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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses practical strategies for raising the spiritual vitality of your church. He emphasizes the importance of the leader's personal spiritual life, teaching basic spiritual disciplines, and developing a formal prayer ministry.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Orch, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Now, our guest host for the podcast today is James Earl Jones. Yes. If you've been a long time podcast listener, you know that when I get a cold, which I currently have, that it tends to make my voice go down about two octaves, and so I like to jokingly say that I'm James Earl Jones.
Jeff Iorg:I'm not sure I sound too much like him, but he's the best low voice I know, and so I always try to act like I'm imitating him. So today on the podcast, if I make any weird noises that we can't edit out, I'll just apologize once at the beginning, but I'll try to do my best. I wanna talk to you today about raising the spiritual level of your church or raising the level of the spiritual vitality or the spiritual experience of your church.
Jeff Iorg:You know, spiritual fervor is like the tide. It ebbs and it flows, and that's the way it is in a typical church. There'll be seasons or periods or times when things just seem to be really spiritually intense and then times when they're not. And we might wanna say, it doesn't need
Jeff Iorg:to be that way. It needs to be high all the time, but frankly, I think that's an unrealistic expectation. You say, but what about in the Bible? Well, you know, for example, in the book of Acts, we don't have every day in the history of the church recorded. In fact, those 28 chapters encompass almost thirty years.
Jeff Iorg:So what we have there are the highlight days when we see the church, you know, if you might say it this way, flow stage of spiritual vitality and certainly not the ebb. But there were a lot of days when there weren't miracles happening on every moment, and there wasn't a worship service happening that was worth being written about in holy scripture. So what can we do to facilitate or to encourage a depth of spiritual vitality and an expression of spiritual life that really is stronger, growing, healthier. And so I wanna talk about that today on the podcast. Now, before we go into the things you can do, let me say upfront that you can't control the Holy Spirit's activity.
Jeff Iorg:You can't mandate it. You can't make it happen, but you can do certain things that facilitate the Spirit's work among us and the Spirit's work within us corporately as churches. So let's talk about some of those today. The first beginning point is evaluating your spiritual life as the leader. Asking, are you committed to your spiritual disciplines like prayer and bible reading and scripture memory or fasting or rest?
Jeff Iorg:You know, these disciplines can often be overlooked by by leaders who are claiming to be too busy or too harried or just too involved in ministry. These are excuses that really rob us of the practice of spiritual disciplines and keep us from experiencing God's best and from modeling spiritual vitality for a church. Many years ago, I heard a trusted spiritual leader say this. He said, the level of your church's spiritual vitality will never rise to stay
Jeff Iorg:above the level of your spiritual vitality. Now
Jeff Iorg:he didn't say that your church can't have a surge or can't have a season or a period of time where there's a sense of spiritual vitality and life and vibrancy that exceeds yours. But he said, your church will never rise to stay above where you are as the leader. Now I believe that that that is actually true. Leaders do set the pace. We are the thermostat.
Jeff Iorg:We can raise the temperature by how we live and model and interact with people related to our spiritual lives. So the first thing I wanna challenge you to do in raising the spiritual vitality of your church is to do a self check.
Jeff Iorg:Are you reading the Bible regularly? Are you praying? Are you, resting, practicing spiritual, scripture memory, occasionally fasting?
Jeff Iorg:Are you being a model of spiritual vitality for yourself? And in doing that, are you preparing the way for other people to follow you in a similar kind of experience? Now, a second thing you can do as a church leader is develop a way to teach basic spiritual disciplines to church members. Now, most people have discovered over the years that this is best done with a curriculum that can be repeated over and over again, so that you build up, if you will, a culture of these
Jeff Iorg:disciplines in your church. For example, when I was
Jeff Iorg:a a young adult, our church had a 10 lesson curriculum that we wanted to work through with every new believer and with every new member of our church, and this involved teaching people how to read the Bible, how to pray, how to share their faith, how to participate in worship by things like fasting and praying and and giving, how to, share fellowship with one another, and how to share our faith with other people. These 10 basic lessons were taught to every new believer and every new member of our church, and we did this year after year after year after year so that there grew up within our church a common understanding of these disciplines and a common vocabulary that was used even to describe them. Now you may prefer to purchase some curriculum that you can use over and over again, or you may prefer to write your own. It doesn't really matter to me, although I think writing your own is much more difficult than most people think it is. But the essential ingredient to this is not where you get the curriculum, it's how you use it and how you stay with it over time.
