Dan Stevers at Worship House Media created a beautiful video discussing what is prayer. He has it available for purchase if you would like to us it for your church or ministry. I goes through many different forms of prayer given in Scriptures and leaves with a some observations from these examples. This will be well worth you watching. Enjoy!

LifeWay had commissioned a survey of 1,300 ministry leaders across our nation, as well as Europe, posing the question about the present challenges churches face. From the all of the responses, there were 20 that were indentified the most, and from those 20, these leaders were requested to rank those that were most critical. The number one most critical issue facing the church today is prayer.  I have posted the report below, which includes resources for each of the issues mentioned. R.A. Torrey's How to Pray was mentioned as a prayer resource, which we mentioned in a post earlier about the tryanny of the urgent.

Why do I mention this? Prayer is the easiest thing to do as a Christian. There is no fear of rejection, no fear of getting it wrong. It is as easy as talking and listening. And yet, it is commonly considered the biggest challenge facing the church. Why is this? Obviously our enemy wants to keep us from it. It is our connection to the source of life and our sense of purpose. No matter how easy prayer is, it will not come easy without doing it. Praytel would like to help you do it. By allowing you to set up the times good for you, we will call you and lead you through items to pray for. We will help you overcome the biggest obstable to prayer... just doing it.

Top_10_Issues_Facing_Todays_Church.pdf (996.95 kb)

We are taking a break from the seriousness to give you a light-hearted view on prayer. This comes from IgniterMedia.com and you can purchase it if you want to use it at your church or ministry. Enjoy!

Thanks to Mark MacDonald for pointing out these tips.

I was going to wait before bringing up too much personal information, but today something special happened that fits with the context of praytel. My wife and I are in the process of adopting an international child. We have gotten pretty far along, and we need to make a decision about whether we would take our kids along when we pick up our new daughter. Besides the costs associated with taking two additional children along, our daughters are 4 years and 18 months, so they would take attention and care for the overseas travel.

My wife was discussing this with our older daughter this morning, and she decided to ask Jesus whether she should go. My wife, trying to get the kids ready to leave for the day, suggested that they wait to pray later. My daughter wanted to do it then. Never one to discourage prayer, my wife agreed. As my daughter prayed, she said that Jesus told her that she and her sister should stay back with my wife's mom. An additional insight you should know is that she wants to go with us.

The point of me telling you this story is not to allow your children to make decisions for you. My wife and I are still going to pray through this ourselves as we are ulitmately responsible for the decision. But imagine if we do decide on having the kids stay behind. Even though our oldest wants to go, we can always remind her of what Jesus showed her.

What are the takeaways from this story:

1. Do not hinder the little children from coming to Jesus. - Luke 18:16
2. The sheep know the shepherd's voice. - John 10: 3-5, 16
3. Child-like faith is better receptive to come to God. - Mark 10:15

 "We are too busy to pray, and so we are too busy to have power.  We have a great deal of activity, but we accomplish little; many services but few conversions; much machinery but few results."  R. A. Torrey

We are all familiar with this, but the busyness of life becomes so great that we feel we have no choice. The tyranny of the urgent over plays the desires within our spirit to reach out to God. Unfortunately, too often this leads to self-abasement. Self-abasement is from the devil. The Holy Spirit does point out things we should change, but His way offers hope. What's the difference between guilt and conviction? One leads to discouragement, shame, and depression; the other leads to hope, life, and change.

Praytel is a service to offer a friendly reminder to pray and walk you through helpful topics. Prayer should never be a source of discouragement. Instead, it should offer us a chance to connect with God, who in spite of our personal discouragements does not discourage. As Christians, we may always boldly enter in to His throne room to find grace and mercy. Check us out.  If you give us your email, we wil offer another friendly reminder... this one for when the service becomes live! (The plan is this fall)

Dr. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, was asked this very question when he received the Templeton Prize for religious advancement.

Bill and Vonette Bright started Campus Crusade in 1951 with the vision of reaching the college campus today to reach the world tomorrow. Dr. Bright was a businessman and had a strong internal motivation, but even so, he and Vonette knew that the vision they had would only be accomplished by God. Therefore they immediately started to bathe the ministry in prayer. They divided each day into 96 segments of 15 minutes each and recruited people to commit to pray (see Global Prayer Movements' August 2009 newsletter).

With this as the back drop, when Dr. Bright was offered the award of a million dollars, he did not take to money for himself; he did not use it to feed the programs of Campus Crusade, even the Jesus Film was left out; and he did not give it to the poor. While each of these would have been acceptable, Dr. Bright, fully convinced of the power of prayer, used it to educate leaders of the church worldwide to the spiritual benefits of fasting and prayer (see Chuck Colson's article).

Notice the start of the ministry was 15 minute segments of prayer. Praytel's goal is to help Christians commit to 15 miniutes of daily prayer. If you give us your email address, we will keep you informed of updates.

Welcome to praytel.net's blog! We are excited to introduce ourselves to the prayer community. Prayer is a wonderful blessing that is often underutilized. Author Philip Yancey introduces his book on prayer with some statistics he found in his research. A simplistic summary is that everybody sees the importance of prayer and most pray. At the same time, just about everyone is not happy with their personal level of prayer. That is why praytel was founded. Praytel seeks to connect Christians with their desire to pray and make it a reality.

"[Yancey] interviewed ordinary people about prayer. Typically, the results went like this: Is prayer important to you? Oh, yes. How often do you pray? Every day. Approximately how long? Five minutes — well, maybe seven. Do you find prayer satisfying? Not really. Do you sense the presence of God when you pray? Occasionally, not often. Many of those I talked to experienced prayer more as a burden than as a pleasure. They regarded it as important, even paramount, and felt guilty about their failure, blaming themselves." - page 14, Prayer: Does It Make a Difference?

It’s a simple concept. You tell us when to gently interrupt your day with an automated phone call that coaches you to pray. We are still putting together a few of the processes, but we plan to be live in the fall. Until then, we will provide insights we have found from our own personal journey with prayer. We invite you to join us either by subscribing to the blog in a reader or through email.  We will be sure to inform you when the calls go live.