Proactive and Reactive Prayer

In a recent post, having noted that the Bible’s prayers are often focused on calling on God to fulfil his promises, I asked the question:

Does your small group spend time praying for God to be active and fulfilling his promises to establish the New Jerusalem?

Our standard operating procedures (“SOPs”) in home groups don’t help us much in this regard. Whilst I love the fact that we share prayer points around the group—it is a great way to express care for each other—which of the following might stand out as a prayer point that would be statistically rare in your group:

1. pray for my quiet times;


2. pray for me, I have exams;


3. pray for my aunty who is sick with ____ ;


4. pray that God might send out his Word and Spirit in [Indonesia] and that he might build his church there.

In my experience, number 4 is pretty unusual. Same for you? By and large, prayer points shared around the room tend to be reactive to the life issues that each of us, or our friends/family, are facing. And please don’t hear me saying anything other than that is appropriate and good, especially in a home group context.

But…

It seems to me also appropriate that home groups be proactive in praying for the coming of God’s kingdom. We surely don’t need to look any further than the Lord’s Prayer to establish a basic case for such a principle. And that sort of prayer is, at least in my experience, less likely to be spontaneous. (Although it will often flow out of the passage of Scripture we have been studying if we encourage that.)

So here is my suggestion: at least once a month, ask one or two of your group members to prepare in advance a (written) prayer for some aspect of God’s kingdom work in our world. Then on the night, explain that these members are going to lead in prayer focused on God’s kingdom, perhaps even as a separate time of prayer before collecting and praying for individual concerns.

A side benefit

Recently I heard from a bloke who was asked to lead off the prayer time in the home group he is part of—with just a few seconds notice. Now this bloke is extremely intelligent, very thoughtful in his faith, but struggles to articulate those thoughts verbally on the spur of the moment. He was totally thrown by being asked, and later said “I have no idea what I prayed or whether it made any sense at all”. He basically felt embarrassed and discouraged by the whole experience.

He’s not alone, folks. There are people in your home group who really struggle with articulating prayers in public like this. For a significant number, it is a fear that actually keeps them from even joining a home group in the first place.

Asking group members to prepare some prayers in advance gives some hope to these people. My friend would happily (well, maybe not happily—but willingly) lead in prayer if he had time to prepare something and read it out. But in most groups, such a way of praying would stick out like a sore thumb… unless we had consciously cultivated such a practice as leaders by regularly asking people to do it as part of our SOPs.

More than that, as leaders we can really help people grow as mature Christians by coaching them in the process of preparing a prayer for the group. So, when you invite them to do it for the first few times, suggest that if they’d like to they could send you a draft of their prayer by email a couple of days in advance of the home group meeting. Most will be grateful for the chance to do this and get some reassurance.

Reading their prayer not only gives you the chance to reassure them, and perhaps to help them improve it, but gives you very helpful information about their Christian understanding, and an opportunity to gently teach them about kingdom issues and priorities.

These are all helpful steps on the path to group members becoming more confident leaders in praying. Which is a very nice side benefit to the primary goal of praying some bigger kingdom prayers in your group.

There are more tips on helping people in this area of praying here and here.

Author: Ian Carmichael