About every six months I develop a prayer template to use for Monday nights. I pray and ask God to lead me in developing that template. I also am attentive to what God is saying to our lead pastor, other pastors and staff, and key prayer leaders within the church.
Currently, we have a general topic of focus for each of the four weeks of the month that we pray for. If a month has a fifth week I use that week to be creative. Week one the focus is on vision, week two on specific ministries of the church, week three missions and the city, and week four is for revival and intimacy with God.
Beyond this focus, I have four key areas to focus on each of these nights. I use the ACTS prayer model for these. For the A (adoration) we have a musical set with some variation. We may read a passage of the Bible to begin prayer with and then sing three songs.
After worship we try and listen. We take a moment to hear what God is saying to us as we have connected with Him in our worship. Part of this process is I have a core of people with a heart for prayer that help put Monday night together. These 10 people are listening to God and when I have us wait on God, these guys know they can approach me with a direction for prayer or an inclination they have of something that needs to be said. Many times during this time we try and have a time of C(confession). I will initiate people asking God if their is anything that they need to confess and ask for forgiveness about. A bulk of this would be initiated by a certain passage of Gods word.
Our next step is T (thanksgiving). We share how many people committed their lives to Christ the previous week and some answers to prayer. We try and capture both individual answers and corporate answers to prayer the previous weeks. Many Mondays we will have someone share a story of how God has impacted them.
After thanksgiving we move to S (supplication). This is a time we are corporately praying for various prayer topics. We might have people who have been asked to come up and pray beforehand over specific things. There are nights we will have an open mic, where people are invited to pray paragraph prayers about topics such as missions, revival, or people getting saved in our city.
We follow supplication with ministry prayer. We will have specific needs stand for prayer. We might pray for a certain segment of the marketplace. After fathers day we might pray for all the fathers. At other times we pray for various ministries of our church and the people there that night who represent those ministries.
Having said all of the above, there are nights when some topic will be strongly on my mind during worship or one of our prayer team will come up and tell me something God is speaking to them. At this point we may change a little of the night up or a lot.
I really like something Jim Cymbala says in Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire "The format of a prayer meeting is not nearly important as it's essence ------ touching the Almighty, crying out with ones whole being. ... The atmosphere of the meeting may vary, what matters most is that we encounter the God of the universe not each other."
Newly added in June
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We have added a small intercessory time each week 15 minutes before prayer. A group of our Monday night leadership team people gather at the front of the building by the stage and join hands and pray over the service each Monday night. They will also pray for me or anyone else leading that night. This time of prayer is led by our prayer intern: Matt Martin.
