Uncommon Prayer: Seven Nights of Prayer for Boosting Your Church or Lauching a New One

The fiollowing ideas are from prayer leader, Phil Migiloratti.  They can be used for a church-wide prayer event to help boost your church's effectiveness for Christ or as a week-long new church launch.

If you anticipate that each night will have a different group of people (only a few returning), then you might want to set a focus and format that is the same every evening. For example:

• Upward – focus on praise and giving thanks
• …use a song or scripture to transition to
• Downward – humble yourselves in confession and repentance; individual and corporate
• …use a song or scripture to transition to
• Inward – invite the Holy Spirit to examine heart commitment to Christ and to his mission
• …use a song or scripture to transition to
• Outward – focus prayers on the community, asking the Lord to empower the members of the congregation to live lives of influence and impact for Christ
• …use a song or scripture to transition to
• Backward – spend time recalling the great acts of God in scripture, history and in the life of the congregation as a means of increasing faith
• …use a song or scripture to transition to
• Forward – ask pray-ers to recite scripture as prayers of declaring the good purposes of God (such as Hab 2:14)
• …conclude with a song of declaration and celebration

Another approach is to set a different theme/focus for each evening, such as:

• Monday – Giving thanks and welcoming the presence of God in each life, each room, each event/activity, through all generations
• Tuesday – Families prayerwalk together (scripture and guide provided for their praying; especially with young children)
• Wednesday – Ministries, classes, committees, groups pray together (provide a guide of topics to help them pray proactively)
• Thursday – Focus praying on community needs (distribute recent newspaper pages and ask pray-ers to scan for people, places, things (issues) to pray about
• Friday – Ask the youth worship team to lead a set of worship then pray that this building will become a House of Prayer and Praise unto the Lord
• Saturday – Hang large sheets of paper, ask pray-ers to write the names of lost persons on the papered wall then pray in triplets for each other’s names
• Sunday – An all-the-church celebration of life in Christ at the Lord’s Table (communion)