Getting People Involved in Prayer Gatherings

Prayer gatherings are about getting many people involved in prayer and taking their next steps in growing in prayer.  Here are a few ways we try and do that at our Monday night prayer gatherings.

1. Prayer Ministry Time
    Having people stand for various needs and all the people around them gather around them to pray. This helps everybody be involved.  We usually encourage 1 or 2 of these people to pray out loud for that person.  This involves the people praying out loud but also models for those who have never prayed out loud how to do that.  We might pray for single moms one night or people dealing with hopelessness or people who are dealing with illness, etc.  We often do this toward the end of our prayer time.

2. Open mics.
    We may pray for a particular topic for the night such as revival.  We let people come to the mics at will and pray.  We do have parameters.  People are encouraged to pray sentence and paragraph prayers and not pray chapter prayers.  We have some people assigned to mics to lay a hand on the shoulder of anyone who is going too long and straying away from the topic that night.  On another night we may have people give thanks to God as we did this past Monday night.  We asked people to pray sentence prayers beginning with "God I am thankful for..."

3. Specific people praying.
    We may pray through various topics in a given night.  I may say take a moment and pray for people to get saved this coming weekend.  We give everyone a few minutes to pray and then someone that has been asked beforehand will pray on a mic to close that topic.  If you aren't a large prayer times you can do the same thing with just having those people specified to pray out loud.

4. Prayer Teams
    At the end of our corporate prayer we have teams of people up at the front to pray for anyone who wants to come forward and receive prayer.  We have worship music praying in the background for 15 minutes after prayer has dismissed.  Our prayer teams have gone through a 1 and 1/2 hour prayer training before they can be on a prayer team.

These are just a few of the ways we try and get people involved in our prayer gatherings.  We know that Jesus said his house should be a house of prayer.  We are trying to get as many people involved in helping that happen as we can.