Jeff Iorg:You can't teach spiritual disciplines by having a one hour class and then sending people off and expecting them to know how to do these things. No. Spiritual disciplines are taught by helping people to understand how to do them, having them modeled for people who are also practicing them, and then giving them the opportunity, usually in some kind of one on one relationship, to be able to develop and practice and field test, if you will, the disciplines until they become a part of their lives. Now, while spiritual disciplines, as I said, can be introduced in a classroom setting and can even be taught in that kind of a context, they're really not inculcated or really baked into a person's life until they're, mentored or discipled into their lives, oftentimes in one on one relationships. So the first thing I wanna challenge you to do in raising the spiritual vitality of your church is do a self check.
Jeff Iorg:How am I doing personally? Recognizing that your church will never rise to stay above your spiritual vitality as a leader. Now you may have some surges, but you'll never rise to stay above where you can lead people or where you can take people by your personal example. And then secondarily, develop a way to teach people, the basic spiritual disciplines, and not only to teach them in a classroom context, but to work with them in a modeling or mentoring kind of relationship to help them learn to put these things into practice. Now, the third strategy that you can adopt for your church is gonna take me a little longer now, and I wanna camp down on this for a bigger part of the podcast, and that is to develop a formal prayer ministry in your church.
Jeff Iorg:Now this can take any meaningful or effective form. There is no one size fits all for how to do a prayer ministry in a local church. But sadly, many churches have not only abandoned a weekly prayer meeting as a core service, but they've abandoned regular prayer more than just the perfunctory prayers in a worship service, but they've abandoned regular prayer as a part of the ministry, that they're trying to accomplish.
Jeff Iorg:So, I want to talk to
Jeff Iorg:you today about several different models of how you can create prayer ministries in your church. Now, besides you modeling and you teaching spiritual disciplines, I think this is the other big thing that you can do, and that is facilitate a meaningful prayer ministry so that your church has this direct conduit, if you will, to accessing God's power on all that you're doing.
Jeff Iorg:So what are some models of how to create a prayer ministry in a church? Well, let me give you several. First of all, develop a twenty four hour intercessory prayer ministry. Now, when I
Jeff Iorg:was a young adult, I was a part of a church that had a twenty four hour intercessory prayer ministry. The church, had a a prayer room that had an outside entrance, so it was always available. Every person who joined the prayer ministry was given a a key to lock and unlock that door, so it was secure, and when you were in there, you were perfectly safe. And the church set a goal of having a 68 people to sign up to pray round the clock, seven days a week, twenty four hours a day.
Jeff Iorg:Now I do not think that was ever achieved. You may say, well, then why
Jeff Iorg:did they attempt that? Well, I didn't say it wasn't a success. I said I'm not sure that they ever had a week where someone came to the prayer room and prayed for an hour, one hundred and sixty eight hours, around the clock, for a whole week. I'm not sure that ever happened. But I can tell you that dozens and dozens and dozens of people came every week to the prayer room to maintain the ongoing prayer ministry of
Jeff Iorg:the church. Now when this first opened,
Jeff Iorg:we were challenged, especially some of us younger guys, to take the, quote, harder hours, and so I signed up for one of those. I signed up for what I thought would probably be the most difficult hour of the week for prayer and the least likely to have anyone else interested in them, and that is I signed up to pray from two to three o'clock in the morning on Monday morning. So after finishing a long day at church, I would go home, sleep for a few hours, and then get up 01:30, one forty five, throw on some clothes, and head down to the church, get there by 02:00 to go in for my hour long time of prayer. Now in this prayer room, there were all kinds of things that were guided there for prayer. There was prayer lists that people had submitted.
