In a recent meeting of the top 100 church planters in our ministry, we looked for common elements among these high producing leaders. Each of these church planters, along with the teams they led, started more than 20 churches per year, each. One group started more than 500 churches in the previous year. The only common element we found in all these church planters was their commitment to prayer. There were other common elements, but the only element that was present in every team was a high commitment to prayer.
These leaders spent an average of three hours per day in personal prayer. They then spent another three hours in prayer with their teams every day. These leaders were not all full time religious leaders. In fact, most of them had regular jobs. They started their days at 4:00 AM, and by 10:00 AM were at work.
These top performers also spent one day per week in fasting and prayer. The whole team spent one weekend per month in fasting and prayer.
I was humbled by this commitment to prayer. When I measured my own time in prayer, and my own commitment to prayer, I found myself lacking in devotion...
[Read the rest of the article here.]
Share with us your thoughts, not only why prayer is THE most important essential in church planting (I think we would all acknowledge that fact!), but what kinds of things are you, your team, or church actually doing to make prayer a priority in your church planting?
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*Thanks to Felicity Dale's blog simplychurch.com for pointing us to this article.
2 comments:
Hey Guy,
The silence in the comments for this post is deafening. I hope that's not because that's how far down our priority lists prayer is...
I appreciate you pointing us to David's original post. I passed it along to my entire church planting team and we all found it convicting and challenging. We realized that prayer had been sliding as a priority for us. As a result, we are now meeting 5 days a week for prayer, as opposed to once or twice a week before.
So that's what we're now doing, thanks in part to your posting this.
Chris L.
Chris,
I also found this article quite convicting. We are good to talk about prayer, but few of us actually make it a priority. Your example of meeting 5 days a week for prayer is something that shows, for you guys, you're not just talking about prayer, but actually making it a priority in your ministry. Thanks.
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