The Work
Power Through Prayer was the first of E.M. Bounds's books on prayer to be published, appearing in 1912 from the Christian Witness Company, though the manuscript had circulated in his immediate circle earlier. Six additional books on prayer were published posthumously from manuscripts Bounds had prepared: Purpose in Prayer (1920), Prayer and Praying Men (1921), The Possibilities of Prayer (1923), The Reality of Prayer (1924), The Weapon of Prayer (1931), and The Necessity of Prayer (1929). Together they constitute the most extensive body of writing on prayer by a single evangelical author and have formed generations of ministers and laypeople in the practice of intercession.
Power Through Prayer is the briefest and most concentrated of the series - approximately 100 pages organized in seventeen short chapters. It addresses primarily the minister's prayer life, arguing that the Church's greatest need is not more sermons, better organization, or more programs, but more and better prayer. Bounds's famous epigram - 'Prayer is the preacher's mightiest weapon' - summarizes the book's argument: pastoral effectiveness depends on the quality of the pastor's prayer life, and a prayerless ministry is a powerless ministry.
Biblical Engagement
Luke 18:1 - 'And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint' - is the text from which Bounds derives his most insistent point: persistence in prayer. Christ's parable of the unjust judge and the importunate widow is, for Bounds, not merely a story but a commission: men ought always to pray and not to give up. The minister who stops praying - who becomes too busy with ministry activities to maintain sustained intercession - has lost the source of his effectiveness. Bounds cites the great preachers of Christian history (Luther, Wesley, Whitefield, Brainerd) as examples of men whose extraordinary spiritual power was grounded in extraordinary prayer.
Matthew 6:6 - 'But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly' - is Christ's instruction on private prayer that Bounds treats as the foundation of all public ministry. The 'closet' is the place where the minister meets God without audience, without performance, in the naked reality of relationship. What happens in the closet determines what can happen in the pulpit: the minister who has genuinely met God in secret can speak of God in public with an authority no rhetorical training can substitute for.
1 Thessalonians 5:17 - 'Pray without ceasing' - is Paul's most concise prayer commandment, which Bounds reads not as a counsel of perfection reserved for the especially devout but as a description of the normal Christian life and especially of the normal ministerial life. 'Without ceasing' does not mean every moment is occupied with verbal prayer but that prayer is the continuous posture of the soul - a life lived in awareness of and dependence on God.
James 5:16 - 'The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much' - provides Bounds's two criteria for powerful prayer: the character of the one who prays (the 'righteous man') and the quality of the prayer (the 'effectual fervent' prayer). Bounds insists on both: no amount of fervor compensates for an unrighteous life, and no amount of holiness makes cold, formal, infrequent prayer effective. The combination of personal righteousness and importunate persistence is the standard Bounds holds before his readers.
Author and Context
Edward McKendree Bounds (1835-1913) was born in Shelby County, Missouri, practiced law briefly, was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1859, and served as a Confederate chaplain during the Civil War (he was captured by Union forces and imprisoned in Nashville). After the war he served Methodist pastorates in Missouri and Tennessee, served as associate editor of the Methodist Episcopal Church South's weekly newspaper for many years, and spent the last seventeen years of his life (1895-1913) in Washington, Georgia, devoted almost entirely to prayer and writing.
Bounds reportedly rose at 4 a.m. daily and spent three hours in prayer before beginning his other activities. Whether or not this is precisely accurate, those who knew him described a man whose prayer life was the visible center of his existence. His books on prayer were not theoretical but autobiographical: he wrote what he had practiced.
The Civil War context shaped Bounds's theology of prayer in significant ways. He had served in conditions where human plans and resources were manifestly insufficient, where the gap between what was needed and what was available was enormous. Prayer in such conditions is not a pious supplement to human effort but a recognition that the work exceeds human capacity.
Style and Influence
Bounds's prose is aphoristic and rhetorical rather than systematic: his chapters are series of concentrated statements, each one a maxim on prayer, supported by biblical quotation and historical example. This style has made the books quotable - passages from Power Through Prayer appear in sermon collections and devotional anthologies throughout the twentieth century - and has also made them easy to browse without sustained reading.
His influence on evangelical pastoral culture in the twentieth century is difficult to overestimate. The books were distributed by the millions through evangelical publishing houses and missionary organizations. Andrew Murray's parallel series on prayer (also from the Methodist and Reformed tradition) and Bounds's books between them defined the vocabulary of evangelical intercessory prayer.
Legacy
Power Through Prayer established the genre of the extended treatise on prayer as a ministerial essential in the evangelical tradition. Its insistence that the quality of ministry depends on the quality of prayer - that programs, techniques, and training are secondary to the minister's relationship with God - has been challenged by the professionalization of ministry in the twentieth century and has repeatedly resurged as a corrective to that professionalization. It remains required reading in many evangelical seminary curricula and Bible college programs.