Is your church planning to host a large event that you’d like to surround in prayer? Recently, our church served as a satellite location for Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit. We designated a prayer team to support the event and to pray for guests. And we also set aside a prayer room where people could seek out prayer. But we tried something we haven’t done before—a prayer focus based on Acts 1.
After Jesus’ ascension (40 days after His resurrection, Acts 1:3–9), the disciples joined together—constantly in prayer—in the upper room (Acts 1:14) until the day of Pentecost. This would have been about ten days because Pentecost was 50 days after Passover. In response to the disciples’ concerted prayer, God poured out His Holy Spirit in an unprecedented display of His power, leading to 3,000 conversions in one day (Acts 2:41).
In the spirit of the upper room, we set aside a ten-day period of focused prayer leading up to the Global Leadership Summit. On the evening of Day 1, a prayer meeting at the church launched our prayer campaign. We couldn’t coordinate schedules to meet at the church daily, so on Days 2-9, we simply sent out emails to the prayer team, highlighting requests participants could pray about.
Since this event has global impact, we followed the pattern of Acts 1:8 in our prayers, starting with our church and widening to the community, to other churches hosting the Summit in North America, and finally to the world. Each day we offered a brief encouragement to pray—either from Scripture or from a classic book on prayer. We included 5-6 specific prayer items. We reminded our team that, while we prayed about the details, God’s glory was the ultimate aim of our prayers.
On Day 10 (the day before the Summit), we prayerwalked the church, stopping in each room to be used for the Summit. For those who couldn’t attend the prayerwalk, we emailed our room-by-room prayer items. Finally, we wrote and emailed a prayer (patterned after the Lord’s Prayer) for the team to use during the event.
The Summit volunteer team and our pastor told us they found this prayer effort very encouraging. We won’t have a definite record of its impact as Luke did on Pentecost, but we know God heard and answered our prayers. And we’re looking forward to reprising the experience next year.
ANDREW WHEELER co-directs the prayer ministry of Willow Creek’s regional campus in Crystal Lake, IL.
