When I first attended a prayer meeting at a church with apostles and prophets it was not a comforting experience.

The praying was aggressive, bold, intentional, loud, expressive, spontaneous, emotional, and they did this at every church meeting.

Frankly, I didn’t like it.

It offended my trained ‘scholarly’ mind and my emotions ran for cover in some back room of my heart.

I was taught that prayer was passive, quiet, routine, occassional, reverent, and definitely not emotional. And definitely something you just did at scheduled times.

Seeing people emotionally involved aggravated me. Why was that necessary? Couldn’t these people control themselves?

While the emotions offended me the spontaneous prayer caused me great wonder. Where was the prayer lists? Did they just make these things up while they were praying? I was intrigued.

I found out that there really wasn’t much in the way of prayer lists. They prayed whatever they heard the Holy Spirit tell them to pray. At this revelation, my first thought was that these people are pretty audacious to think they can pray the same thing as the Holy Spirit. But my offense turned to a sarcastic, “sure you are”, when they told me they were emotional because they experienced the emotions of God over the thing they were praying.

As the Lord made me stay in these apostolic churches and learn how to pray, I grew used to what was going on. I came to realize how apostolic churches take prayer seriously and that they were praying heaven into the earth. The first time I felt a demonic principality shudder from fear was in an apostolic church prayer meeting.

After all these years, you may find it interesting that prayers at apostolic churches are still scary. Just not to me anymore. But demons and territorial princes definitely don’t like them.

Still trying to feel and hear.