Investing in Prayer Leaders

Building a Praying Church from the Ground Up

By Fred Hartley III

The size of your ministry is determined by the size of your prayer life. The size of your prayer life is revealed by the size of your answers to prayer.

When Jesus built His Church, He built a praying Church. What kind of church are you building? When Jesus made disciples, He made praying disciples. What kind of disciples are you making?

Standing in front of a large sanctuary full of preachers, Charles H. Spurgeon pointed his finger and declared, “Your work, brethren, is to set your church on fire.” He was right. The starting point for setting a church on fire is to learn to pray.

Saddle Up

The best way to learn to pray is to pray with people in your church family who know how to pray. Let me encourage you: right now there are people in your church who are waiting for you to invite them into an entry-level prayer partnership.

When God first put me in the vice grip of prayer with a desire to learn to pray and to bring people with me, I didn’t know exactly where to start. But I figured I could not go wrong by inviting three people whom I knew had strong prayer lives to pray with me: Don, Leslie, and Daniel. Don works for FedEx, Leslie is a massage therapist par excellence, and Daniel works for Home Depot. Our backgrounds could not have been more diverse, but that didn’t matter. Our hearts were together—we each loved Jesus and wanted Him to teach us to pray.

I have grown tremendously from my mentors—Armin Gesswein, David Bryant, Henry Blackaby, and Victor Hashweh—but these relationships have been long distance. I’ve been profoundly impacted by Jim Cymbala, Richard Foster, Alice Smith, and other prayer leaders, but that has been primarily through casual friendships and books.

But without question I have learned more about prayer and advancing Christ’s Kingdom from kneeling with my three trusted prayer partners than from anyone else on earth. I saddled up with them as in a posse 15 years ago, and we’ve been riding together ever since. The Urban Dictionary defines posse as “your crew, your homies, a group of friends, people who have your back.” We might define it as “your entry-level core prayer partners.”

Build Your Prayer Team

You don’t need to be a pastor to gather a core of praying people. Everyone wants to have a huge prayer gathering like Pastor Jim Cymbala’s at the Brooklyn Tabernacle in Brooklyn, NY, but why not start small? Give God time to lay a solid foundation with a core group. Gather your core prayer friends now and perhaps you will have opportunity later to launch a church-wide, God-encountering prayer gathering with the full support and blessing of your lead pastor.

Start by asking the Lord, “Father, who would You have me invite into an entry-level prayer partnership?” He will tell you. Write down your initial prospect list. It’s time for you to form your posse and saddle up. Set a date and time to launch your God-encountering prayer gathering for your core praying friends.

Jesus spent three years making upper-room disciples. We know that He practiced a life of prayer, as recorded in Mark 1:35: “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” He also modeled a lifestyle of prayer for His disciples. Even in the middle of heavy days of non-stop ministry to needy people, Jesus called time-out: “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16). His example of relevant, life-giving prayer was so winsome to His disciples that one day, after Jesus finished praying, “. . . one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples’” (Luke 11:1).

You’re Not Alone

When Christ sets off our spiritual appetite alarm, we immediately and instinctively want to pray with others. Many of us were raised in the generation that was taught solo prayer—to pray in private. Many grew up in a church in which the corporate prayer meeting was dry, irrelevant, and boring. I must admit that I have suffered through plenty of boring—painfully boring—prayer meetings. They were torturous for only one reason: they lacked fire, the fire of God’s manifest presence.

Once God has stirred a passion in you to pray and to receive the fire of His manifest presence, it is an indication that He has also stirred a similar passion in others around you. I have found this is virtually a universal principle—it’s just a matter of discovering who these people are. God will help you identify them and gather them in prayer.

My friend and mentor J. Edwin Orr was not only a brilliant revival historian with three earned doctorates in the history of revival, he was also a catalytic practitioner who was anointed to stir people to seek Christ and to gather them in God-encountering prayer. As a young man desperate for God, I attended a conference on revival prayer at which Dr. Orr was a speaker. My friends and I took him out to lunch and asked him, “In your 60 years of study, can you summarize everything you’ve learned in a single sentence?” I waited to hear his next comment.

“Yes,” the great revival Jedi-master replied. “Whenever God is ready to begin something new with His people, He always sets them to praying.”

It Takes a Team

In order to effectively build a praying church, a congregation needs to build a strong prayer team. The prayer team is not responsible to carry out all the work of prayer on behalf of the congregation; rather, it is responsible to mobilize prayer throughout the church family. The first work of every Christian is to pray, but some believers have a distinct calling to pray for their local church and to mobilize prayer.

A strong prayer team is built from a core group of leaders, each of whom has both a heart to pray and a love for the church family. People with both of these callings are needed to form a prayer team.