Jeff Iorg:There were missionary prayer guides that were provided. There were other kinds of prayer helps that were given. And so it wasn't that difficult, frankly, to get in there and spend an hour praying through, what needed to be done.
Jeff Iorg:I remember when I was discipling a a man named Larry at
Jeff Iorg:the time, I was teaching him spiritual disciplines, modeling them for him, and then it came time to for him to be mentored into them. I said, hey, listen, man. To help you learn more about focused prayer,
Jeff Iorg:why don't you
Jeff Iorg:come to the prayer room with me? And he said, yeah. I've never joined the prayer ministry, and I said, that's okay. You can come during my hour, and we'll pray together. And he's like, yeah.
Jeff Iorg:Okay. That sounds great. Well, when do you pray?
Jeff Iorg:And I said, you'll need
Jeff Iorg:to meet me at the, prayer room at 02:00 in the morning on Monday. Well, he was a little surprised by that, but he showed up. And we went in the prayer room that first time, got the different prayer lists down. I showed him how it all worked. Pretty soon, we were on our knees and started to pray, and after an hour, I started wrapping up the prayer time, and he looked over and said, man, that flew by.
Jeff Iorg:Is it already been an hour? That's what it was like to pray with him that very first time. Now, I'm not sure that every context, today can facilitate a twenty four hour seven day a week prayer room. I think that today in today's world, there are a lot of other issues that we didn't have to deal with back in the day. I think, for example, just first of all, the security of the facility is a bigger issue than it was back in the day.
Jeff Iorg:I think that there's also, issues with transportation and with people being able to get to different locations and the level of commuters and commuter churches that we have today. And so I'm not saying this is the only model, but I am saying it is one way to facilitate a prayer ministry, and that is to pray twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and to have people sign up to come to a prayer room, to issue keys, and to allow people to come to a spot and pour out their heart to God in prayer. Now let me give you a second version of the prayer ministry like this, and that is to shorten it down and not do something twenty four seven, but to do something periodically that we called prayer summits in another church I attended. The prayer summits were organized usually three or sometimes four times a year, and they would usually last from Friday evening through Saturday evening or maybe Friday midnight to Saturday midnight or something like that. That.
Jeff Iorg:And during this twenty four hour time frame, the church would focus all its attention
Jeff Iorg:on praying together for its ministries and for its activities. Now, this twenty four hour prayer summit could be structured different ways, but
Jeff Iorg:I'll tell you a couple of ways that that our church did it. One way that we did it was to have a service that started every hour on the hour, that would have a brief time of singing, a very short message, and then moving into prayer, together into small groups. And this works better if you're in a larger church, but the I've done this in a different church that was a little bit smaller, that that instead of doing it that way, decided that we're gonna have a service every hour on the hour for twenty four hours as our prayer summit, But we're gonna train people to lead that, lay people and others to lead in these in these hour long prayer services, and we're they're not gonna be such a so much of a full blown worship experience with all the stuff that you would do with a full sized worship service. Instead, they're gonna be more scaled to the number of people who come. Well, in that particular church, I remember participating one time, and only two or three people came at a particular hour.
Jeff Iorg:And then another time, I know and went at a different hour, and, like, there were 20 or 30 people there. And so you were trained to facilitate however many come to whatever hour we're doing this, we simply pray together, in that in that context. And in in training people how to lead this, it's, it's another opportunity to train people, shape people, and help people learn how to lead other people in an experience together that facilitates spiritual growth, development, and vitality. So not only are you getting the prayer meeting accomplished, but you're also training people to give additional leadership along the way. Now these prayer summits can be focused on a specific need or specific issue, like you might be one of them might be focused on a church's building program and its ministries and its progress and its community.
