Further tips for fostering group prayer

I wrote earlier about how it's good for people to pray out loud in our small groups, and then gave a few tips for helping group members to do so. Here are some more ideas for encouragement, modelling, and sharing in prayer.

Divide the group into smaller groups of twos or threes

This is a good way of reducing the ‘audience’ so to speak and helping people feel more comfortable, thereby reducing the anxiety someone may feel about praying out loud. In our women’s groups, at the beginning of each year, I divide the group into smaller groups of 2-3 women. Whenever we divide up into smaller groups for prayer, the women meet with the same 2-3 women. This is a great way for women to follow up prayer points and get to know each other better, sharing their lives as they pray.

It’s also an opportunity to allow other people in the group to exercise leadership. To help facilitate the small group prayer time, I appoint a leader of that little group. The task is for that leader to make sure prayer actually happens and that everyone gets a turn—we all know how easy it is to share prayer points and never pray or for one person to continually take up the prayer time with their points. I encourage this leader to be sensitive to the women who are still uncomfortable with praying out loud and to take the time to find ways to get together with the women outside the Bible study time and to follow up prayer points. This is a way of training up potential Bible study leaders or giving people the opportunity to lead even though they might not be capable of teaching a group.

On the issue of small prayer groups, it’s worth bearing in mind dynamics between men and women and married and single people. Some married couples are happy to be in separate prayer groups, others aren’t. A person who isn’t comfortable praying out loud may be find it easier if their spouse is in the same group. If small prayer groups are meant to encourage the members to freely share in a secure environment so they can take the step of praying out loud, same gender groups may facilitate this.

Ask everyone to write out one prayer point

Give each member of the group a piece of paper. (If you’re into nice paper, go for it! Otherwise, plain old paper is fine!) Ask them to write their name on the top and then one prayer point for themselves based on the study or something more general they are happy for others to know about. Then, going around the group each person can either pray for themselves. Alternatively you could ask everyone to pass their piece of paper to the person sitting on their left and that person prays for the person whose name is on the piece of paper. You can then encourage everyone to keep the piece of paper in their Bible or on the fridge door (where thy will see it regularly) and to pray for that person every day that week. This can be done in a large group, or you could divide the group into smaller groups of twos or threes.

But even here it’s a case of knowing your flock. Some people struggle with literacy—either because they never learnt to read or write, they can’t write in English, they’re not confident writers, can’t spell well or their writing is illegible. Other people find it hard to read and pray at the same time. If this is the case, you could make writing optional and say, “If you prefer. You can say your prayer point”, or “You don’t have to pray exactly what the person next to you has written—you can ask them to tell you their prayer point or pray using your own words”. But make sure you leave enough time for this exercise or those who struggle will get stressed.

It’s a common problem that some people find it easier to give general prayer points. So they start their prayer point with “Pray that people will”. I like to encourage people to use the word “I” or “me”. For example, “Please pray that I will…”, or “Please pray that God will help me to…”. Using these types of guidelines helps people to think about how God’s word applies directly to them.

Notice what people pray about

It’s amazing how encouraging it is when someone follows up on what we’ve prayed about. It could be as simple:

“I really appreciated what you prayed for the group.”

“I loved the way you tied your prayer point to the application that flowed out of our study. Thank you.”

“I noticed you said in your prayer that you have been really tired … is there some way I can help you or I can be praying for you during the week?”

“Thank you for your prayer for me, it really comforted me that you took the time to pray for me.”

This is a great way of getting the message out that prayer matters, and that it’s a corporate activity we can do to help each other. Remembering what someone prayed about and following up the next week has the same effect. Praying repeatedly about an issue can mistakenly be seen as repetitive and useless. But Jesus tells a story about a persistent widow who kept coming back to the judge with her plea and was finally granted her request. Jesus told this parable to teach his disciples to “always pray and not lose heart.” (Luke 18:1-8)

Most years, I give the women in my group a notebook to record each other’s prayer points. This helps people who aren’t confident praying out loud for three reasons:

1. They can use their notes to pray during the week and thereby still feel useful and involved in the prayer life of the group even of they don’t yet feel comfortable to pray out loud.


2. As they get used to praying during the week for the group members using their notes, their confidence to pray out loud for those people in the group grows.


3. It helps them remember what people have shared so they can more easily pray for them out loud using their notes as a guide.

As an added bonus, at the end of every 6 months, it’s a wonderful source of thankfulness to look over the notes everyone’s kept to see how God has answered the groups’ prayers. In itself this can be a huge encouragement to pray out loud in the group setting.

Give people time to transition

For some, hearing the biblical motivations for audible prayer and using the above tips quickly warms them to the idea and they take the leap. For others, their confidence builds more slowly. This means it’s worth thinking of ways to give people time to transition. For example, if you’re inviting everyone to pray working your way around the group, you can suggest that if someone doesn’t want to pray, they could tap the hand or shoulder of the person next to them and that this is completely fine. Another idea is to allow someone who’s not quite comfortable with praying out loud, to share ideas for prayer or their own prayer point and then getting someone else in the group to pray their points.

Train your leaders

If we want to create an atmosphere where all members of our small groups feel comfortable to pray, then we can’t be the only one modeling it. So we need to take the time to train our leaders in the motivations for audible prayer and the kinds of things that are helpful and unhelpful to encourage people to pray out loud. Why not gather your leaders or other mature Christians in your small group(s) and work through the Bible passages I mentioned earlier and brainstorm ideas on what works and what doesn’t. Your leaders might even give you some ideas that have worked in their group.

On that note, what have you found helpful in your groups?