Between them, users of the PrayerMate app are now praying for over a million requests every month. Through the PrayerMate Publishing Platform you can publish prayer feeds to keep your supporters updated and engaged in praying for your ministry too – whether you’re a charity, a church or an individual. Many organisations already publish an existing prayer diary or bulletin, and the site provides tools to quickly and easily get those imported into the PrayerMate system. But what if you’re not already in a habit of writing regular prayer requests – what kinds of things make for a good prayer update?
Here are our top tips for writing prayer updates:
1. Write them prayerfully
It’s hard to expect people to be praying for your ministry if you’re not praying for it yourself. When I sit down to write my prayer updates for PrayerMate each month (yes, PrayerMate has its own feed to help you pray for PrayerMate!), I find it really helps me to begin by praying myself. It feels like the right thing to do anyway, to remind myself that this is first and foremost about inviting God to be at work – and in the process, it usually quickly becomes obvious which kinds of issues are in need of prayer, what is causing anxiety and difficulty, and what encouragements there have been to give thanks for.
2. Give thanks
That leads to our second tip: give thanks! Not all prayer updates have to be requests, it’s often helpful to have some updates which are about giving thanks for the ways in which God has been answering previous requests.
3. Think of some general ministry areas / topics
A good means of generating ideas for writing prayer updates can be to start by writing down some general ministry areas and topics for prayer. For example, if you’re a church, you might have a children’s / youth ministry, a work amongst your local community, students, mission partners who you support, and so on. Most charities will have some particular ministry areas, or perhaps regions where they operate. If you can think of five relatively broad topics then you only need to come up with six prayer points for each topic and you’ve got yourself a month’s worth of prayer points.
4. Be specific
Under each topic, you can then write some specific requests. The more vague your prayer points are, the harder you’ll find it to come up with more than one or two. So instead of saying “Pray that the kids will grow in their knowledge of Jesus”, you could single out what the teaching topic will be this week and have a few specific requests related to the various application points. This is also usually much more engaging for the people praying as well, since it helps keeps things fresh as they pray week by week.
5. Be brief
In your desire to be specific, it’s also good to keep things relatively brief. You don’t need to write a long essay for every day of the week. Just a brief line for each prayer request is fine – and will help both you and those praying.
Want to get people praying for your ministry?
Sign up to the PrayerMate Publishing Platform today to help engage your supporters in praying for your ministry.