Jeff Iorg:Another time, it might be focused on international missions or on church planting or on some specific aspect of that. So there's a lots of ways to organize these, but the main thing to do is to focus your church for a twenty four hour period entirely on prayer. Now, interestingly enough, once I was in a church, a long time ago, one of my children was
Jeff Iorg:a teenager, and our pastor announced a program like this, except he called it prayer vigil. And I remember my son saying to
Jeff Iorg:me, what what's a vigil? And I said, well, it's a somber time of coming together when you reflect on God, and he goes, that doesn't sound very appealing to me.
Jeff Iorg:It's not like going to a funeral. Well, I thought about that
Jeff Iorg:a little bit, and I thought, you know, there is something about this. When you call it a prayer vigil, it almost implies, you know, someone has died or something negative has happened or it's gonna be quiet and reflective and serious. And so I actually went to the pastor and I said, hey, what do you think about finding a different name? And he's the one who coined the phrase prayer summit. He said, yeah, I think you got a point there.
Jeff Iorg:Let's call it a prayer summit instead, and a summit meeting meeting is when all the important people gather to make a decision, and so he said, that's what we're doing when we come to prayer. We're gathering with our Christian brothers and sisters and with God to talk to him about the important issues that we're facing, and it's a prayer summit, not a prayer vigil. So maybe just a nomenclature thing, but I think it's a good one to get us focused on what we really want to accomplish in this kind of, opportunity to set the tone for prayer in a more positive way. So there's, twenty four hour prayer ministries. There's twenty four hour prayer summits.
Jeff Iorg:Another model is prayer groups. Now these prayer groups can meet, before a service, after a service, on a certain night of the week, or a certain other time. And these prayer groups can be multigender, multigreed, multiaige group, multiracial, multiethnic. They can be put together in all kinds of different ways as long as the focus is on prayer. And the key to these, of course, is that you have leadership that keeps them really focused on prayer.
Jeff Iorg:Now, my wife was in a prayer group that prayed together for about twelve years. They met once a week, and they met during the lunchtime, and they simply had scripture and a quick bite to eat and then forty five hard minutes of intense prayer. They did this together as a prayer group, and it was a wonderful way to raise the spiritual vitality of the organization where they were meeting to pray. A wonderful example. But this prayer group idea took a new dimension during COVID that I wanna talk about for a moment.
Jeff Iorg:I was a part of a church at the time of COVID in California that had a pastor who had been there for many years and who was very committed to leading a prayer group every week. So on Monday nights, the pastor and this was a church of attendance about 800. On Monday nights, the pastor led a prayer group that was designed to promote and support the ministries of the church. And so he would gather the people every Monday night, and they would pray. And he would have, you know, 20 to 30 people in a church of 800 that would come back to pray with him on a Monday evening.
Jeff Iorg:Then COVID happened. And, of course, we were curtailed in meeting in person, and our particular church had a lot of higher risk people in it. And so pastor was pretty strong about let's not do anything that jeopardizes anyone's physical health. So while we continued to have morning worship services, things like the prayer group were stopped for a while. And then the pastor decided, you know what?
Jeff Iorg:I think I
Jeff Iorg:can do this prayer group on Zoom. Yeah. On Zoom. So he set put out
Jeff Iorg:an announcement and said, we're resuming the Monday night prayer group, and we're going to have it on Zoom, and we'd like to invite anyone that would care to participate to log in. To his shock, more than a hundred people logged in for the first Zoom prayer meeting, and after that, the number grew. Now, when I reflected on this with him, I asked him, pastor, what what do you think happened there? He said, well, I learned that there were a lot of people that didn't wanna commute back to church the next night after a long day of Sunday. There were people that were had ill family members or had homebound family members or had other reasons that couldn't go out on a Monday night.
