Content taken from Prioritizing Missions in the Church by Aaron Menikoff and Harshit Singh, ©2025. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

---

Charles Spurgeon famously led the Metropolitan Tabernacle to raise up and send out scores of pastors and missionaries. He kept missions and evangelism front and center by disseminating Christian literature, preaching for conversion, and starting a pastor’s college. The Metropolitan Tabernacle planted 187 churches in the United Kingdom, and some estimate that by the time of Spurgeon’s death, half of the Baptists in London were members of his church or a church planted by one of his students.[1]

Spurgeon called upon his congregation to long for and labor toward church planting around the world: “The Christian church was designed from the first to be aggressive. It was not intended to remain stationary at any period, but to advance onward until its boundaries became commensurate with those of the world. It was to spread from Jerusalem to all Judaea, from Judaea to Samaria, and from Samaria unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”[2] In fact, when Presbyterian missionary John Paton visited London, the Spurgeons had him into their home and financially supported his work.[3]

Buy on Amazon

Did the preaching at the Metropolitan Tabernacle incite members to take the gospel beyond the four walls of the church building? Yes, because Spurgeon preached a missionscentered Bible. But he didn’t rely only on the preaching; he also led his church to depend on prayer.

On Monday nights, he would gather his congregation and they would devote themselves to prayer. He insisted that the prayer meeting “be maintained at all cost.” He compared the church gathered for prayer to the engine room of an ocean steamer. Spurgeon said, “You do not think much of it, but that is the centre of power. If you stop the engine, every wheel will stand still. Some good people say, ‘I am not going; it is only a prayer meeting.’ Just so. It is only the engine, but that is everything.”[4]

In our respective churches in India and America, we strive to keep evangelism and missions constantly on the minds and in the hearts of our congregations. We regularly pray that God would open doors for evangelism and soften the hearts of our neighbors. We also pray the Lord would raise up missionaries by emboldening Christians to become church planters, starting and strengthening churches across significant barriers that are usually linguistic, geographic, and cultural.

We devote time to missions and evangelism in our pastoral prayers on Sunday morning. We call them “pastoral” because this is when we, as elders, lead our churches to plead with God to be at work both within our congregations and throughout the world. There’s nothing magical about leading a group of people in prayer, but it’s entirely biblical for an elder to stand before the congregation, hands raised to the Lord, and plead with him on their behalf to do a work among the nations. Pastor and theologian Jim Hamilton put it well: “The corporate prayer of the pastor and his church . . . is a shadow and a type of the gospel itself—one person standing in for the many, making intercession for them (Heb. 7:25).”[5]

I (Aaron) recently led my church to pray for the tiny island nation of the Maldives, which is almost entirely Muslim and has only a handful of Christians. Who knows how the Lord might use the prayers of our small congregation!

Both of our churches have special prayer meetings as well— though they’re not as popular as Spurgeon’s. During these prayer gatherings, we invite members to share evangelistic opportunities. Almost every week, we hear about members who have begun evangelistic Bible studies at work or in their neighborhoods. Sometimes a prayer request is more personal: “Would you pray that I would be bold enough to share the gospel with my parents?” After hearing the request, we always ask another church member to pray.

To be clear, it’s not just personal evangelism we pray about. As church members wonder whether they ought to devote their life to full-time missions, they solicit prayer as well. They ask for help processing through their qualifications, their gifting, and their desires. Under the oversight of the elders, they appeal to the whole congregation for help to discern whether the Lord is leading them to become missionaries. Together, we go to the Lord in prayer.

It’s taken years for our members to get comfortable enough to speak up and ask for help. Every single request encourages not only the person asking for help, but every brother or sister within earshot. Like a snowball rolling down a steep mountain, the evangelistic fervor and missionary zeal of our congregations is growing with each passing day.

Brothers and sisters, if your congregations aren’t praying for missions and evangelism, then why would you expect them to make missions a priority? So let’s pray that:

• God would raise up laborers for the harvest;

• Christians would be bold;

• we would deeply understand the gospel and grow in our ability to communicate it effectively;

• our neighbors who don’t know Christ would have open ears and soft hearts;

• people in the world who have little to no access to the gospel would be reached; and

• brothers and sisters who are persecuted for their faith would find relief while God uses their blood to water gospel seeds.

Nothing is more important than our churches being immersed in the Bible—from the pulpit to our own private times with the Lord. But missions-centered churches will also be fueled by prayer.

Does prayer really work? Back to Spurgeon. Pastor and historian Alex DiPrima reports: “In 1892, the year of Spurgeon’s death, nearly one-third of the graduating class [of his Pastor’s College] went overseas to places such as the Congo, Australia, and South Africa.”[6]

---

[1] Alex DiPrima, Spurgeon and the Poor: How the Gospel Compels Christian Social Concern (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage, 2023), 103.

[2] DiPrima, Spurgeon and the Poor, 104.

[3] John G. Paton: The Autobiography of the Pioneer Missionary to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) (1889; Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth, 1965), 435.

[4] C. H. Spurgeon, Only a Prayer Meeting: Studies on Prayer Meetings and Prayer Meeting Addresses (Fearn, UK: Christian Focus, 2000), 82.

[5] Jim Hamilton, “A Biblical Theology of Corporate Prayer,” 9Marks website, March 25, 2010, https://www.9marks.org/.

[6] DiPrima, Spurgeon and the Poor, 108.

News Source : https://gcdiscipleship.com/article-feed/pray-a-gospel-for-the-nations