If you want your people as well as yourself to be soul-winners, try and keep up the prayer meetings all you can. Do not be like
certain ministers in the suburbs of London, who say that they cannot get the people out to a prayer meeting and a lecture, too, so
they have one week night meeting for prayer, at which they give a short address. One lazy man said, the other day, that the
week-night address was almost as bad as delivering a sermon, so he has a prayer-meeting and a lecture combined in one, and it
is neither a prayer-meeting nor a lecture, it is neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring; and soon he will give it up because
he says it is no good, and I am sure the people think so, too. And after that, why should he not give up one of the Sunday
services? The same reasoning might apply to that as to the week-night meeting. I saw, in an American paper to-day, the
following paragraph: "The well-known fact is again going the rounds that, in Mr. Spurgeon's church in London, the regular
hearers absent themselves one Sunday evening every three months, and the house is given up to strangers. Our American
Christianity is of so noble a type that hosts of our people give up their pews to strangers every Sunday night in the year.” I
hope it will not be so with your people, brethren, either with respect to the Sabbath services or the prayer meetings. If you find that your people cannot come in the evening, try and have a prayer meeting when they can come. You might get a good meeting in the country at half-past four in the morning. Why not? You would get more people at five o'clock in the morning than you would at five o'clock at the other end of the day. I believe that a prayer meeting at six o'clock in the morning among agricultural people would attract many; they would drop in, and just have a few words of prayer, and be glad of the opportunity. Or you might have it at twelve o'clock at night; you would find some people out then whom you could not get at any other time. Try one o'clock, or two o'clock, or three o'clock, or any hour of the day or night, so as somehow or other to get the people out to pray. -
Spurgeon, The Soul-Winner, pg. 44
"If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to Hell over our bodies. If they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees. Let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for." -- Charles H. Spurgeon