Jeff Iorg:I found out there were older people that that couldn't drive or get out in the evening. He said, I found out a whole host of reasons why people weren't coming to prayer meeting but really still loved to pray and to pray with others. He said, when we launched the Zoom prayer meeting and all these people started calling in, I saw how many people that really were that wanted to pray together. So he said, I learned how to get people in the large group, do a short devotional, and then put people into smaller groups on Zoom to pray, and then to call everybody back together for a group prayer at the end. Now here's the most amazing thing.
Jeff Iorg:When the when COVID was over and we were all able to resume back meeting in person, this prayer meeting stayed on Zoom. Because as pastor said, I had more people coming, more people participating, and more people praying through the Zoom prayer call than I did through any other means. And then, just to talk another variation of this, I am a part of a ministry to professional baseball umpires in North America, And as a part of that ministry, the professional baseball umpires have a call in prayer meeting every Friday afternoon. It's been going on for years. There's a certain number and a certain time when these men call in and share prayer requests and pray for
Jeff Iorg:each other, weekly as an expression
Jeff Iorg:of their commitment to praying with and for one another. And these guys are calling in from all over The United States because, you know, as umpires, they're working in all these different cities all around the country, And so wherever they are, they know the time and the hour and the number, they call in, and they have this prayer call every week. So some different models of creating prayer ministries. First, you could have a twenty four seven prayer ministry. Second, you could have prayer summits, which are twenty four hour periods of prayer, usually three or four of those a year to really focus the church on prayer.
Jeff Iorg:Third option is prayer groups, where you have small groups that gather together for prayer. They can gather in person, they can gather by video conference like Zoom, or they can just gather by audio conference or audio phone like these umpires that I've been describing. But all three of these are means by which people get together at least once a week to pray. And in doing so, they have these different expressions of prayer groups, which raise the spiritual vitality of the church or the ministry, with which they're involved. Now, another model is often used in predominantly Korean churches, and that's an early morning prayer meeting.
Jeff Iorg:Korean churches are famous for their 6AM prayer meetings where people come together. Usually, it's structured like a worship service. There's a brief time of singing, a brief message from God's word, and then we go to prayer. Now, if you've ever been to one of these, you know that in a Korean context, everyone prays simultaneously out loud at the same time. And so, that's what happens in one of these early morning prayer meetings.
Jeff Iorg:And this is a good way to bring people together for community, bring people together to start their day, bring people together to accentuate or to underline the commitment they have not only to the Lord, but also to their church and to each other. So another way of organizing a prayer ministry is this early morning prayer model. Now, let me give you one final way that I've seen churches really raise the value of prayer ministry in the church, and that is having what I will describe as a prayer altar call. Now, I saw my first one of these, that's organized the way I'm describing it today in a church again in California. It was a larger church, and I went there on a Sunday morning, and the pastor preached his message and then gave the invitation.
Jeff Iorg:And he said, this morning, if you need prayer, if you need prayer for a job, prayer for your rent money, prayer for your wayward child, and he listed several things like this that people would need might need prayer. He said, we want you to come. Our prayer counselors are going to be ready for you. If they'd come now, we'd be prepared to receive you and pray with you this morning. Now remember, this church had built up a culture of this over time, so you won't have this the first Sunday you try it, but I watched as 20 or 30 people stood up and all went forward.
Jeff Iorg:And there were men and women, there were young adults, single adults, middle married adults, there were older adults. There were different races and ethnicities. There was quite a cross section of these 20 to 30 people that went forward that were the prayer counselors, and they went forward and just stood and turned and faced out across the congregation. And the pastor said, these are my friends who are ready to pray with you this morning. If you have a need, I want you to come right now, and we will pray for you this morning.
