Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.
Genesis 8:20
Having finally stepped out of the ark, Noah’s first impulse was to build an altar. Because of God’s warning, he and his family had been spared the floodwaters that had covered the earth. They had drifted in their ark for days, suspended between heaven and earth. If not for God’s kindness and Noah’s faith, they would have perished, too. The ark had come to rest on land again, and Noah stepped out into a new world. Before he did anything else, he worshiped. He built an altar and made a sacrifice. It is the first altar recorded in Scripture, but it certainly is not the last.
Altars have long been a place created to connect heaven and earth. Through sacrifice, they allow us to bring the things of this world and offer them to God. The smoke of Noah’s burnt offering was a pleasant aroma to God as it drifted upward toward heaven. These altars became a common way for God’s people to connect the needs of their life—their prayers and worship—with the throne room of God.
Elijah constructed an altar before he prayed to heaven and called down fire as a sign to the pagan prophets and the onlooking crowd of Israelites. Ezra made the reconstruction of Jerusalem’s altar a priority in his work while rebuilding the city and the temple. Abraham built altars to mark places of God’s promise. Even as Israel wandered through the wilderness, Moses kept finding places to draw away from the people to pray: mountains, tents, and altars.
There wasn’t a lot required to construct an altar. Some were simply stones piled upon one another. Some were carved, some crafted from bronze. Some were just earth, humble places where families gathered. Others were impressive and central to Israel’s identity. The altar in the temple courtyard was seven and a half feet wide with a massive ramp that was used by priests to place daily sacrifices. Still, all these altars served the same basic purpose: they were a place to encounter God, a place to sacrifice, and a place to pray. They were a place where the things of earth rose to the throne room.
Jesus understood altars. Entering the temple and finding it overrun with merchants and money lenders, He cast them out, reminding them His Father’s house would “be called a house of prayer” (Matthew 21:13). We no longer place sacrifices upon altars, but we still construct them, and Jesus understood that at the heart of every altar is a heart of prayer.
Altars are the intentional places we construct to remind us of the connection between heaven and earth. They are the places to which we return to pray. So, like our ancient brothers and sisters, we still build them. Perhaps not of the same design or materials, but we, too, find places to pray. We crawl to those places and offer our time, emotions, finances, and plans as a living sacrifice.
An altar doesn’t need to be anything more than an open space at the back of your closet. But it does need to be somewhere. It does need to exist. And what matters most is what you do while you’re there, while you’re at that altar. What matters is your faithfulness to build them and the prayers your pray while at them.
An altar no longer needs to be built with stone or wood. It can be the steering wheel of a car, a chair in the den, or beside the bed in a hotel room. The altar is more about the prayer than the place or setting. It is anywhere and anytime that we decide to recognize our existence in the throne room of heaven. It is anytime we stop allowing ourselves to be limited to what we can see, when we bow our heads in faith and humility and say, “Our Father in heaven, we hallow Your name.” I have made altars in hospital rooms, automobiles, airplane seats, kitchen tables, and most often my recliner in the basement. An altar is first and foremost a decision to recognize our need to submit to God and ask for His divine help.
While pastoring, I developed a tradition of praying for an hour each Saturday night. I would walk to the church, and then pace the empty sanctuary praying for the next day’s service and the men and women who would be in attendance. The truth is, I also prayed for myself. I prayed that God would do in those services what I knew I was not capable of doing by my own talent or ability. I was desperate for God to move, and I wasn’t sure what else to do but pray.
One Saturday night, I looked up, and a man from the congregation was standing at the back of the sanctuary watching me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Praying,” I responded.
He looked at me for a moment and asked, “Can I join you?”
It wasn’t a program. It wasn’t even really a prayer service. It wasn’t a part of some strategy I had outlined for cultivating a movement of prayer in our church. But we were intentional. Every Saturday, we showed up with no other agenda than to pray. Eventually, a few others joined us. Word began to spread, and I made it official. Before long there were sometimes as many as one hundred of us praying together. It was an altar, a place where we met with God.
We often experienced powerful moves of the Spirit. While praying, someone would feel drawn to a particular seat. They would feel an urgency to pray over that place and the person who would sit there the next day, sensing that God had plans for that person. As Sunday came, we all witnessed hands risen for salvation from the very seats where they had sensed the Spirit’s call to pray. We all sensed that our prayers were a part of something bigger than Saturday nights. Our passion for prayer and for the altar was growing.
Looking back, something in our congregation changed through those Saturday nights, something I was leading without realizing what it was. I now look back and recognize how those Saturday prayer meetings began to change the people in my church, and how they began to infuse our church with a new culture of prayer.
There is so much advice and there are so many techniques for how to change the culture of a church, but it isn’t as complicated as it may sometimes seem. Culture is simply a set of shared values. Culture forms as a group of people begin to value similar things. Whatever we value most is what defines our culture. That is not hard to understand, but it can be extremely difficult to change.
Certainly, part of the challenge is getting people to value something new. But the real challenge of changing a church’s culture is getting people to be honest about what they really do value. Most of us who have followed Jesus for any amount of time know the things we should value. But knowing something is valuable doesn’t mean we actually value it. We may even all agree that something is valuable, but that does not mean that we, as a church, truly value it. We can know the value of a piece of art, a luxury car, or dinner at a five-star restaurant, but that doesn’t mean we want it or are willing to pay for it. Knowing that it is valuable does not mean that we personally value it.
Prayer is like that. We know prayer is valuable. We know that it is a vital part of any believer’s life, and we know that Jesus valued it. But we can know prayer is valuable without valuing it ourselves. I have never been in a church that didn’t think prayer was valuable, but I have been in very few churches where prayer was a shared value.
