The Focus of Corporate Prayer

I read an article on prayer by Jonathan Graf recently.  He made a point about corporate prayer that I thought was important.  His article was on the focus of corporate prayer.  Here is what he said.

Most prayer that takes place in church settings is not corporate prayer. It is more often individual prayer in a corporate setting. Let me assure you that individual prayer in a corporate setting is not wrong. It is an important, valid, needed kind of prayer. But it's not corporate prayer. True corporate prayer seeks God's face as one body in one voice about one thing.

How often do you hear people who gather for prayer praying about 1000 different topics.  This is valid prayer but not corporate prayer.  Corporate prayer is when the group has a focus and is praying together for that focus.

I am convinced God wants the church to pray big focused prayers together.  We should pray for salvations, we should pray for revival, we should pray for vision, we should pray for missions.  This focus of corporate prayer will bring big results.  Many times we are thinking too small as we pray.  If we can get Gods heart for our corporate prayer times I think He will lead us into requests that are bigger than we could think of and bigger than we could complete on our own.

Let your corporate prayer times be a time of being one body in one voice about one focus.

Specificity Helps Repentance

From time to time at our corporate prayer gathering we have times of repentance and confession.  We had one of these times recently and it seemed to go well.  As i was talking to some of our prayer people they let me know they appreciated the specificity of the repentance time.  I read from 1 Corinthians 13 about what love is.  I would read a verse at a time:  "Love is patient" then I would say "have you been impatient in the past week at any time?", then read "Love is kind" and "Have you been unkind to anyone this past week.  People can review the week and think of specific situations when you give them some direction.