Pastor’s Cave
By Pastor Kelcey West MDiv
Nehemiah’s Ministries
During a recent conference, Scott Kessler shared the following PRAYER PROPOSAL for the local church:
1) Though there is a remnant of corporate prayers at local churches, in general there is a lack of “long praying” (described as praying for one hour or more – mark 14:37) in U.S. church communities, both in the leadership and in the church body
2) Church communities “talk” about prayer: how we want prayer and how much we need prayer. However, we do not long pray in correlative to how much we believe God wills us to pray
3) There is rarely a church culture of corporate prayer and thus they must consider taking the action necessary to create a culture of corporate prayer in the leadership in order to encourage the flock to pray corporately
4) Though all the church is responsible, transformational corporate prayer must begin within the leadership community; the pastoral staff and selected non-pastoral staff
5) Until corporate prayer occurs in the local church leadership as a “want to”, we recommend that corporate prayer be a “have to” mandatory function within the regular responsibilities of all leaders
6) Until this culture of corporate prayer is established in church communities, we recommend one of following four choices be mandatory for church leadership communities:
a) Daily a one-hour block committed to corporate prayer
b) Weekly a 2-hour block committed to corporate prayer
c) Monthly a 4-hour block (1/2 day) committed to corporate prayer
d) Semi-annually an 8-hour block (full day) committed to corporate prayer
e) OUR RECOMMENDATION – all of the above
Additionally, we recommend the following further proposals:
1) Individual departments develop plans to pray together weekly
2) All staff encourage their volunteers to attend a prayer time
3) The church body be intentionally educated on corporate prayer