A prayer team is made up of five to ten pray-ers, all of whom love Jesus, long for His manifest presence and, preferably, know how to minister in the revelatory gifts. They should be people with godly character and maturity who understand lines of authority and confidentiality and who will protect, not undermine, the leadership of the pastor.

There are two sets of people to build the team from: those who have influence with God, and those who have influence with people.

The first set—those who have influence with God—need to be people who love your church and can express a genuine Holy Spirit call on their lives to intercede for your church. These people are worth their weight in gold. As you look for them, keep in mind a tip that the Holy Spirit taught me a number of years ago: the shakers and movers in the Kingdom of God are not necessarily the shakers and movers in the kingdom of men. These are the kind of people who will be your prayer force, and they don’t necessarily need to have broad influence with people as long as they have significant influence with God.

The second set of people to build your team from is made up of prayer mobilizers. These are the individuals who have influence and leadership among the various people groups in your church family. We intentionally select people for our prayer team who represent the diversity of our church family—men and women, young and old, business owners, laborers and middle management—and we represent as many different nationalities as possible.

The duties of our church’s prayer team members are extensive:

• They serve as the leaders of our central, all-church, God-encountering weekly prayer gathering.
• They serve as prayer ministry team leaders along with our elders during the response time of our Sunday morning corporate worship celebration—praying for people’s healing, deliverance, salvation and any other number of needs.
• They make up part of the prayer shield of the lead pastor as personal prayer partners and advisors.
• They mobilize prayer throughout our church life for children, youth, young adults, men and women.
• They facilitate prayerwalks in the neighborhoods around our church campus.
• They help facilitate nights of prayer periodically throughout the year.
• They pray together every Sunday prior to our worship celebration.
• Most importantly, our prayer team members are assigned the highest responsibility to minister to the presence of the Lord. While this responsibility belongs to all of us, if no one else does it, then—like the Levites—the prayer team members are willing.

The Collateral Benefits

Over the past 20 years in northeast Atlanta, we have seen God completely reshape our local church to truly become a house of prayer for all nations. We went from being a lily-white, English-speaking congregation to now worshiping every Sunday with people born in more than 60 different nations of the world. We have planted 12 international congregations and have seen several thousand people pray to receive Christ.

No one understands better the collateral benefit of being a praying church than Steve Gaines. He is currently pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, TN. Prior to serving in that position, Steve pastored First Baptist Church of Gardendale near Birmingham, AL. For seven years First Baptist Gardendale led the entire state in baptisms—and they never had an evangelistic program. People often asked what Steve’s secret was. He simply explained, “When God comes to church, people get saved.”

That’s what I’m talking about! When we put our energy into attracting the manifest presence of Christ through prayer, people get saved.

Does this whet your appetite for Christ to make His presence conspicuously known among your people? You have everything you need right now to build a praying church. Be courageous!

FRED HARTLEY is the lead pastor of Lilburn Alliance Church in metro Atlanta, GA. He is the author of 19 books and the president of the College of Prayer International. This article is adapted from his book Church on Fire—A 31-Day Adventure to Welcome the Manifest Presence of Christ.

Building Your Prayer Shield

Whether you are a pastor or a business person, retired or a student, God wants you to have a prayer shield—a team of prayer partners who are called and committed to pray consistently, and in most cases daily, for you and for the work of Christ to be accomplished through you. It is good for you to communicate your specific needs, challenges, and assignments to this group at least once a month. Please read the next statement slowly, carefully, and prayerfully:

If you do not currently have a prayer shield, it is probably because you don’t think you need one or because you don’t think your assignment is important enough to require one. In either case, you are wrong.

You may be thinking, Well, I don’t need a prayer team. I don’t have a high calling like a pastor or a missionary does; they need prayer covering, but I don’t. Not so fast. If you are in Christ, you have a call of God on your life. Don’t ever feel inferior or substandard. Every call of God on our lives is a high calling and a supernatural one. For this reason we all need a prayer shield.

The Apostle Paul knew that he needed a prayer shield. No less than five distinct times he recruited personal prayer partners to pray for him and for Christ’s work through him. (See 1 Thessalonians 5:25, Romans 15:30, 2 Corinthians 1:11, Philippians 1:19, Philemon 22.)

I love to honor my prayer shield. I give careful thought to consistently and creatively expressing appreciation to those who pray for me and for Christ’s work to be accomplished through me. I recruited my first prayer partners when I went off to college. I sent out letters to many people in my home church asking them if they would be willing to pray for me daily through my college years. To my surprise 18 wonderful people agreed. I am confident the reason God blessed me during the four years of college is largely due to these individuals’ faithful prayers.

The future belongs to the intercessors, and we are all indebted to them for their faithful prayer ministry on our behalf.

– FRED HARTLEY