Church Prayer Walk lesson

I’ve been working through our Bible lessons again, and this time as I’ve been teaching about Abraham and the other patriarchs again I noticed just how much they pray. We’ve been slowly working with them on praying and had a member of our prayer team come to talk to them. Then after over a month of talking about prayer, we went on a church prayer walk and had the most amazing church prayer walk lesson.

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Preparing for the church prayer walk

Before we walked the church praying for it, we talked about what areas of the church they really wanted to pray for. Our class is full of volunteer kids, and so they primarily wanted to pray for the areas their parents were serving in.

After talking we narrowed it down to four areas for our church prayer walk:

• worship service
• children’s ministry
• Guardians (basically their job is to make sure no one suspicious is there or help if there’s a medical emergency, there are a couple of paramedics on the team)
• welcome team

There are a few other areas we could have prayed for, but four were more than enough for our walk.

• prayer team
• youth group
• children’s worship
• facilities or tech team

Once I had it narrowed down I went to people serving in those ministries and asked them to give me three prayer requests and one praise.

I took those requests and made them into cards for the kids because if the kids didn’t have something to look at, I didn’t think their prayers would go well. I’m including a blank version of the cards in my subscriber library (JOIN MY NEWSLETTER), obviously, your church’s prayer requests would be very different from my church’s prayer requests.

I currently only have the four areas we used, and it is only in black and white, what other areas would you suggest and use?

More prayer lessons

I just realized I need to make a prayer landing page. I’ve realized I don’t really have landing pages for my various Bible skills I work on with my kids.

• Back to School Prayer maze
• Skittles prayers– this is wildly popular
• Natural Disasters prayer stations– we’ve brought this out from time to time again as natural disasters make the news
• When God uses the Unexpected (praying in times of silence)
• Psalms prayer walk

Preparing the kids on the day of the church prayer walk lesson

Before the lesson, I reminded them of praying for the church and how we’d been talking about prayer, and then told them we were going to walk through the church and pray for four different ministries. Before leaving I asked for four volunteers to pray, one for each group.

I was happily surprised to have more volunteers to pray out loud than I needed. Then we set off.

Our church prayer walk lesson

Here are my takeaways and what I learned.

First, I think it worked very well to have them walk to different areas of the church to get some energy out before we prayed. We didn’t plan to start until about 15-20 minutes after church started to give lots of time for crowds to clear out (our church is rather notorious for being late).

Getting volunteers ahead of time also was a great plan, and really helped our church prayer walk go much smoother.

I also think it worked very well to give each person giving the talk freedom to design it how they wanted.

That means the pastor talked to us about the worship service and the church staff, split them into two lines, and had them take turns praying. The kids loved that. We ended that time with a group cheer. But very quiet because we were right next to the service.

When we talked to the welcome team, she made sure to ask lots of questions and get them to interact with her.

Our Guardian team spokesman took us outside and had fun talking with the kids and you could see him mentally thinking how to make it appropriate for young kids.

Funny story, when I talked with him ahead of time, he was joking about throwing stuff at the kids and how to interact, and I said, “That’s great, but remember we have Bob in that class.” He’s friends with Bob’s dad, and he very quickly said, “Yeah that would turn into chaos if I did that.”

I love my church.

I also think it was a good idea to only have four areas, because if we had talked with more areas than that our kids would have been overwhelmed, and we would have run out of time.

Flexibility is key because sometimes things do not go the way you expect. We were supposed to talk with the children’s ministry first, but she got caught in a minor emergency as happens when you have large numbers of kids.

And that was our church prayer walk. I’m updating this slightly because I somehow left off in the middle of the sentence when I published the post.