subject: Can You Have A Corporate Prayer Meeting That Is Spirit-led? [print this page] The other day I received a question from someone via email. The persons question was regarding corporate prayer at their church. People pray in different ways. At many churches people tend to like to create prayer lists to guide them through their prayer time so that every prayer need gets prayed for. Other people, however, like to take a less structured approach and allow the Holy Spirit to lead them through their prayer time. They pray for who the Spirit guides them to pray for.
In this case, the person asking the question was the latter the group she prays with regularly at church is the former. This led to a dilemma, as you will see.
The question:
My question concerns prayer meetings at my church. The Lord has been calling me into an intercessory prayer ministry for some time. A group meets on Sunday morning and a group of ladies meets on Wed. mornings.
Someone leads and has a list of prayer requests to tell the group (broken up into small groups of 4/5 people) what to pray for. Most of the time I feel a bit out of place since I don't pray privately in this way. I may have some requests but for the most part my prayer time is worship (a lot of praise and thanksgiving), tongues, and the Holy Spirit directs me to a person or gives me the topic to pray for.
I have been asked to lead this Wednesday's ladies' prayer meeting. Any thoughts on how I should handle this prayer meeting? I have continued attending the prayer meetings to be part of the church and to be united with others in prayer.
This is an interesting situation and one that could make a person feel apprehensive, but theres no need to fear. Just as the Spirit can lead in your prayers, so He can lead you through this situation.
I would start with worship and prayers of adoration, and encourage people to then pray as they feel led. This causes the prayer time to just flow from one to the other, being led by the Spirit.
Instruct them ahead of time that you want to worship with them for a bit and begin the prayer time by lifting Him up, and then tuning to the flow of His Holy Spirit (within), and people praying from flow as they feel directed, and moving from person to person as people feel led to pray.
If there is a list the items could be mentioned before beginning and you could tell people that if the Lord brings it to your heart to pray about any of the items from the list, fine, and if not, then people can pray as they feel led to pray, and you will trust the Holy Spirit will have them pray for all things HE wants prayed for. This should work fine.
