5 Reasons Your Church Service Should Include Pastoral Prayer

Our church recently conducted a survey, asking 30 of our core leaders to assess our church’s health. The overall results were encouraging. We scored high in loving community, volunteer organization, and visionary leadership. But of the 100 topics asked about, we scored by far the lowest in prayer.

We began to meet, discuss, and pray together about how to best address this deficiency. We could offer a Sunday school class on prayer, make it a bigger focus in our life groups, or hold monthly prayer meetings. But one thing everyone agreed on was the need for better prayer during our corporate worship services. That’s why we’ve started including a regular pastoral prayer as part of our morning worship.

One thing everyone agreed on was the need for better prayer during our corporate worship services.

Tony Merida defines the pastoral prayer as “an extended time of thanksgiving and intercession . . . [including] prayer for all kinds of physical and spiritual needs in our church; . . . for our city; for our nation; for our church planters and missionaries; and for significant crises—locally and globally.” At our church, we open our pastoral prayer by praising God for who he is, and we end it by asking God to bless the preaching of his Word. In total, this extended time of prayer typically lasts 5–7 minutes.

Perhaps you too have sensed the need to grow your church’s prayer life. If so, let me offer you five reasons to include a pastoral prayer this Sunday.

1. A pastoral prayer helps your church to know its leaders and your leaders to know the church.

Typically, the pastoral prayer is led by—you guessed it—a pastor. While some churches reserve this duty for the lead pastor, we view it as an opportunity to incorporate lay pastor-elders into the worship service. By rotating who leads the prayer each Sunday, we not only share the workload but also give the sheep a chance to hear from all their undershepherds. Because the elder prays through a list of requests he may not have otherwise known about, the pastoral prayer helps our leaders to better know the entire flock.

2. A pastoral prayer helps your church to know one another.

One thing our people love about our church is the tight-knit community. But as our church has grown, it has proven more difficult to maintain the same level of connectedness and intimacy. By publicly lifting up our members’ prayer requests, we bring them before the church as well as before the Lord. This encourages not only the elders or an individual’s small group but everyone in the congregation to “pray for one another” (James 5:16). If “the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working,” how much more power does the collective prayer of the entire church possess?

3. A pastoral prayer lets church members know they’re being prayed for.

Any doubts in my mind about our decision to incorporate a pastoral prayer were removed the first week we made the change. After the service, one of our members I’d prayed for found me in the lobby to thank me, saying, “In 60-plus years of attending, that was the first time I’ve ever been prayed for in church.” May no one in our church have to wait that long again to receive the gift of corporate prayer.

4. A pastoral prayer models how to pray.

Peter exhorts elders to be “examples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:3). Of all the areas where an elder ought to lead by example, prayer is foremost (see Acts 6:4). Christ has given the church its leaders “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12). Is there a spiritual discipline more vital for this task than prayer? Is there a better tool with which we can equip them?

A weekly pastoral prayer systematically disciples our congregations in how to pray. We model a healthy pattern of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. We model prayer for our own church, other local churches, and the global church. We pray for issues facing our city and for issues facing our country and the world. We model missional prayer for lost loved ones and for unreached people groups abroad.

5. A pastoral prayer helps your church to commune with God.

Chiefly, we want our congregants to have deep, growing, personal relationships with the Lord. Good communication is the key to healthy relationships. It’s true for our relationship with God too. On Sundays, our people need to hear from God through the preaching of his Word, and they need to make their hearts known to him through prayer. In the pastoral prayer, we lift our collective desires to the Lord, deepening our love and trust in him.

A pastoral prayer teaches your church how to pray for one another.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I’m still discovering new benefits of the pastoral prayer. The pastoral prayer provides a natural space in the service to include our long-standing prayers for new members or recent graduates. It has enhanced my own prayer life, as well as my relationships with other elders, as we work together to prepare the prayer each week. Because we reach out to solicit their prayer requests, it has also strengthened our ties with other gospel-preaching churches in town. In all these ways and more, the pastoral prayer has blessed our church. I pray that it will bless yours as well.