How Does Your Church Pray?

How does your church pray? If I were to list the ways our church prays, I would include:

• Various kinds of prayers at worship gatherings
• Prayer chain
• Prayer at multiple ministries & meetings, often at beginning & end
• Elders Saturday morning prayer
• Wednesday night prayer gathering
• Monthly Potluck & Prayer
• Sunday Morning Communities prayer
• Small group prayer
• Elders prayer for healing

You might say, "Well, it appears we are a praying church!"

Yet within me is a holy dissatisfaction that we are missing Holy Spirit energized, fervent, faith-filled, passionate, transformative, fruit-bearing prayer!

There is a difference between a church that prays and a praying church. Prayer needs to be central.

Prayer is the place of power that brings about tangible results. Prayer is the source of releasing God’s love and blessing. Prayer is the environment in which God shows up.

To that end we keep praying about praying!

• To invite God to come down and visit us with his manifest presence.
• To ask the Lord to forgive us for our praylessness.
• To implore the Spirit of God to breathe new life into our church.
• To get desperate for the oil of the Spirit to flow within every ministry and gathering.
• To seek the Lord for a fresh visitation from heaven!

Doing ministry apart from the fervent prayers of God’s people is like running in waist high water. You expend a lot of energy to move forward a little distance. I want to expend less energy to gain more much for God.

That’s what prayer does, because prayer is the work, and then God works!

And when God wants to do something great, he gets his people to praying.