To Love Your Church, Pray for Your Church
By Glenna Marshall
Many years ago, some friends of ours suffered a house fire. These friends had spent decades in church ministry but were now attending our church as regular members after a string of difficult years left them without a place to serve. Once the fire was put out and it was safe to go inside, we sifted through household items that weren’t too smoke or water damaged. I found a basket in the living room that contained a church member directory from one of the previous churches where they had long labored. The directory was surprisingly undamaged, so I flipped through it before putting it in a pile of things to keep. Our friends had served at a large church, so the directory was thick. Next to nearly every family name was a list of children’s names, prayer needs, and details about each family that seemed important. This wasn’t merely a directory. It was a prayer list.
I had been a pastor’s wife for about seven years on the day I found the directory after the house fire. My own church directory was a fraction of the one I held in my hands, yet I had never invested much time in personal intercession for my church. Our ministry had been difficult from day one, and I didn’t have a lot of affection for my congregation at the time. I complained often and loved little. I was good at keeping people at arms’ length to avoid being hurt me any more than I had. Fingering the church directory and wiping away soot from the pages of notes, I knew my friends had been deeply hurt by some of the things they experienced in their many years of ministry, and yet—they weren’t bitter. They still loved the people they had ministered to. I felt that I held in my hands the secret to their love: prayer.
Since that day gathering ash-covered, smokey household items from our friends’ home, I’ve pondered the difference that regular prayer might have made in my ministry in those early years. Perhaps our ministry would have still looked like a failure to most, but I’m certain that intentional prayer would have affected the attitude of my heart. Nearly a decade has passed since my friends’ house fire, but the Lord used that smudged, marked-up church directory to reveal my lack of love for my church. He also helped me to see the remedy for it.
Praying for your church family regularly does at least a couple of things. First, the practice of intercession makes your heart tender towards them. It’s difficult to hold grudges against people for whom you are devoted to prayer. Approaching the throne of God for a person who gets under your skin is more likely to change you than them, but perhaps that’s the point. We feel that our ministry should be about getting others to examine their hearts and follow Jesus faithfully—and ministry is about that. But, I’ve found that much of the time, the heart examination that most needs to happen is mine. Praying for my church family reveals my selfishness and lack of love, but it also softens my heart towards people I find difficult or needy.
Praying for my church family requires that I know them, really know them. If I want to bear their burdens, as commanded by Paul in Galatians 6:2-5, then I have to know what their burdens are. I have to be invested in their lives. Here are some questions I regularly ask the Lord during my prayer time each week:
Who can I encourage this week with a call/text/letter in the mail?
Who might need a meal dropped off on their porch?
Who is stuck at home and might need me to pick up a prescription or some items from the pharmacy?
Who seemed discouraged the last time we talked?
Who haven’t I contacted in a long time?
Each of these questions requires me to reach out and ask someone what they need and how I can pray. And that’s the key right there: asking. Not everyone feels comfortable broadcasting their lives on social media. Though I do take note when someone mentions their illness or challenging life circumstance on Facebook, asking someone how you can pray communicates that you want to know them and that you care about what is happening in their life. It can lead to a deeper conversation or a coffee date. The more I learn about my church family, the more effectively I can pray. And the more I pray, the more I love. The more I love, the more the Lord knits us together. The more we’re knitted together, the more we can show Christ to our community.
Over the years, as I’ve seen the Lord work in my slow-growing prayer life, I’ve adopted some patterns of prayer for my church. Each morning when I read my Bible and pray, I devote a few minutes to prayer for our pastors and church body as a whole. I pray for those members on the fringe of church life, those who are suffering, those who are sick, those who are wandering. A lot of my calls, texts, and letters come from this time in prayer each morning. I keep my weekly planner next to me when I pray so that if the Spirit brings someone to mind, I can jot down their name and then continue in prayer. I’m more likely to follow-through if I write down what the Lord brings to mind.
My family works through the church directory by praying for one family or member per evening at dinner time. Years ago, I wrote down every church member’s name on popsicle sticks, banded them together with a rubber band, and stored them in a coffee mug. Each night, one of my kids pulls a popsicle stick from the banded group. We pray over that person or family together and return them to the coffee mug without banding them back together with the others. Once all the sticks have moved from the rubber band to standing freely in the mug, I band them all together again, and we start over.
We often snap a picture of the popsicle stick for the evening and text it to the person we’re praying for, and we always receive a reply of appreciation. People want to know they’re being prayed for. It communicates love and concern.
But, prayer does more than that. It binds my heart to my church. It protects me from bitterness. It helps me to view my congregation as family, to step outside my own little world and serve others, to value their faithfulness to Jesus more than our “successful” ministry. Developing a habit of prayer takes time, and prayer itself takes time. But the investment is never wasted. While you might be praying for the Lord to change your church, you can be sure that He will use prayer to change you.
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence: Why God is Always Enough (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness: The Beauty of Ordinary Perseverance in a Demanding World (Crossway, June 2020).