How to Have a Church Prayer Meeting

A little over a year ago our church began devoting one Sunday evening service a month exclusively to prayer. Honestly, I wasn’t sure it would take. But a year into the switch I think our people are growing to appreciate the prayer service more and more. We don’t get everyone to come back for prayer, but it’s roughly the same size we get for our regular Sunday evening service (around 125 people, or about 1/4 the size of Sunday morning).

Here are seven things we’ve learned about having a church prayer meeting.

1. Pray. Don’t make your “prayer meeting” a time for 5 hymns, a short message, sharing requests, and 10 minutes for prayer. Get down to business and pray.

2. Start on time and end on time. This may not be true for every culture, but in America punctuality helps. People know what to expect. We will pray together for one hour.

3. Plan. If you are praying with a few mature, seasoned pray-ers, you may be able to get by with little preparation. But leading a church-wide prayer meeting takes, well, leadership. You have to think through what you are going to do. Recently I planned the prayer service around the fruit of the spirit. At other times we’ve prayed for different ministries in the church. We’ve used prayer books and lots of Scripture. We’ve borrowed from ancient patterns of prayer. We’ve even walked through the building to pray. The point is you can’t wing it with 100 people. You have to prepare.   Keep Reading >>>

See Also: Sample Prayer Service

Ten Principles for Church Singing (Part 2)

 (Go here for Part 1)

6. We should strive for excellence in the musicality and the poetry of the songs we sing.

I’m not for a moment suggesting elitism. A tine has to be relatively simple for hundreds or thousands of people to sing it at the same time.  But we can still insist on undistracting excellence (to use Piper’s phrase). We want the cross to be the stumbling block, not our poor musicianship or faltering powerpoint.

While I believe a wide variety of styles can be used in worship, I am not a musical relativist.  Some songs are better than others. Some styles work better than others. And when it comes to lyrics, we should avoid obvious sloppiness like using thee and you in the same song or heaping up trite cliches. I heard a song on the radio a couple weeks ago whose chorus had something about a fragrant rose in the early spring and an eagle soaring to spread its wings. If your church sings this on Sunday, love your worship leader all the same. But if you’re the worship leader picking this song, try for something with a little more artistry, something that doesn’t sound like it came from a random page in your inspirational pocket calendar. Keep Reading...

Singing Has Gotten Entirely out of Hand

A Snapshot of Christ Singing