I work closely with churches to innovate church strategies using data and technology. As a former pastor myself, I’ve learned some important lessons about how the most powerful levers for change are right at your doorstep.
About ten years ago, I was the pastor of a southeast valley church in Phoenix, Arizona. We had about 9K adults attending our campus every weekend and we regularly had upwards of 3k prayer requests each month. It was good to have such high engagement from our community—over one-third of our people were reaching out for prayer.
Every Tuesday at 9:00am, our 20-person prayer team would come together to pray for these requests. At one point, I asked everyone in the room, “what are we actually praying for?” The answer they gave: marriage, divorce, death—the usual. Still not satisfied, I wanted to understand the nature of the prayer requests so that we could explore if what we were doing programatically, week after week, was really serving the needs of our people.
So I took the prayer requests, put them into a spreadsheet, and started to analyze them. I didn’t do anything too complex, but I did do two key things:
- Classify each request into a normalized category such as “relationship”, “marriage,” “health”, etc.,
- Add known gender and generation such as “male” and “millennial”
Most importantly, I took off my pastoral hat and put on my “curious scientist” hat. For me, that meant that I honored the language that was given in the prayer request. If Lucy asked for prayer around her relationship, I didn’t infer that she meant her marriage to John, because who knows if that’s what she meant. If Bob asked for prayer around cancer, I didn’t assume that he wanted a cure for cancer—heck, for all I knew Bob could have been praying for a clear diagnosis of a recent test. I tried to stay as objective as I could, classifying the requests using the literal language that was presented in each prayer request.
Once I had classified all of the requests, I took a step back and what I saw opened my eyes. The first thing that came to light was that the number one prayer request from the general congregation was overwhelmingly for their “marriages”. As I began to cut the data deeper by gender and age, the second thing I saw—and this one really humbled me—was that millennial men were largely asking for prayer in the areas of mentorship and leadership. There I was, cracking jokes from the pulpit in weeks past poking fun of young men living out of their parents’ basements. I clearly had a lot to learn...and a lot to repent for.
As I shared the data and learnings back with our pastoral team, we knew we had some tough decisions to make. We were currently going through the book of Acts and had at least another six weeks to go. As you know, there isn’t a clear place in Acts where teachings on marriage is addressed, outside of Ananias and Sapphira and we all know how that ended. Yet here were all of these prayer requests from our people, with an overwhelming theme across the board: “Will you pray for my marriage?”
So we asked ourselves, should we keep going through the current series or do we pivot and start talking about marriage? Instead of choosing either of those paths, we decided to share back the insights we had gleaned with our people and ask for their input.
Of course, we could have just added this to our weekly staff prayer time and tried our best to pray for each of the people requesting prayer. But we were bothered by that idea. After all, we wanted to get our community engaged in ministry—wasn’t this the perfect opportunity to equip and involve the saints? It was an aha moment. How many times had we, had I, tried to do it all ourselves? We were excited about asking for the help we needed, apologizing for the assumptions we had made, and most importantly, giving people an opportunity to really contribute to the people and causes they cared about.
So we did it. The next Sunday, I apologized to our millennial men for not seeing and hearing their hearts for mentorship and leadership. And then we put up a word cloud on the big screen, just like this:
We asked our congregation, “Would you be willing to pick up a shovel, journey with us, and pray for these needs?” The response was overwhelming. By just showing them one single picture, more than half of the nine-thousand-person congregation joined us in prayer in these areas. And the prayer requests started to increase too, because now Jane Doe, who had asked for prayer for her marriage, knew that 5K people in her community were praying for her.
That cycle: asking for input, sharing back the insights, and asking the community to get involved—became a very important motion for us as church leaders.
If you’re like most churches, you already have a prayer ministry. Perhaps you are taking in prayer requests through community cards or online. You may be collecting those prayer requests and then sharing that information with your prayer team who works faithfully through each request every single week. In times of difficulty and high volume, it may feel pretty daunting and at times feel more like a task than an opportunity to really go deep into communion with the Lord.
But what if you took those requests and began to look at the patterns? You could mobilize your people to pray for those issues—turning your team of 10 or 100 into literally thousands of intercessors. Moreover, it would create a virtuous cycle: as more people are praying and seeing the needs, more prayer requests will come in. Your people will be serving one another. This is the beauty of a closed feedback loop as you start releasing the passion of your people toward the needs of their community.
If you know me, you’d be saying, “Not everyone is wired like you, Matt (thankfully!) I can’t do that.” but the reality is, anyone on your team could do this.
So here are a few simple ways to start:
- Collect your prayer requests in one place. Digital is best and spreadsheets will make looking at your data easier.
- Ask for more info. If you can, find out the gender and generation (or age) of your respondents—this will help you segment the needs of your people better.
- Protect your people. Remove or hide any personal information such as names or numbers to protect the privacy of your people.
- Put on your “curious learner” hat. Pretend you are a curious scientist who does not know the people requesting prayer. Try not to read into it from a personal point of view, but be the pastoral scientist and hold the humility that says “I don’t know what I don’t know”. Stay objective.
- Start categorizing. Try to categorize the requests - you can use the Five Areas of Flourishing as a helpful framework. Visualize it. Put the information into a word cloud. This one is a great free, customizable option.
- Close the first loop. Share and discuss with your team. This is how you start to close the feedback loop. Ask your team for their thoughts and ideas on these new insights.
- Close the last loop. Reflect the insights back to your community. Ask them to contribute to needs as they are called to.
Now, you may be asking yourself, “Am I really serving John Smith who asked for help with his 15-year-old son’s issues with respect?” This is where we can trust that God, in His omniscience knows our hearts and hears our prayers. God is big enough to understand what John requested in his specific prayer and when 4000 people in John’s community are praying for that, the prayer is only amplified. How beautiful is that?
You can also pair this kind of prayer approach with a personal touch. You can reach out to individual people who have requested prayers and let them know you’re praying for them. In John Smith’s case, the youth ministry leader might reach out to John. And that’s why we built a prayer platform right into Gloo. You can receive and respond to prayer requests in real time all via text message, and it only takes a few minutes to set up. If that wasn’t enough to get you on board, it’s free!
Whatever approach you decide to take, you can take the reins in knowing your people better by asking them...and then spending some time getting really curious about what those needs are telling you. Most importantly, you don’t have to do it alone, but instead, multiply the collective might of your community. And who doesn’t want the power of a praying church behind them?