You can’t teach a team into a culture of prayer. You have to walk them into it.
A prayer to open the meeting. A prayer to close it. A few requests lifted up in between. For a while, that felt like enough. This year, I don’t want prayer to be the bookends of our meetings — I want it to be the heartbeat of our team: people who pray wholeheartedly on our own, before an event, in the ordinary moments, because we truly believe God is near.
Prayer and God’s Word go hand-in-hand. I’ve given my team tools for reading and teaching the Bible well — and prayer deserves that same intentional training and modeling.
Your team won’t build a culture of prayer by hearing you talk about it. They’ll build it by watching you live it.
Paul tells the Philippian church, “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you” (Philippians 4:9, ESV). He doesn’t just say heard. He says heard and seen. My team will only absorb what I teach about prayer if they also see me live it.
Even Jesus’s own disciples learned to pray this way. Jesus modeled heartfelt prayer throughout His ministry, so much so that His disciples deeply desired to learn from Him and asked, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1, ESV).
Eager to see my ministry team grow in dependence upon the Lord, and hopeful for what God will do as we pray together, I’ve spent time thinking through what this could actually look like for us. Here’s what that looks like in practice — starting with what I plan to share with my own team first.
Read on for three truths that can help cast a vision for prayer on your team — and don’t forget to download the free discussion guide at the end of this post.
The following points are designed to cast a vision for the value of a praying ministry team. My hope is that when my team, and yours, grasps the value in praying regularly, they will trust the prayer rhythms you are adding and emphasizing within your team. You will notice that all the points are rooted in Scripture because God’s Word and prayer go hand-in-hand.
This is God’s will for us. Included in a list of final instructions to a beloved church body, the apostle Paul writes: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18, ESV). Many people wonder what God’s will is — here it’s stated plainly: pray continuously, keeping up an ongoing conversation with God, alone or with others. Prayer is essential for building a trusting, loving, and dependent life and ministry with God, and it is clearly His will, so we would be wise to obey it. When we build a culture of praying as a ministry team, we are living out obedience to what God has already made clear.
We Were Never Meant to Plan With Certainty. James confronts a specific kind of arrogance: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that’” (James 4:13–15, ESV). The problem isn’t that these merchants made plans — it’s that they spoke of the future with total confidence, as though their own effort guaranteed the outcome, with no acknowledgment of how fragile and finite their lives actually are. It’s easy for a ministry team to build a calendar the same way — confident in our own strategy, without pausing to hold it loosely before God. James isn’t calling us to stop planning, but to plan with humility, acknowledging that every plan we make depends on whether the Lord wills it. When we build a culture of praying as a ministry team, we are choosing humility over control in how we plan.
Only God Gives the Growth. Paul reminds the Corinthian church of something every ministry leader needs to hear: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6–7, ESV). We have real work to do — planning, inviting, teaching, sharing the gospel — but none of it produces the actual change. Only God can change a heart, only God can keep you from stumbling when you speak, and only God can truly draw someone to Himself. We can plant and water all day long, but the growth was never ours to give. That’s exactly why we pray — not as a formality tacked onto our planning, but because prayer is how we ask for what only He can do. When we build a culture of praying as a ministry team, we are asking for what only God can give.
Once your team has sat with these — not just heard them, but talked through them together — you’re ready to move from vision to rhythm: what does a praying team actually do differently now?
Once your team has caught the vision, the next question is simple: what do you actually do differently now? Vision without rhythm fades. Here are the rhythms I’m building into my own team this semester, along with a few more ideas worth considering as your culture of prayer grows.
These aren’t meant to happen all at once. Pick one or two to start, and let them shape how your team gathers from here.
None of this works as a checklist. It only becomes culture when your team watches you do it — when they see you pause a meeting to pray instead of just talking about praying, when they hear you follow up on a request three weeks later, when they notice you keep bringing back what the ministry needs from God, week after week. That’s when it stops being your idea and starts being a natural rhythm the whole ministry adopts.
My prayer for this next semester is simple: that my team would learn complete dependence on the Lord as they lead others to seek and follow Him too — and that we would see God work in ways only He could, the kind of moments where all we can say is, “Wow, God did that.”
The discussion guide below was created to help you take these ideas off the page and into your leadership team. Set aside about 25–30 minutes in a team meeting or training time to walk through it together — not just to talk about prayer, but to actually start practicing it as a team. Use it to cast a vision for what it could look like to depend on God together, not as a one-time training, but as a rhythm that shapes how your team leads from here on out.