Men Are God's Method: E. M. Bounds on the Preacher's Prayer Life
"Men are God's method" is the best-known line from E. M. Bounds' book Power Through Prayer. It means that God does His work in the world chiefly through people, not through programs, and so the most important thing about any ministry is the kind of person God has made the minister to be. For Bounds, the man God uses is above all a man of prayer. Here's the full sentence as it stands in chapter 1:
Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
The rest of this article walks through what Bounds teaches with that line, using his own words. You can read Power Through Prayer free alongside it.
What Bounds was answering
Bounds opens the chapter by describing the church of his day. It was always "on a stretch," he says, to devise "new methods, new plans, new organizations." He doesn't call those things evil. His worry is that they tend "to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization."
He then points to Scripture. When God prepared the way for Christ, He sent a man: "There was a man sent from God whose name was John." When God shows Himself strong, it is "in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him." God works through people, and He depends on them as channels for His power.
From there Bounds names what the church really needs:
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use—men of prayer, men mighty in prayer.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
The preacher is the pipe
Bounds uses a picture to explain. The message is God's, but it reaches people through the preacher, and the preacher affects how it arrives:
The preacher is the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows. The pipe must not only be golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a full, unhindered, unwasted flow.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
This is why he says "the messenger is, if possible, more than the message." He doesn't mean the preacher is more important than the gospel. He means the gospel is carried in a life, and a blocked or dirty pipe hinders the flow. In his words, "The man, the whole man, lies behind the sermon."
Character before gifts
If men are God's method, then character matters more than talent. Bounds says it directly:
It is not great talents or great learning or great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God—men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
He adds that "the preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself." The hardest work of ministry is the work God does in the minister. In chapter 10 he presses the same point: "If he does not excel in grace, he does not excel at all." And in chapter 12 he warns that the church has learned to ask for "talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety."
Prayer makes the man
So how does God make the kind of person He uses? Bounds' answer is prayer. The same chapter that begins with "Men are God's method" ends here:
The real sermon is made in the closet. The man—God's man—is made in the closet. His life and his profoundest convictions were born in his secret communion with God.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
"Closet" is the private place of prayer. Bounds believed that what a preacher becomes there decides what he can give in public. "Prayer makes the man; prayer makes the preacher; prayer makes the pastor."
He also believed this kind of prayer takes real time. In chapter 4 he says prayer must not be "made out of the fragments of time" left over from business. It "means the closet first, the study and activities second." In chapter 8, after a long list of praying saints, he concludes that "no man can be a man of prayer who does not give much time to praying."
A heart preacher
Bounds connects prayer with the preacher's heart. Learning fills the head, but prayer shapes the heart, and the heart is where preaching gets its power:
Praying makes the preacher a heart preacher. Prayer puts the preacher's heart into the preacher's sermon; prayer puts the preacher's sermon into the preacher's heart.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I2
He doesn't tell ministers to stop studying. He says their "great lack is not in head culture, but in heart culture." And he gives a line every pastor can test himself by: "almost any man of common intelligence has sense enough to preach the gospel, but very few have grace enough to do so."
An example: David Brainerd
Bounds' favorite picture of "God's method" is David Brainerd, the young missionary to the Native Americans who died before thirty. In chapter 11 he says the results of Brainerd's work are found "not in the conditions or accidents but in the man Brainerd." Then he writes one of the book's most hopeful sentences:
For nothing is too hard for God to do if He can get the right kind of a man to do it with.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I1
Not only for preachers
Bounds wrote mostly to ministers, but the principle reaches every believer. In chapter 18 he turns to the people in the pews and asks, "Do you pray for your preacher?" He says the preacher must pray and must be prayed for, and that these two "ought never to know any divorce." And in the last chapter he says the change he hopes for starts at the top and spreads: "None but praying leaders can have praying followers."
So "Men are God's method" is a call to anyone God might use: a pastor, a teacher, a parent, a new believer. God isn't waiting for a better plan. He's looking for people who will let Him shape them in prayer. Bounds ends the book on this note:
God can work wonders if He can get a suitable man. Men can work wonders if they can get God to lead them.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter XX
Keep reading
For an overview of every chapter, see the Power Through Prayer summary. For more of Bounds' lines, see Power Through Prayer Quotes. To learn about the man himself, read Who Was E. M. Bounds?, and to discuss these ideas with a group, use the study guide. Best of all, read the book for yourself.