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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the powerful impact of intentional prayer support in ministry leadership. He reflects on three decades of sustaining a personal prayer team, offering practical advice for forming and nurturing such teams to provide spiritual strength and encouragement for leaders facing overwhelming challenges.
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Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.
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From effective communication and team building to strategic decision-making and fostering innovation, each episode is packed with valuable lessons and inspiring stories to empower you on your leadership journey.
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Welcome to the Lead On podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Today on the podcast, I wanna tell you about something that happened recently while I was preaching in a Southern Baptist church, and I wanna use that to talk about something that's been a very important part of my life now for the past thirty years. I have, for a long time, known of the need to have people pray for me to support me in ministry leadership. But recently in a church, something happened that touched me so deeply.
Jeff Iorg:Wanna tell you about it today. I was preaching in a mid sized Baptist church. It's not a mega church by any means, maybe an attendance in the four to 500 range. And while after I finished preaching the message, the pastor said, we'd like to make a presentation to you and to your wife. So my wife, Anne, was with me.
Jeff Iorg:We went up
Jeff Iorg:on the stage, and he said, we want you to know
Jeff Iorg:that we believe in the work Southern Baptists are doing all around the world. And we believe in the leadership of the executive committee and what you're accomplishing on behalf of Southern Baptists, and we believe in you, and believe that God has brought you together as a couple for this particular time in our denomination's life to give us the leadership we need. Well, all of that sounded very affirming and encouraging, and I
Jeff Iorg:was grateful. Then he said,
Jeff Iorg:our church wants you to know that we believe so much in our in our work that we're doing together,
Jeff Iorg:that we've committed to pray for the both of you every day for the following year. And then he handed me a little booklet. Now this was not a fancy thing made by some expensive printing. It was
Jeff Iorg:a simple booklet that they had made on their church's printer and copier. It was a booklet that has within it, a a page for each month of the year. And on each page, down the left hand side were the days of the month, August 1, August 2, August 3. You get the idea. And then out to the right of each one of those dates, there was a blank.
Jeff Iorg:And every one of those blanks for three hundred and sixty five days was filled in by someone who had handwritten their name saying, on
Jeff Iorg:this particular day, I'm going to pray for you. And as I thumbed through that book, it moved me emotionally, brought tears to my eyes. As I looked at
Jeff Iorg:the names of these rank and file Southern Baptists who believe in what we're doing and said, I'm going to pray for you. Well, I I brought that little booklet home, and I use a notebook to help me stay on track with my daily devotions. And this particular notebook has a flap that you can slide things into the front. And so I took that that little booklet that they gave me at the church.
Jeff Iorg:I brought it home. I opened it to this month, August, and I folded it back and slipped it into that, little clear pocket so that when I open my prayer notebook, the first thing I see is the date and the name of the person who's praying for me today. It's hard to put into words how meaningful it is to know that people care enough about you to pray for you. So I wanna talk to
Jeff Iorg:you today on the podcast about developing a prayer team. That's what I did thirty years ago. I've maintained it consistently for
Jeff Iorg:all of that time And I wanna talk with you about,
Jeff Iorg:what a prayer team is, how you form one, how you sustain it, and what it can mean to you over the years. And I'm gonna do that by asking and answering a few questions today on the podcast. And the first question is this, what is a prayer team? Well, very simply, it's a group of people
Jeff Iorg:that you facilitate to pray for you on a regular basis. It's a group of people that you facilitate to pray for you on a regular basis. Now let me emphasize, it doesn't have to be a large number of people.
Jeff Iorg:I would suggest that your prayer team may be only needs to have three to five, maybe 10 people on it. You don't need hundreds of people. That's not the goal. This is not a contest. We're not trying to amass a list.
Jeff Iorg:We're not trying to prove a point. We're trying to identify people who are praying for us, and then we wanna facilitate their continued prayer and their more effective prayer for us on our behalf. So what is a prayer team? It's a group of people you facilitate to pray for you on a regular basis.
