Three Simple Changes to Improve Your Church's Prayer Times
Blog Post by Justin Nash
One area that is often overlooked in planning and evaluating a worship service is prayer. However, the quality of the prayer times can have a huge impact on the overall atmosphere of the service. A commitment to improving a church’s corporate prayer times will go a long way in bringing new life to not just the worship service, but to the overall health of the church. Here are three simple and positive tweaks you can make to your corporate prayer times that will pay huge dividends.
1. Pray with a purpose
First, each instance of prayer in the service needs a specific purpose. Often prayer is a rote and routine part of the service and the prayers are fairly generic and interchangeable. This leads to a stagnation of the prayer times. The prayers just become noise that no one really hears.
One solution to this is to make every prayer purposeful. For instance, the opening prayer might be a prayer of praise, or perhaps, repentance to prepare the congregation’s heart at the beginning of the service. Each prayer could serve as a directional mark guiding the service from preparation to worship, to hearing the Word and finally, response to the Word.
This will require a little work for those who plan the worship service, and some discipline for those who pray. But it allows prayer to become a more integrated and complementary part of the service than it often is.
2. Use prepared prayers
A second change would be to begin using written or prepared prayers. Many in the Free Church tradition will recoil in horror at this suggestion. But this is a simple change that can serve not just to enhance the quality of the prayer times, it would also be a powerful teaching tool for the members of the church.
First, using written or prepared prayers would remove much of the “heaping up of empty phrases” (Matthew 6:7) that plagues many of the prayers during the service. This is important because the congregants will learn how to pray in part by listening to those who are praying publicly. As D.A. Carson exhorts, “If you are in any form of spiritual leadership, work on your public prayers. It is not a question of pleasing our human hearers, but of instructing them and edifying them.”[1] Our church members, including our children, learn to pray by listening to others pray.
Those of us who have occasion to pray publicly need to remember this. By writing our prayers beforehand, or using time-tested prayers written by others, our prayers will become more thoughtful and our word choices more careful. Or, where appropriate, you can use prayers directly from Scripture. Teaching through example in our corporate services will pay dividends in not just the corporate life of the church, but in the individual lives of church members as they practice prayer in private as they learned it in public.
3. Focus on the spiritual more than the physical
Finally, prayer should focus on the spiritual more than on the physical. This seems to comport better with the biblical prayers modeled in the Bible, particularly those of the New Testament. However, most churches’ prayers and prayer requests are physical in nature, asking for healing from sickness and disease. It is, of course, good to pray for healing. But we impoverish the spiritual lives of our church and members when that is all we focus on. To focus on the spiritual and the eternal more will help to turn people’s hearts from the physical and temporal to the spiritual and the eternal. So take time to pray for specific spiritual needs in your church and community.
These proposed changes to prayer can be accomplished as the pastor and those responsible for leading worship work together to slowly develop these habits for a more fruitful prayer time. These are small tweaks that do not require you to make any major changes to your worship service, but the benefits can be significant.
[1] D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1992), chap.1, Kindle.