In our church’s Wednesday night prayer meeting, we have changed things lately in order to make it more of an actual prayer meeting. In my experience, many churches call their Wednesday night meetings a prayer meeting but actually do about 75% Bible study and add some prayer request time at the end. The prayer time ultimately ends up being primarily for the sick (which is important, of course); it doesn’t usually include much time praying for God to work in and through His church in that local context.
So, we’ve tried to change that recently. We’ve prayed through Acts 2:41-47, John 12:23-36, and John 13:31-35/14:1-6. I break up the passage into smaller chunks, explain each section for about 3 minutes, and then ask each table to use my suggested prayer points to guide their prayers based on the text. We’ve received positive feedback from attendees, and I’ve genuinely enjoyed it.
I’m going to post some of these prayer guides for anyone who wants to use them. They’re nothing revolutionary, but they might save a busy pastor some time. Feel free to reproduce them. I also think they would work for personal times of prayer. Let me know if you find them helpful or how I can improve them. God bless you!
John 13, 31-35 and 14, 1-6 – Prayer Meeting 05062015
Tags: John 13, John 14, Prayer, Prayer Meeting
Sermon Illustr8r 
Our “prayer meeting” is much the same way you described. I suggested to our group to take a country each week from the “Operation World” book so that our focus isn’t solely on the sick or even our community. I have heard, since I’m not in prayer meeting on Wednesday night, that sometimes when a world event happens they turn to Operation world and use their prayer guides to help them pray for that country. Thanks for the prayer guides, very helpful.
Thanks, Blair. That Operation World book is excellent. We’ve done something a little similar in that we’ve been using a couple versions of the IMB’s “Loving the Lost of the World Through Prayer” booklets. There are a bunch of versions, and the IMB will send you them for free. Here’s a link: https://imbresources.org/index.cfm/product/list/catID/44/deptID/1