Purpose
Prayer meetings provide social support to those who attend. The prayers during the prayer meeting sometimes ask their deity for a positive outcome in times of uncertainty.
Some prayer meetings are targeted at repentance, either of those attending or of another person or organization which is not in attendence. The latter type of prayer meetings are also a form of protest against the sinful behavior of the targeted person or organization.
In the years before widespread news media, prayer meetings were also a primary source of news and information (including firsthand accounts) about the events leading to the meeting being called. At the same time as the news was received, the prayer meeting offered ways to deal with changing circumstances. This still continues in modern times. However, the impact of such a prayer meeting is now much stronger among the worshipers than among the general public.
Read more about this topic: Prayer Meeting
Famous quotes containing the word purpose:
“Satire exists for the purpose of killing the social being [for the sake of] the true individual, the real human being.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“And the purpose of the many stops and starts will be made clear:
Backing into the old affair of not wanting to grow
Into the night, which becomes a house, a parting of the ways
Taking us far into sleep. A dumb love.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)