Church Growth Without the Shouting: Bishop Ron C. Hill on Prayer, Fasting, and Evangelism

In two weeks, 29 people joined Love and Unity Church of God in Christ. Bishop Ron C. Hill, its pastor, didn't know it was happening until he saw it himself.

What he does know is how it didn't happen. "They didn't come because I'm some guy with my hand behind my ear, screaming, with all the emotion on it, sweating and yelling," he says. "No! I don't have to do that."

For Hill, a growing church isn't about the performance in the pulpit. It's about what the people behind the pulpit and in the pews are doing all week. His formula fits in a sentence: live holy, love one another, and tell sinners about Jesus. Everything else, including the calm teaching, the prayer, and the fasting, exists to keep a congregation doing those three things.

He is blunt about the alternative. As churches across the country close their doors, he believes that in large part both the leaders and the members missed it. "If they aren't reading their Bibles and if they're not praying, I don't care how much you yell, scream, buck and holler, your ministry is going to go down."

A Church That Prays Around the Clock

Hill offers pastors a tool he says God gave him for the ministry. It has two parts.

The first is a set of three 24-hour prayer chains, each running once every three weeks. The handoff is the key. The person praying from eight to nine calls the next person seven to ten minutes early, and the two agree in prayer before passing the watch. Hill roots this in the promise that when two agree on anything they ask, it will be done. The result is that someone is always agreeing in prayer for the ministry and for souls to be saved.

The second is the prayer tribes. There are four, and each week one of them is active. Its members fast Monday through Friday until 5 p.m. and read scripture. They also pray three times a day: at breakfast, at lunch, and just before they break the fast.

Hill doesn't treat fasting as optional. He points to the Gospels, where Jesus is challenged because his disciples don't fast the way John's disciples and the Pharisees do. Jesus answers that they won't fast while the bridegroom is with them, but that the day will come when he's taken away. That day, Hill says, is now. "Fasting is a very important discipline for the New Testament church. And many of you never do it. Many pastors never do it."

He has watched people leave his church because they felt it fasted too much. He has also watched one of his sons in the ministry adopt the system and see his church catch fire.

The Healing That Started With a Jehovah's Witness

The clearest picture of what this atmosphere produces is a story Hill tells almost in passing.

He once tried to lead a woman, a Jehovah's Witness, to the Lord. He nearly had her, but she said no. So he asked whether he could pray for her, and she said yes.

Later, at a hospital, that woman met a patient with severe arthritis in her neck. The patient had spent months on strong medication with no improvement and was in excruciating pain. The Witness told her about Hill. She described him as a holy man who had prayed for her even though she was a Jehovah's Witness, and said good things had begun happening in her life afterward. The patient decided to find the church. She came in while Hill was praying for the sick, he anointed her with oil, and, he says, God healed her instantly.

Hill is explicit about what made the difference: "Not because I was yelling, but because of having faith in this Word and a team of people behind me who are praying daily, and every week somebody is fasting."

"Bring Us a Sinner"

A praying church still has to open its doors. Reading from Luke 5, Hill dwells on Levi, the tax collector who followed Jesus and then threw a great feast at his house, filling it with publicans and sinners. The religious leaders complained. Jesus answered that the healthy don't need a physician; the sick do.

Hill takes the point further than most would. "If you don't have a lot of sinners in the church, you ain't of God." How can people become saints, he asks, if they aren't sinners first? So he challenges his congregation to bring a sinner that Sunday. "I know you can preach and dance and sing, but do you have enough power that a sinner will follow you to church?"

In his telling, the obstacle is often the people already inside. He describes those who can find something wrong with everyone at home, at work, and at church, but never with themselves. He warns believers against resenting newer Christians for not yet being where they are, forgetting where they started. You're here to pray for everybody else, he says, not to judge them. "That's why you don't find many old happy saints. Because in order to get old and happy, you've got to learn how to stay out of other people's business."

Just Hang With It

None of this, Hill admits, happens overnight. His counsel to pastors watching attendance fall is simple. You may start with a handful. Get a system, make sure it's Bible-based, and hang with it. The harvest is plentiful; it's the laborers who are few.

"God wants His church to be the most blessed, happy place on the planet." That means not the loudest church, but the one where people pray, fast, live holy, love everybody, and bring someone new through the door.