Have you ever thought about how prayer can transform your community? Ever heard of prayer walking? Prayer walking is a simple yet powerful ministry, perfect for all ages and personalities, that combines walking with praying, effectively covering a targeted neighborhood or even city with a blanket of God’s grace. Here are a few tips to help you plan a prayer walking event.
Join with other believers
Join your faith with others to help prayer flow in an engaging conversational style. Large groups sometimes fail to give everyone a chance to participate. Pairs and triplets work best. (For example, a group of eight could naturally divide into pairs as they walk, but stay in sight of each other or meet back together at a certain location.)
Set aside time
Allowing one or two full hours gives prayer walkers a good chance to manage preliminaries and follow-up discussions, although lots can be done in less time.
Choose an area
Ask God to guide you. It’s best by far to learn the joys of prayer walking in unfamiliar neighborhoods; you’ll return quickly to your own neighborhood with fresh vision. Centers of commerce and religion are fascinating, but there’s nothing like touching families, schools, and churches in residential areas. Use elevated points of land to pray over an entire neighborhood. Linger at specific sites that seem to be key. When deciding where to go in a new community, you may choose to link up with a Christian ministering in that area so your prayers can be directly related to ministry plans that are being implemented.
Pray with insight
Pray for the people you see. As you do, you might find the Spirit of God recalibrating your heart with His own sensitivities. Enhance these responsive insights with research done beforehand. Use knowledge of past events and current trends to enrich intercession. Above all, pray Scripture. If you have no clear passage to begin with, select just about any of the biblical prayers, and you will find that they almost pray themselves.
Focus on God
Make God’s promises rather than Satan’s schemes the highlight of your prayer. Your discernment of evil powers may sometimes seem to exceed God’s specific guidance for a situation. Consider the simplicity of first making direct appeal to the throne of God before attempting to pick street fights with demonic powers. Seek a restraining order from heaven upon evil so that God’s empowered people may bring forth God’s intended blessings on the city.
Regather and report
Share what you have experienced and prayed. Expressing something of your insights and faith will encourage others, as well as yourself. Set plans for further prayer walking.
Coordinate efforts
Enlist other praying people to join with friends to cover special areas. As a leader, you may wish to help form and mix prayer bands. Ask prayer walkers to make written notes recording which areas have been covered and what kinds of prayers have been prayed. Pool your insights to ascertain whether God is prompting a repeated focus on particular areas. Eventually aim to cover your entire town or city, unless God guides otherwise.
