Learning to Pray in a Pandemic
It was Friday, March 13th, 2020, and I was driving southwest on the old Route 66 through Missouri. There was a gravel bike race beginning and ending in Stillwater, Oklahoma the following day, and I was feeling great. I had finished my week’s responsibilities, left town on time, my trusty bike was partially disassembled and packed neatly in the trunk, and I was even going to take that Sunday morning off. It had been a long and challenging past few years of church planting, and I was taking my first weekend off in almost two years. I’m sure some combination of Lecrae, Kirk Franklin, and Anderson Paak was blasting through the speakers. Like I said, I was feeling great.
But little did I know.
As I neared the Missouri-Oklahoma border, I pulled out my phone to check for the next Starbucks, and I had dozens of missed calls and text messages. “Are you seeing this?” “What do you think?” “It seems really bad, man.” “Hey pastor, I’m watching the news—are we going to have church Sunday?”
You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. Not today, Satan. I’m finally off work, and my wife has encouraged me to get out of town and do this ridiculous day-long race. What on earth could be so urgent?
I pulled off at the next Starbucks and walked in for a black coffee. The coffeeshop was full of travelers, pacing around and looking at their phones, talking in hushed tones with one another, like it was a funeral. In a matter of minutes, the country would be placed in a state of national emergency and Coronavirus would become an unwelcome addition to our daily language.
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I never made it to Oklahoma. Like a good pastor (or at least like a person without effective personal boundaries), I called with my wife, talked with our worship pastor, then responded to each missed call and message.
For me, it settled in during that road trip on that fateful Friday the 13th: Everything is about to change. We won’t be able to meet for worship on Sunday any time soon; members of our community will get sick or lose their jobs; people I know and love will die from this hellish virus.
I turned around, drove home, and like many other pastors and ministry leaders, vowed to serve and shepherd others through this crisis, even if it meant a loss of free time, exercise, and other joys of life in “peacetime.”
My first resolution was to work harder, plan smarter, and lead sacrificially, but quickly another thought awakened. I’m already tired. We only have sixty people and we’re still largely dependent on outside support. This could be devastating for a second-year church plant.
I can’t think or scheme or grind my way through this. I’ve got nothing.
A Year of Prayer
Thankfully, in the vast providence of God, we had just committed the year to prayer. Beginning at the end of 2019, I began experiencing a renewal around prayer and the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures had come alive. My prayer times were intense and consistent. My conversations were full of longing for God’s kingdom to come—on earth as it is in heaven. In January 2020, we agreed as a leadership team and set before our congregation a singular theme for 2020: renewal-seeking prayer.
Renewal-seeking prayer, as we called it, is passionate prayer for the renewal of our hearts, our lives, our churches, and our communities.
“Renewal-seeking prayer is passionate prayer for the renewal of our hearts, our lives, our churches, and our communities.”
We had made prayer an important part of our church plant, but it wasn’t exactly central. No one would spend a month with us and immediately call us “a praying church.” I felt convicted as a pastor and confessed this oversight to our leaders and congregation. There was a collective sense of discontent with our prayerlessness and lack of Spirit-led renewal.
In the first few months of 2020, we developed several new habits to sustain a year-long emphasis on prayer. And then Covid hit with the force of a thousand thunderstorms. Again, it was God’s providence and kindness: we already had all the conviction and rhythms established to pray our way through a pandemic.
Throughout 2020, we embraced these rhythms, and now that we are a few months into 2021, I can say that we have become a praying church. We have not mastered prayer or done anything impressive, but I can say with integrity that prayer is central now. When we talk with visitors, nearly every one begins by speaking of the unusual and refreshing emphasis on prayer. What exactly have we done?
Becoming a Praying Church in One Year
1. Leadership Commitment
Becoming a praying church begins with the commitment of the entire leadership. We decided together as a leadership team to focus on prayer, make prayer one of our five core values, and to pray together for one-third to one-half of our leadership meetings. We also created a new role to establish a prayer lead, who can coordinate prayer gatherings and keep prayer on the forefront of our minds and schedules.
2. Prayer Nights
We committed to two prayer nights per month. We have done Friday Night Prayer from 6:30-8:00pm on the first and third weeks, and even under Covid restrictions, we kept each of these gatherings by Zoom. While many prayer meetings end up with more conversation than prayer, we have set the pattern of getting into prayer within five to ten minutes of the start time, so that we are spending 80-90 full minutes in intercession together.
3. Congregational Prayer
Although we had previously done this sporadically, we did congregational prayer in every Sunday gathering in 2020. In the first half of our gathering, between worship songs, one of our worship leaders sets a theme and invites people to pray. Typically four to six people pray aloud in the congregation, and then we roll into the next song. More than anything else, this is the element that receives the most positive feedback.
4. Prayer in Groups
As a church with a strong emphasis on community groups, we already have members meeting in homes (or online) throughout the week, so introducing more prayer nights and time for prayer in weekly groups has enabled more people to be trained in prayer and spend time praying together.
5. Teaching on Prayer
Throughout 2020, we preached something like 16 sermons on prayer, including an 11-week series on the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:5-13). We added a seminar on prayer to our membership class and created seven prayer commitments that we open with on our prayer gatherings.
6. Training in Prayer
We as leaders have pursued training in prayer and in establishing a prayer culture. As pastors and leaders, we seek training and resources in preaching, community groups, kids ministry, and everything else, so why not prayer as well? I personally read more than a dozen books on prayer in 2020 and completed a virtual training with Jon Tyson and Church of the City, New York City.
7. 24-hour Prayer
On several occasions, we have called the church to 24 hours of prayer (often with fasting). We have done these 24-hour prayer times around a season of need (like reopening after Covid) or a church season (such as Good Friday). We simply email out a google sheet with 30-minute slots for a given 24-hour period, and let people sign up for one or more that works for them. They pray from their homes and cars and workplaces and with one another, and we provide a simple prayer guide as well.
8. Citywide Prayer
Lastly, we’ve made space to pray with leaders and members from other congregations. We know that whenever God brings renewal to a city, it flows through many churches and ministries, and prayer is almost always the common denominator. I have several regular prayer times each month with pastors from around the city, and we’ve also done joint prayer gatherings with other congregations throughout the past year and a half.
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As I wrote earlier, we do not have it all figured out and are just over a year into all these prayer rhythms. Many congregations are decades ahead of us, and we are so thankful to learn from them. But if you are desiring a more prayerful church experience, and if the pandemic has identified a need for a deeper prayer life in your congregation, then I hope you’ll consider stepping with faith into some of these rhythms and practices as you become a praying church.
Jeremy Linneman is lead pastor of Trinity Community Church, a church he planted in Columbia, Missouri. Prior to planting Trinity, he was a staff pastor of Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, for seven years. He is author of Life-Giving Groups: “How-To” Grow Healthy, Multiplying Community Groups. Jeremy and his wife, Jessie, have three sons and spend most of their free time outdoors.
