"In a recent meeting of the top 100 church planters in our ministry, we looked for common elements among these high-producing leaders. Each of these church planters, along with the teams they led, started more than 20 churches per year, each. One group started more than 500 churches in the previous year. The only common element we found in all these church planters was their commitment to prayer.... These leaders spent an average of three hours per day in personal prayer.
"I was humbled by this commitment to prayer. When I measured my own time in prayer, and my own commitment to prayer, I found myself lacking in devotion.
"Most church planters and missionaries spend their prayer time in trying to get others to pray for them. In the early days of my ministry I spent as much as 20% of my time in developing and maintaining my prayer network. This involved newsletters and personal contacts with prayer partners.
"After our survey of the top church planting performers on our team, I decided to change my strategy. Instead of developing prayer partners, I would pray. I began to call, text message, or e-mail people and praying for them, instead of asking them to pray for me. ...[Now] I have 30 people I pray for every month. When possible, I pray with them in person or by phone. If not possible, such as when I am traveling is blackout conditions, I send text messages or e-mail containing my prayers for each of them.
"The result of this process is that 30 people respond to my prayers by praying for me. As I talk to them about this process I encourage them to pray for 29 other people on the days they are not praying with me. So, in one generation the prayer network goes from 30 to 900 people praying. We pass prayer requests back and forth on this network. We encourage all participants to find 30 people to pray with every month. By three generations there are 27,000 people in the prayer network. That’s 30 X 30 = 900 and 900 X 30 = 27,000. This is exponential growth. If the process is only 10% effective there will be 2,700 people praying. If it is only 1% effective there will be 270 people praying."
Read the rest of this posting here: Thu, 12/27/2007 - 02:00 — David Watson
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
David Watson on prayer
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4 comments:
Hello. This post is likeable, and your blog is very interesting, congratulations :-). I will add in my blogroll =). If possible gives a last there on my site, it is about the CresceNet, I hope you enjoy. The address is http://www.provedorcrescenet.com . A hug.
Hmmmm. Unfortunately I can't read Portuguese.
I can't read Portuguese either.
But I do know that David's approach wouldn't really work for me - I am uncomfortable praying with someone over the phone (or sending them a text message on a phone praying for them).
I do agree that I spend far too much time asking others to pray for me rather than praying for them.
Yes, I think that's the main thing - not necessarily talking to the people you pray for - though that's not bad - but to stop just sending out prayer requests and get down to business... the real work of prayer. And it's not like we're the doers, and the other people are the prayers - it's not supposed to work like that.
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