Prayer Meeting - Purpose

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:

    The chief want, in every State that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants. This alone draws out “the great resources” of Nature, and at last taxes her beyond her resources; for man naturally dies out of her.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Our purpose in founding the city was not to make any one class in it surpassingly happy, but to make the city as a whole as happy as possible.
    Socrates (469–399 B.C.)

    The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)