10 Practical Ideas for Developing a Strategic Prayer Partnership with a Church Plant
Leading your church to engage in a prayer partnership is a great and essential first step in missional engagement. Church planting is difficult and lonely at times, and church planters are in great need of the most powerful resource you can offer, the prayers of the Saints. Implementing a strategic partnership with a church plant is a powerful way to partner with church plants as they spread the gospel and have kingdom impact.
Every church can partner with a church planter because every church can and should have a prayer ministry. However, many churches want to pray for their ministry partnerships but have no tangible plan to do so. This often results in the church losing its passion to pray and the partner feeling forgotten and alone. Here are ten practical ideas for developing a strategic prayer partnership with a church plant:
“Prayer is the slender nerve that moves the muscle of omnipotence.”
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
10 Practical Ideas for Developing a Strategic Prayer Partnership with a Church Plant
1. Read and implement Serving In Your Church Prayer Ministry as Church Wide Emphasis. This is a great resource for laying a solid foundation for a Church Prayer Ministry.
2. Download a Church Planter Profile. Get to know the planter, his family, and the ministry context. Print, distribute, and display these in your church.
3. Initiate a specific and regular time to pray for the planter you adopted. Regularly remind your church of their commitment, responsibility, and privilege to pray. Have them set their phone/clock alarms to the agreed-upon time and stop and pray.
4. Assign Small Groups/Sunday School classes to adopt a planter and his family as they routinely write prayer cards on birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and special occasions.
5. Use quarterly video calls in a church-wide service. Ask planters to share for 5-10 minutes followed by corporate prayer for the adopted planter, family, and church.
6. Google Earth the church planter’s geographic location and pray over his community addressing the needs, barriers, and lostness.
7. Send a team to pray “on-site with insight” at the location of the planter’s community.
8. Use a monthly/weekly update to communicate the prayer needs of the planter you adopted.
9. Share the planters Social Media platforms and have your church encourage them with regular messages of “You have been prayed for today.”
10. Create a prayer chain that will commit to immediate prayer for real-time ministry requests and needs the planter may encounter.
These are just a few practical ways your church can partner with a church plant as you commit to battle for them through prayer. What a wonderful privilege it will be for you and your church to participate in meeting every church planter’s greatest need, having faithful prayer warriors interceding on their behalf.
“And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.”
— Luke 18:1, ESV
