why so many of us neglect this great asset to 
 our Prayer Hour Meetings. I have never tried 
 anything that has added so much to the spirit- 
 ual atmosphere of such a meeting. 
 
 I always try to keep in mind, when I am 
 preparing my sermon for the mid-week meet- 
 ing, the business man, the mother, the father, 
 the young man or woman, out there in the 
 world, buffeted about by competitive business 
 methods, weary of struggle, sometimes dis- 
 gusted with the mad race for orders, sales, 
 accounts, production, transportation. I think 
 of them as grievously needing, somewhere be- 
 tween Sundays, a spiritual refreshment. I think 
 of them as needing a drink out of the Well of 
 Everlasting Life. I think of them as needing 
 a lift, a spiritual impetus. I think of that 
 crowd which will attend my Sanctuary Service 
 as a crowd of people who have had some kind 
 
132 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 of disappointment, some kind of sorrow, some 
 kind of disillusionment. I know that they have. 
 Life offers so much of that! 
 
 I try to remember that the Noonday- 
 Lunch-Club does not give them any spiritual 
 food, any uplift for their souls. There is so- 
 cial fellowship and laughter and singing, but 
 not spiritual food. There is no place in this 
 modern life which offers the lonely, weary man 
 spiritual refreshment except the Church of 
 God, and if it fails that is a great tragedy for 
 humanity. 
 
 If this spiritual hunger which is on all souls 
 is met; if the business man of any community 
 finds out that, at a certain Prayer Hour, that 
 hunger in his soul is satisfied, that need is 
 met; that particular Sanctuary Service will not 
 have any trouble in getting people to attend its 
 gatherings. Folk will flock to that service be- 
 cause they are hungry in their hearts and there 
 is no other place in all the modern life they live . 
 which even approximates giving them spiritual 
 satisfaction. 
 
 It is also up to the church to satisfy the so- 
 cial need of those who attend this mid-week 
 meeting. This can be done by a gathering, such 
 
Meeting a Real Need 133 
 
 as I have indicated elsewhere in this book, fol- 
 lowing the Prayer Hour. People used to like 
 the old-time Singing School. That institution 
 in our American life satisfied two things: It 
 satisfied their desire to sing, and it satisfied 
 the social need. That was why the old-time 
 Singing Schools were so universally popular. 
 
 The church in this Wednesday evening meet- 
 ing has an opportunity, if it will seize this 
 chance, to satisfy both of these needs of the 
 human heart. 
 
 I say quite frankly to my Sunday congrega- 
 tions that I consider the Wednesday evening 
 Prayer Meeting as the most important meet- 
 ing of the week in the entire church schedule. 
 I put it far above either the Sunday morning 
 or the Sunday evening church service in impor- 
 tance to the individual member and to the 
 church at large. 
 
 The old-time preacher used to say that the 
 “Prayer Meeting is the spiritual barometer of 
 the church.” He was right to a certain extent. 
 To-day that is even more true than it was then. 
 To-day that Wednesday night meeting is abso- 
 lutely the only Family Gathering we have in 
 American life. Our home-life is shattered. 
 
. 
 
 134 Building Up the Mid-Week Service 
 
 Our church services are big, popular, crowded 
 gatherings of the entire city. We do not get 
 that personal contact with each other; that 
 spirit of communion, that fraternal touch which 
 the church of Christ had in its early beginnings ; 
 which was and is the very genius of the church. 
 The church that loses this fraternal, family 
 touch loses its very heartbeat. The Church 
 Night, or the Family Night, the “Food, Faith 
 and Fellowship Night,” or “The Sanctuary 
 Service,” will restore this in all of its splendid, 
 pristine, spiritual glory if it is worked carefully 
 and prayerfully. 
 
 I have sent forth this book with the hope 
 that it may help even a little to a restoration of 
 the mid-week meeting, in a different way; a 
 way to fit the new day; and with the hope that 
 it may help the preacher in a practical fashion 
 to solve this ever-present problem. 
 
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 BV285 .S85 
 Building up the mid—week service, 
 
 rinceton Theological Seminar 
 
 ary—Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 00014 6722