Teaching Your Group to Pray
We spend real time teaching our groups to study Scripture — and we should. But how often do we teach them to pray? For many people, especially newer believers, prayer feels vague or intimidating — something they know they should do but aren’t sure how to do. One of the most valuable things you can do as a leader is help your people depend on God through prayer: to see it as a gift, to grow in it, and to gain the confidence to actually do it — out loud, and on their own. That’s what these two lessons are built for.
Download both prayer lessons and the TWI Prayer Guide free at the end of this post!
Two Lessons — Teach One or Both
These are two standalone prayer lessons. Teach one, teach both, in whatever order fits your group. They share the same prayer practice (TWI, below) but come at prayer from different angles:
- Bring It All to God (Philippians 4:6–7) — best for a group learning to trust God with every part of their lives. It walks through bringing our requests to Him in prayer and receiving the peace He promises.
- Never Stop Praying (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18) — best for helping your group make prayer a way of life: God’s will, a constant conversation, modeled by Jesus Himself.
Pick the one that fits where your group is — or teach both for a two-week focus on prayer.
The TWI Prayer Method
Both lessons close with a simple, repeatable way to pray together called TWI — three categories that give prayer a shape so no one is left wondering what to say:
- Thanksgiving — thanking God for what He has done.
- Worship — telling God what is true about who He is.
- Intercession — bringing needs to God, for others and for ourselves.
TWI reminds us prayer is more than asking — it gives people language for gratitude and praise, not just requests. And because it’s so simple, they can carry it with them and use it anytime, long after the lesson. Each lesson uses the TWI Prayer Guide worksheet (a separate download below) — one per person to fill out and pray from.
How to lead the prayer time. This is the heart of the lessons, and how you lead it matters. For many people, praying out loud in front of others is genuinely intimidating, so your job is to make it safe while still inviting them to grow:
- Lower the fear. Read your group. For those new to praying aloud, brainstorm ideas for each of the TWI categories on a whiteboard first, and lean on the sentence stems so no one has to invent words on the spot. Always go first yourself, so everyone hears an example and knows it doesn’t need to be fancy.
- Match the method to your group. With newer or younger believers, keep it simple — go around the room and invite each person to complete one sentence stem out loud (“God, thank you for…”), with the freedom to pass if they’re not ready. Stay there for a few weeks, then encourage them to add more than one sentence as they grow. With more seasoned believers, pray over each category at length, popcorn style, where anyone can jump in and pray as many times as they’d like.
- Never force anyone to pray aloud. Pressuring someone can turn a tender moment into a negative experience — and a bad experience with prayer can push a person away from God. What you can ask of everyone is to take part in the worksheet and the brainstorming.
- But do challenge them to grow. Praying aloud is intimidating for almost everyone at first, yet it’s a normal, healthy part of the Christian walk — and that step of courage is one of the ways faith stretches and matures. Gently invite your people into it. Hold both together: never force, but always encourage.
Note to the Facilitator
- Come prepared. Pray before you ever open the lesson — you’re not the one who changes hearts, He is. Read through the whole lesson ahead of time, and have Bibles, pens, and a TWI Prayer Guide for each person ready.
- Lead the discussion, don’t lecture it. The teaching is short on purpose so the growth happens as your group talks. You’ll lead best when you know the lesson well enough that you’re not reading it word-for-word. (More on this in Teaching With Confidence: How to Lead Without Reading From a Script.) Let there be silence before you jump in, and follow the group when a question sparks something real.
- Adapt to your group’s size. In a large group, teach each point to everyone, then break into small groups for the questions and prayer. In a small class or one-on-one, just work through it together.
- Teaching a youth group? Open with a round of Telephone Charades. Have everyone stand in a line, all facing forward. Give the person at the back a phrase (brushing teeth, fishing for a shark, walking a dog). They tap the shoulder of the person in front, who turns around and silently watches them act it out. That person then taps the next shoulder and acts out what they think they saw — and so on up the line, no words allowed. The person at the front acts it out one last time and guesses the original phrase. Then tie it in: “The message got scrambled as it passed down the line. Prayer is the opposite — no matter how clumsy our words feel, God receives them perfectly.”
Prayer is one of the most essential ways we draw near to God — and it isn’t something we should assume our people already know how to do. Even Jesus’ own disciples asked Him, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Let’s do the same for our groups: walk them through it, and help them grow.
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