Our church has come from a very traditional experience and is presently "breaking out" of the old and into the new. The Prayer Ministry was started in March, the first for this church! We now have an opportunity to have a Prayer Room, designated for the sole purpose of prayer. We plan to use it for the prayer teams , to pray through the services, to pray for individual needs after the services, etc.
Since this is new, what experiences have others had with Prayer Rooms? How do you furnish yours? How do you use yours? What recommendations might you have for us?
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God bless your Prayer Ministry!! It seems that He already is - having a room dedicated to prayer is such a great blessing.
Our church has a room that we use for prayer, but unfortunately it's not a dedicated room - others use it also. It's a small room and can comfortably seat about 4-6 people. We have a closed-circuit TV in there so that we can have the service on if we choose to while praying through the service. We have a team of four that meets before services to pray in that room also. Although we haven't yet used it this way, the room would be suitable for "prayer appointments" with individuals who had needs that they wanted prayer for. It's currently furnished with a couch and a couple of chairs.
The main Willow Creek campus in South Barrington has a much larger prayer room, dedicated solely for prayer. They use it after services to pray for people, and they often get several people who come after the service to receive prayer. Their room is large enough to accommodate several prayer partners at the same time, so it's an effective use for them - our room would be too small to use effectively that way (no privacy). They have a "traffic cop" at the door of the prayer room, to make sure that it doesn't get too crowded. I think that person also helps direct people who are looking for prayer to specific prayer partners who are comfortable praying for that subject. Since they have many guests who frequently use the room, they have a number of comfortable chairs in there, and plenty of Kleenex!!
Both South Barrington and our campus also have "drop boxes" for prayer requests in our prayer rooms. Anyone can stop by and drop off a prayer request in the box. We haven't seen this widely used at our campus yet, but we're hoping it will gain traction over time. We have an e-mail prayer team that will pray for these requests.
Some prayer team members have used our prayer room for "retreats of silence" and extended prayer times on their own.
I hope these ideas are helpful - I'm sure there are many more possibilities that we haven't yet explored.
Andrew,
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences. It has been most helpful. As we meet together in January, we plan to seek God's will for 2011 regarding prayer at our church. It is a blessing to add your thoughts as we plan together.
God bless you!
Billie
Billie,
Once we put a prayer room in place at our church people knew we were serious about prayer! The room was painted a soft green, and we tried to accommodate all types of prayer styles - meaning - we had chairs to sit in, pillows on the floor, notebooks to write in and a wide variety of worship music. We also had a notebook with different types of prayer starters (scripture verses etc...) It was really important to us that all ages felt welcome, especially our youth. ( I found that the more we asked people to help w/ ideas about how to setup an decorate the room the more they felt that they had ownership in the room and wanted to spend time there). We even had the youth take a portion of one of the walls and write scripture out in a graffiti font. Also one really neat thing the prayer team did was we handed out old fashion nails on the Sunday before Good Friday, we asked everyone who received a nail to be in prayer about a request they would like to nail upon the cross during our Reflection Day(worship videos where streamed all day long in our sanctuary) that we held on Good Friday. We opened the church and prayer room from Good Friday until Easter for 24/7 prayer and fasting. It was one of the most poignant things to see the people write out their requests and then take the nail out of their pocket and nail it to the cross, the sound alone of the nail going in the wood was so very powerful!! After the Good Friday service the cross was brought upstairs to the prayer room w/ nails intact, we then had people in place to pray over each and every request. But it didn't end there...the cross was so powerful people asked if we could keep it up in the prayer room and continue to nail requests to it. Periodically we would pick off and date the requests also try to followup w/ the person if we knew who the request was from. As far as a schedule went I made up a calendar for those on the prayer team and then asked the elders to sign up for a month at a time. They would come in and pray before the sunday service. Oh, I almost forgot one really important thing.....I posted a sign outside the door in the hallway to remind people that the prayer room was open and prayer was in session so to please keep their voices down.
Kathy,
Thank you so much for sharing ideas. It is such a blessing to pool all this as we continue to plan for creating our "house of prayer". We love the cross idea and have used it in a smaller way, but even then saw the effect it can have. God bless you as you serve Him.
Billie