. . . that in our efforts to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in developing a prayer saturated congregation, we may be our own worst enemy. How? By overly promoting a single weeknight prayer meeting.

Notice I said "overly promoting" because I am in favor of calling the entire congregation to the place of prayer (Col. 4:2). But we may unintentionally exclude significant segments of our membership by offering, primarily or exclusively, a one-size-fits-all prayer experience. Weeknight prayer meetings, by definition, are for everyone to pray about everything. This centralized (everyone in the same place at the same time) and generalized (everyone is expected to have equal interest or passion for every need or issue) approach excludes those who must live on a different schedule and those who are motivated to pray by a specific topic or issue or circumstance.

By Jonathan Graf

Over the years, I've heard a few pithy sayings about prayer. "Prayer is caught, not taught," and "You learn to pray by praying." Both are true, but the effect of these sayings has added to the prayerlessness of many churches. Why? Because they keep churches from being deliberate about discipling in prayer.

A Powerful Corporate Prayer Idea

Most churches struggle to have a large corporate prayer gathering. One of the reasons for this struggle can be the "not another night" syndrome. Because people are already involved in so much, they revolt agasint the idea of coming to church for another thing. Centerville Community Church (Centerville, Ohio) got around this problem in a marvelous way.

Centerville Community already had a fairly strong small group ministry, with a good percentage of its people involved in small groups (its groups meet weekly). Its small groups were used to praying together, always lifting up the needs of members in the group. WHen the desire and need to start praying more corporately--into the life and health of the church--came up a few years ago, rather than start a corporate prayer meeting on another night, Centerville used its small groups. They asked small groups to pray for the spiritual life and corporate issues of the church (moving of God's Spirit, that His transformational power would be evident, that the preaching of the Word would come with power, etc.).

College Students Focus on Great Commission Praying

With the sudden rise of terrorism, threats of chemical and biological warfare, economic stresses, natural disasters, new strains of diseases, and other international conflicts, we certainly are living in a strategic hour for the church to impact our world with the love of Christ. Combined with the continued reality of 27% of the peoples of the world still being the least evangelized or unreached peoples, Ryan Shaw and other abandoned leaders from the Student Volunteer Movement 2 (SVM2) recently reminded us of the 1806 “Haystack” prayer meeting and subsequent movement that God used to launch the North American missionary movement. They called students to 21 days of Prayer and Fasting (January 10-31) as we entered 2006.

Excellent Youth Prayer Websites

Perhaps no other age group enjoys and utilizes the internet more than teenagers. So we decided to recommend a few youth prayer websites. We ecourage you as prayer leaders to print these addresses out and give them to your youth pastor or sponsors. Many of them come out of a list from Mike Higgs's excellent book, Youth Ministry on Your Knees: Mentoring and Mobilizing Young People to Pray (NavPress). Go to our webstore to order--or click here. (We recommend buying it as a gift for your church's youth pastor or sponsor.) Click "Read On . . ." for the web list.

http://www.youtharise.com. This website has an excellent pdf for youth leaders on leading a youth prayer meeting.
http://www.24-7prayer.com. The website of the 24/7 prayer movement that swept Europe--and other parts of the world--a few years ago. We highly recommend the book that tells its story, Red Moon Rising (Relevant Books). Available at our website: https://store.prayerleader.com
http://www.yifa.org. This is the website of the youth movement within Intercessors for America.
http://www.thecallrevolution.com
http://www.elijahrevolution.com

One of the best ways to jump start people into a deeper level of prayer is to encourage them through a conference. Many of you attend our regional or national conferences, some churches spending thousands of dollars to do so. While we want to continue challenging you to come to our events, have you ever thought of bringing an event to your area? Most of our regional conferences are planned due to an invitation from the hosting church, not us seeking a location.

What Does it Take?

There are three possible conferences you can host.

CPLN Prayer Leader OnLine

Vol. 3, No. 1
January 2006

Welcome to our revised Prayer Leader OnLine. We hope you like the changes. We are trying to categorize matterial better and make it more practical. Each issue will have ideas, stories or resources that fit into various areas of church life that need prayer to saturate it--missions, youth, children, leadership, worship and so on. Our idea is that you might copy an article or idea and give to the person over that ministry. We made this change for two reasons: 1. We want to see prayer permeate every area of church; and 2. we want to help you to become a valuable resource person for your church. Enjoy!