“But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Matthew 6:5

The Livonia Community has been blessed with decades of annual corporate prayer at its prayer breakfast. There is great power in corporate worship and a community who embraces it in truth and humility will benefit from its fruits. However, the forced absence of congregating in this way should not be seen as a negative, but perhaps even a positive.

The forced isolation of worship and prayer should not weaken us in faith, but should strengthen us individually and as a community. Faith is an individual journey and our relationship to God is an intensely personal one. The prayers we pray ‘in our rooms with the door shut’ are those no one else ever witnesses or knows about. Yet its these prayers, our secret (isolated/virtual) prayers to God, that He promises to reward. Imagine the intensity of our corporate gatherings of worship if we all had personal and intensely private prayer lives God was rewarding. If we rely on corporate worship only, it is a far cry from the relationship God wants with us personally, and from what He intended the corporate experience to be.

Prayer has always been virtual. We pray to an unseen God with a communication channel being the Holy Spirit. For a second year the Livonia Community Prayer Breakfast will not be meeting in person. It can feel disappointing as this is the largest annual community gathering in the city and one of the longest running in the state. I choose to see this as a time of renewal and refocus. The event should not be about the speaker, the music, or the food. It is about a community coming together in prayer. Whether it is in a fine banquet facility, or in our room with the door closed and logged into Zoom, we will pray, and it will be rewarded.

Ken McMullen
Chairman, Livonia Community Prayer Breakfast
May 6, 2021
7:30 AM
Email chamber@livonia.org to register.