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:
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
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“With the breakdown of the traditional institutions which convey values, more of the burdens and responsibility for transmitting values fall upon parental shoulders, and it is getting harder all the time both to embody the virtues we hope to teach our children and to find for ourselves the ideals and values that will give our own lives purpose and direction.”
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