That is all culture is. A culture of prayer simply means that your church both knows the value of prayer and personally values it themselves. To change the culture of your church, to create a new culture of prayer, you need only move prayer from a thing that is valuable to a thing your church actually values. It must be made one of the main things on the calendar and in the practice of leadership before it will become a high value in the culture of the church.
I pose a simple question to test what your church currently values. What is the first thing you do when there is a need? Do you hold an emergency meeting? Do you start raising funds? Do you turn to your favorite online resource for advice? When the early Church found themselves facing a need, the first thing they did was pray. It is the pattern repeated again and again in the book of Acts. The early Church constantly gathered to pray. It was the first thing they did. It was the thing they valued most. It was their culture.
If you are going to call your church to prayer, if you are going to create a culture of prayer, if you are going to help the men and women in your church live in the throne room of God, it is going to take honesty about what you actually value as a community, and it is going to take intentionality to build new altars of prayer.
As our church began to grow in prayer, I became increasingly intentional about working prayer into every part of our time together and into our leadership development. We simplified our board’s responsibilities and met for no other reason than prayer. The staff began to prioritize praying together each week, and we challenged one another to press deeper and expect more from our personal prayers. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but we were intentionally constructing altars. We were building places in which we could “approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). We were learning to approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, because we needed mercy and grace to help us in our times of need.
We were crafting a new culture based on a valuable thing becoming the thing we valued most. It is possible for your church, too. I want to help you construct altars of your own, places where you can encounter God and connect heaven and earth, and places that will change the culture of your church.
I want to introduce you to five altars of prayer every church must be intentional about building. They are not just a program or strategy. They are values, intentional practices that will help you move prayer forward in the priorities of your church. These altars will help you not only cultivate a new culture of prayer, but they will also help you encounter God and experience the power of His throne room.
In the coming chapters, I will unpack each of these altars to help you understand how to be intentional about each. I will offer you lessons from my life as well as give powerful examples from Scripture. But you will have to provide the intentionality. This book is not a theology of prayer. I didn’t write this book so that you could learn about prayer. I wrote it so that it might inspire you to actually pray. I wrote it so that you might, by catching a glimpse of what you have in prayer, be moved to pray with a new focus. I wrote it to help you lead a change in your church’s culture, to help you call your church to prayer.
If you want to lead a cultural change in your church, you must value your personal altar above all others. Everything you do and everything you are begins in prayer. It begins in the privacy of your own prayer altar. It begins in a willing sacrifice, in death, and in submitting your life to God. It is a secret place, a place where you discover who you are and where you grow in ever-increasing intimacy with your heavenly Father. If you are a pastor, your personal altar is the lid of your church’s praying. If you are a parent, it is the lid of your family’s altar. God has called you to value it and to lead from it. It starts here, your altar.
We are called to make disciples. Disciples know how to pray, and they value it as a part of their life—not just on Sunday mornings. But the truth is many people simply don’t know how to pray. They have seen it done, but no one has taught them how to do it themselves. The disciples requested that Jesus teach them to pray. Jesus took the time to do it. He showed them how to pray by His own prayers, and He taught them how to pray for themselves. We need families that value prayer, that pray together, that know how to pray, and that raise their kids to pray. A church that is serious about prayer will be serious about the home altar. They will be serious about teaching families to pray.
Faith can be a spiritual gift. While all believers participate in it, God calls some men and women to extraordinary acts of faith and prayer. If God has given you a vision and has called you to lead His Church, He has also called men and women to join you in prayer. From that core of believers gathered in the Upper Room to the group that gathered daily in the temple to pray, there has always been a core committed to prayer. Cultivating a culture of prayer requires a core of people who are willing to lead the way. I want to help you identify that core, help you equip them to grow in prayer, and help you lead your church into a deeper culture of prayer.
We all want to see miracles. Miracles demonstrate the power of God to the world. They show God’s compassion, His power, and His credibility. But when we don’t witness enough of the miraculous, it isn’t because God is distant or unwilling. Too often, He finds people unprepared for His miraculous moves. God gave us clear instructions. He taught us how to pray with authority, how to lay hands on the sick, how to anoint with oil, and how to offer prayers with bold faith. God wants to do miracles in your church, but you need an altar, an intentional place, and a commitment to praying for the miraculous.
Ultimately, there is a time when each person must come to the altar for themselves. Scripture is clear; a day is coming when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord (see Philippians 2:10–11). By God’s grace, we are each given an opportunity to recognize His authority and to humble our hearts and receive Him as our Savior. There is an altar of salvation that we must pray over and that we must invite every person to approach for themselves. The goal of every church is to welcome the lost into the Kingdom of God. So, we build altars where we call the world to repent, bow a knee, and receive Christ.
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As we begin the work of building these five altars, I want to suggest that you take a moment to commit this process to prayer. When God moved on the hearts of His people, they often responded by building an altar as a reminder of what God had spoken to them. An altar can mark a new place of commitment.
It is easy for a moment of good intention to be lost. It is easy for a divine moment to be forgotten. But our call to prayer is too important to be neglected. Too much depends on it. Perhaps you need to take a moment to commemorate this moment. Stack up some stones if you must, but do not allow prayer to slip into the background of your life and ministry. We have work ahead, but it begins with intention. We will pray. We will lead churches that pray. We will enter heaven’s throne room through our prayers. We will witness the miracles of God by prayer. We will control the outcomes by these altars of prayer.