A New Prayer Strategy

Slater Baptist Church is launching a new prayer strategy. In this post, I’ll share what is being changed and why this change is happening.

One of the things that I love the most about Slater Baptist Church is this congregation’s commitment to prayer. Slater Baptist Church takes seriously what the Bible says about the power of prayer. Yet, I still believe there is room for our church to grow in this area. I believe we can deepen the prayer ministry of our church and involve even more of our congregation in the process.

In the past, Slater Baptist Church has had two regular prayer meetings. The first prayer meeting was on Sunday mornings at 9am and the second was on Wednesday nights at 7pm. The Sunday morning prayer time was intended as a time to pray for our congregation and services, while the Wednesday night prayer time was more focused on our community and our world. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, neither of these meetings have taken place over the last several weeks.

During this pandemic, Scott and I have had the opportunity to take a step back and examine the various ministries of our church. We asked hard questions about a lot of different areas of the life of our church. As we examined these prayer meetings, we began to ask “What if we asked people to pray for our congregation outside of a regular meeting? What would it look like to include more of our membership in the prayer ministry of our church?” From those questions, a new prayer strategy was born.

This new prayer strategy has two parts. The first part is a weekly prayer rotation. Each week, two members (or member families) of Slater Baptist Church will be given the special opportunity to pray for specific needs at Slater Baptist Church. These members will be given a prayer guide with prompts on how to pray for our congregation each day of that week. Each day of the week will have a different focus and the prompts will change from week to week. These focuses include things like our church’s leadership and community partners. In order to decide who will be asked to pray on what week, the members of the Leadership Team will be asked first, then the rest of the members will be asked from A to Z (based on last name). This prayer rotation has the advantage of involving all of our members, even the ones who can’t leave their homes! Also, it means that someone will be praying for our congregation EVERY SINGLE DAY!

The second part of the new prayer strategy involves our house groups. Our members really enjoyed meeting in homes during the pandemic to discuss the sermon and get to know each other better. So, we are continuing to meet in house groups during the week even after we started meeting in our building again on Sunday mornings. One of the things we are asking our house groups to do each week is to spend time in prayer. Every week, I send out prayer requests for our house group leaders to bring before their groups. These requests often come from events that have recently happened in the life of our church. This practice allows our house groups to pray for situations and circumstances that our members are currently facing.

These two parts accomplish different goals in the prayer ministry of our church. Through the prayer requests sent to our house groups, we have a multitude of people praying for the same urgent needs. Through the weekly prayer rotation, we have members of our church coming before God daily to intercede for our church.

I’m sure that this new strategy will raise some questions, and I would love to hear them! If you would like to receive a copy of the prayer guide each week so that you can pray alongside our other members every day, please let me know. If you would like to submit a prayer request, then send me an email or find me on Facebook. I am super excited to see how the Lord works in response to the prayers of His people!