Nothing brings a church together quite like prayer. Imagine a full year of unified prayer for your church’s vision and ministries.
As your church focuses on the major prayer needs of your church, you’ll grow together and harness the power of God to tackle the most important spiritual needs of your community and your church.
And don’t worry. It’s easier than it might seem. Regardless of the size and budget of your church, you can easily scale the project to something that makes sense in your context.
These five steps will get you started.
1) Define the Purpose of the Guide
This might sound obvious. You create a prayer guide to help people pray, right? Yes, but why are you trying to motivate your congregants to pray specifically for your church?
- Do you want to spark a greater unity?
- Are you hoping to cultivate a deeper understanding of what it means to intercede for others?
- Do you want to teach people to pray more consistently?
You’ll structure your guide differently for each of these purposes. For example, if you want to spark greater unity in your church, your prayer requests will focus on your shared vision and community needs. If it’s a teaching tool, you’ll likely want to build in more scripture.
2) Choose a Format that Works for Your Church
The format of your guide may be the most important decision you make (other than what you’re praying for). You want a format that matches your church. You can use multiple formats, but each will take a specific amount of financial and time resources. Here are a few options:
- Print calendar: Printing your calendar has the advantage of being easy to make and hang in congregants’ homes or offices. Plus, you’ll likely have a high percentage of your people use it.
Of course, the big downfall is that you’ll need to pay printing costs. To save money, you can make it monochromatic and purely informational, but don’t expect anyone to hang it up if that’s the case.
- Mobile app: If you can put the calendar on your mobile app, your congregants can take it with them throughout the day. You can also add some interactive elements.
However, you may have some demographic groups that won’t use a mobile app version.
- Email: Assuming your church has software that can help you automate email, you can schedule a year’s worth of daily emails to people in your church who have signed up to get your prayer calendar.
While this pushes the calendar content to them, you may have a small percentage of people who open these emails.
Your format will play a significant role in deciding what content you can include in your calendar. For example, if you’re using emails, you could include written prayers in the guide. But you’ll likely have less space to work with if you’re creating a printed calendar.
3) Develop Themes for Weeks
Before you write the prayer requests (or prayers) for your calendar, you’ll need to determine whether you will create content for each day or each week. Since most churches will choose 52 themes for weekly content, this blog post will focus on that scenario. But just recognize that you could choose a 365-day option. This might be particularly good for larger churches with a greater variety of prayer needs.
Sit down with a spreadsheet and enter dates for the 52 weeks in the first column. Then, pencil in themes for each of those weeks.
First, note holidays. Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day are obvious themes for specific weeks of your year. You may even want to have multiple weeks of prayer themes for Christmas and Easter.
Then, write about key church/community events. For example, if your church has an anniversary or your community has a fall festival, you’ll want to include those in your calendar. Don’t forget to include any mission trips your church has.
You’ll likely still have 35 or so additional weeks to fill. Look at your church vision and pull some themes related to it. For example, if your vision includes discipleship, include a few weeks where your church specifically prays for spiritual growth and the ministries related to that in the church. If outreach is in your vision, pray for specific outreach activities and particular neighborhoods your church wants to engage.
Then, add broader themes, such as families and relationships, local schools and education (particularly when school starts), and the persecuted church.
Ensure you also include some weeks to pray for your church’s pastoral staff. Birthdays and marriage anniversaries are good times to do this.
4) Crafting Your Prayer Prompts
Keep your calendar as simple as possible. For each of your themes, write a clear prayer request. The length can depend upon your particular format, but you shouldn’t need more than 1-2 sentences.
For example, if you’re writing one for your upcoming Easter services, it may read: Pray that many will come to faith in Christ during our Easter worship services and that our church will be a welcoming place for guests.
You might also include a prayer request for your youth ministry, such as: Pray that our youth will grow in their faith and build lasting relationships.
Depending on your format, you may also include a brief written prayer to guide those new to talking with God. Maybe something like this: “Lord, help us to create a welcoming environment for our Easter services where guests can learn more about your great love for us.”
Do what you can to make your prayer guide visually appealing. If you have the room, include images of whatever you’re asking people to pray for (such as photos of your church’s youth during the week(s) you’re praying for them).
5) Pray for the Future, Celebrate the Past
Set your church up for a year to remember by praying for specific needs in your church and community. A prayer calendar can be a force for uniting your church around your shared vision.
But before you dive into next year, celebrate what God has done through your church this year. Our guide, The Ultimate Guide for Creating a Compelling Year-End Impact Report, walks your church through developing a year-end impact report that shares your church’s story from the last year as you excite them for the year ahead.
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