Jeff Iorg:I was in this church several times over the years. Every time they did this, hundreds of people would come forward for prayer. Now
Jeff Iorg:this was a church that might have maybe 1,500 in attendance, and there might be a hundred or 200 that would come forward. And they wouldn't all necessarily, you know, just come to pray with someone, although many did. They would just come and kneel and just pray. And I would just see dozens and dozens of people coming, and
Jeff Iorg:I would just be astounded, frankly, but
Jeff Iorg:they were coming for this moment of prayer. Now this was a multi ethnic church with people from various backgrounds, and the pastor happened to be an older Anglo male, and I asked him one time, I said, how did you do this? He said, oh, I didn't do it
Jeff Iorg:in the beginning, but he said
Jeff Iorg:the more I our church became multicultural and the more I discovered how other people connect with God, I discovered that, and these are his words, not mine. He discovered he said, I discovered that white guys like me don't really pray enough or don't pray with people as much as we ought to, and when I started asking people to tell me what would be more multicultural and more multi ethnic in our expression of worship, it was more time praying together, which was one thing that you would unify all of us. So he said, we started the prayer altar call. So every Sunday when I finish preaching, I say, we'd like to pray with you, and we'd like to give you the opportunity to pray, and we have time now in our service for people to pray and to be prayed with, and that's when dozens and dozens of people started coming. We had to start training prayer counselors, and then as
Jeff Iorg:a result of this, we had
Jeff Iorg:to train people also to say, now that you've I've prayed with you, may I just ask you if you're certain that you know Jesus Christ personally as your lord and savior? And if you don't, could you stay with me for a few more minutes, or we walk out to a table where I can give you some material and someone can talk with you about receiving Jesus as your savior and Lord, or maybe I can talk with you about that as your prayer partner today. He said, not every Sunday, but many Sundays, we have people that come to faith in Jesus primarily because they first wanted somebody to just pray for them
Jeff Iorg:in the moment, this kind of prayer altar call.
Jeff Iorg:So I'm talking today about raising
Jeff Iorg:the level of spiritual vitality in your church. It starts with you. If you're the leader,
Jeff Iorg:you have to be modeling spiritual devotions and spiritual disciplines because your church will never rise to stay above the level of leadership you provide. Then, secondarily, I want you to teach people these same disciplines you're modeling. They they won't know how to do them spontaneously, but you can teach them about Bible reading and prayer, scripture memory and fasting and worship and giving and the disciplines that make up their Christian life.
Jeff Iorg:But then then you need to most focus the spiritual development of
Jeff Iorg:your church by developing some way to call people to prayer. And I've given you five suggestions today. Twenty four hour, seven day a week prayer ministry, twenty four hour prayer summits that you have periodically through a year, prayer meetings that can take on various kinds of forms, whether they're in person, by video conference, or just call in prayer times, And then, of course, these early morning prayer meetings that are modeled by Korean churches and others that come together early in the morning for worship and prayer daily. And then finally, this prayer invitation or this prayer altar call experience, where you have people trained and ready and you say, if you need prayer today, you need a job, you need rent money, you need a wayward child to come back to Jesus, you need physical healing, what is it that you need today and what you'd like to talk to God about? We have people who are prepared to come and pray with you.
Jeff Iorg:Come right now, and let's pray. All of these are ways that you can raise the spiritual vitality in your church, primarily by focusing people on spiritual disciplines and on prayer. These are practices you can put into place that will facilitate an enhanced spiritual climate, enhanced spiritual vitality, and will facilitate a rise of the tide of the work of the Holy Spirit in your church. Now, as I said at the beginning, nothing we can do mandates, dictates, controls, or facilitates the work of the Holy Spirit, but we can do things that remove impediments to his activity in our lives. Today, I've tried to outline some of those that you can do collectively as a church so that you can enhance the spiritual vitality that you're experiencing as a congregation.
Jeff Iorg:Part of spiritual leadership is leading people to greater spiritual vitality. We are not bureaucrats running machines. We are not, administrators, just greasing the skids of organizational behavior. We are spiritual leaders who are responsible to facilitate the spiritual vitality of the people, the churches, and the organizations we lead. Put these things into practice today and raise the spiritual vitality of where you live and work.
Jeff Iorg:Do it as you lead
Jeff Iorg:on.