Hi,
I was wondering if anybody out there has ever done something like this at there church? If so, could you please give me any advise you may have? And if you've not, perhaps consider doing such in your own congregation.
At my church I am the "Prayer Pastor" and oversee the corporate aspect of our church's prayer life. Recently at church we have been having an extremely high amount of people on a regular basis want to request prayer during Sunday morning services. Being that we believe in an "open church" type format, where people are free to contribute, we are pretty ok with such things happening. However, lately, there have been times where prayer requests have been so numerous that we can easily spend 45+ minutes taking prayer requests, and haven't even come around to actually praying, or doing praise & worship, let alone preaching.
So of late my pastor and I have been trying to come up with solutions to curb this problem. We didn't want to shut such activity down altogether like we know has happened in some other churches. Because our church is still trying to grow in the direction of an open church, where everybody can minister to everybody, we wanted to embrace what was going on, yet attempt to steer it in a more practical direction.
So he suggested we do something he heard is done in a larger church out in California (Jack Hayford's?). We essentially divided the congregation up into four sections. And out of those four sections we identified where certain more mature Christians and elders who know how to pray generally sat. If there was a section of the conregation that didn't have as many mature Christians and strong prayer warriors in it, we asked some of these people before hand to consider moving to another part of the congregation.
Once we had to some degree secured that mature believers were placed throughout all the congregation, we then directed all the congregation to simply break up into clusters of about 5-10 people, or however many they felt comfortable with in a group. Once in their individual groups, we simply directed people to make their prayer requests known to one another, and to pray for the needs of the people in their group. And, once your group was finished, we asked people to quietly sit down and wait on everybody else to finish before we moved on to the next part of the service.
By doing this, we are giving everybody a chance in the church to make whatever prayer request known, without at the same time, bogging down the service with such requests. In fact, I'd say in doing such, more people gave their prayer requests than would have even done so if we simply did it one by one, as everybody is not as comfortable speaking publicly before 100 people, thus, they are less inclined to make requests. Also, we ended up spending perhaps 10-15 minutes altogether on prayer, whereas before we'd take 45 minutes worth of requests.
This is especially helpful I think for the homeless part of our congregation we bus in from the shelter every morning. Many of these people have bad drug problems, and only a few in times past have ever stood in the congregation to ask for prayer in regard to their problem. I managed to pray with a large group of them this past Sunday, and there were at least 4 or 5 requests for prayer from people that are struggling in this area.
So, with all that said, any ideas others might have would be appreciated. This is a new thing we are doing at our church, and are open to suggestions.
