How the Corporate Church Should Pray

[nwink]

Often in church prayer meetings, church members request prayer for temporal needs (sickness, selling a house, etc) which are valid prayer needs. But one wise Christian man I know said something to the effect of, "If we only pray for sickness all the time as a church body, and when the Lord answers our church's prayers, we might have a healthy church...but then what?" This man was implying that if we only always pray for sick people, when will we ever also corporately pray for holiness, evangelism, our church officers, etc?

When we ask for the church to pray for an issue, what should direct us? Is it really effective or even possible for us to always pray for someone's cousin's pastor's second-cousin who is having surgery? With so many prayer needs living in the 21st century when the world is connected a lot more (making a LOT more awareness of specific prayer needs than people would've known 100 years ago), what should direct us in what concerns we do pray regularly for?

I don't know if I'm right or not, but I feel like ideally church members should submit prayer requests to the church only when it is something so burdensome on them and important that they NEED the church to support them in prayer for the topic. (Granted, I wouldn't discourage anyone from praying for the most trivial-seeming, legitimate requests brought up by any member of the church.) Related, I feel like in most cases, prayer requests should be mentioned for a close family member, co-worker, etc...not some way distant relative's friend's cousin-once-removed.

Thoughts?

 

[Jack K]

Most of us have pretty sorry prayer lives. We don't express dependence on God nearly as much as we ought to. So when someone wants to pray about something, anything, I hate to discourage it.

Jesus taught that prayer should reflect the attitude of a child with his Father. That's not an excuse to be immature, but it does tell us that God wishes us to share our burdens with him even though these desires are often not as mature as they could be. It may indeed be more mature to desire spiritual growth rather than temporal things. It may be more appropriate to desire group benefits when in a group, and pray for those. But a wise prayer group leader also understands that prayer should be an unloading of whatever burdens a believer has, even if they're not the best burdens he could have. There's maturity in this, too.

Adjusting our prayer toward more mature desires can help direct our hearts. But it's even more important that our hearts direct our prayer. So we should not be too quick to be critical of any requests.

As a Sunday school teacher, much of my group prayer takes place with children. They often want to pray for their pets. They want to pray that they'll get good birthday presents. And so I'm constantly tempted to use prayer time to correct them; to direct them toward things more imporant than pets and less selfish than presents. And those would be good lessons.

But I resist, and here's why: I'm also teaching them about prayer itself. I'm teaching them to be dependent on God. I'm teaching them that whatever burdens they have, they should take these to their Father. And as they become more mature, learning to be selfless and to see beyond their own world and to seek personal holiness, their prayers become better too.

 

[jambo]

As praying in private so in corporate prayer. Prayer is not simply coming to God with a shopping list. The elements of praise, thanksgiving, confession and intercession should all be present at the church prayer meeting. Depending on who is leading, the time would be divided up into segments for reading and meditating upon the word from which praise and prayer is based upon. For intercession there are some elements that are constant. Praying for the ministry of the various departments within the church, missionaries, outreach of the church, etc. Personal needs are brought before the Lord but they are usually needs which people do feel burdened for What we have started to do recently has been to pray through the previous Sunday's sermon as we prayerfully seek to apply the message to our lives.

 

[Reformed Roman]

This is a topic I really wish had more comments