Jeff Iorg:Now, second question, why did I develop a prayer team? Well, here's how it happened. I developed a prayer team because I know that I need prayerful support. I recognize a biblical pattern of prayer support like the picture in in Exodus of, you know, Moses praying and those brothers holding up his arms while he prayed.
Jeff Iorg:I need that. I need people to hold me up, if you will, in prayer. And this became very clear to me when I first left pastoral ministry and moved into executive leadership. Let me tell you a little bit about that story. In 1994, I was a 35 year old pastor leading a church that I had planted, the church of my dreams.
Jeff Iorg:I was married, of course, to Anne. I had three small children at the time. I think
Jeff Iorg:the oldest one was about, maybe 10. I was working hard, trying to get the church established, dealing with all the things that you deal with as a 35 year old man and having a young family and just everything that that entailed. I got a letter in
Jeff Iorg:the mail saying I could get some additional insurance if I got an insurance physical. So I went down to get the physical and discovered that I had cancer. So all of 1994 was a difficult year for me. Physically, I was struggling spiritually and emotionally. I was it was very difficult.
Jeff Iorg:And in the midst of all of that, the search committee for the Northwest Baptist Convention contacted me and asked if I would be willing, to talk with him about becoming the executive director of the state convention. Well, at first, I was like, no. I have no reason to to do that. I'm pastoring a church that I planted. It's the church of my dreams, and you don't want me to lead a stake convention because I I I'm a denominational appreciator.
Jeff Iorg:I I like what we do together, but I don't know how to lead it. I've never I've never even chaired a Baptist committee, much less been on a Baptist board or anything like that. I I I just don't think I'm the right one, but well, you know the story if you know my background. It turned out that I was the one. And so by early nineteen ninety five, I had accepted the position to be the executive director of the Northwest Baptist Convention, and quite frankly, I was overwhelmed.
Jeff Iorg:I was the youngest state executive at that time ever elected to that position in the nation. I was coming out of a very challenging health crisis the year before. I was dealing with leaving my church, the church of my dreams, the church I had moved, my family across The United States to plant, and I was dealing with all of the transition that was going on with my family as a result of
Jeff Iorg:the job change. It's not enough to say it, but it's all the words I have. I was overwhelmed. And I knew that I needed prayer, sustaining, uplifting prayer.
Jeff Iorg:So I wrote a column in the Northwest Baptist Witness, the newspaper at the time, in which I described this need that I felt for prayer, and I asked this key question. Now listen carefully. I said, if you are already praying for me, would you identify yourself? I'd like to let you know how you can pray more effectively. Now did you hear how I phrased that?
Jeff Iorg:I said, if you're already praying for me. You see, I wasn't trying to amass
Jeff Iorg:this huge prayer list of people who would pray for me. I wasn't trying to recruit anybody or talk anybody into it. I simply wrote and said, if you're already praying for me, would you let me know that? I'd like to have a conversation with you and share some information with you.
Jeff Iorg:Well, to my great surprise, I got about 30 letters back from that column that I wrote in the newspaper. Now I won't go into all of them, but I
Jeff Iorg:do wanna tell you about one. I got a letter, a handwritten letter from a man named Cal Poncho senior. Mister Poncho was in his eighties. He lived on the Warm Springs Reservation in Central Oregon where Northwest Baptist Convention had a cooperating church, a strong church that had been planted and nurtured on the reservation over the years. Mister Pancho wrote me a handwritten letter.
Jeff Iorg:If you've ever received handwritten letter from someone in their eighties, you know how the letters are a little shaky and you can tell that their hand has a little bit
Jeff Iorg:of a quiver. Well, that's what his letter was like. His letter said this, dear doctor Orge,
Jeff Iorg:I've been praying for your family ever since I saw your photograph in the Northwest Baptist witness. When I saw the picture of your young family, I said, I need to pray for this man. And I've been praying for you and your wife and your children, and I'll continue to do so. And you asked if we'd write you, so I'm letting you know I'm out here praying for you. Well, I can hardly tell that story today on the podcast these thirty years later.
Jeff Iorg:What a moving what a moving letter that was to receive. I remember sitting at my desk with tears on my cheeks thinking, who is this man? Why do people care about me? Why do people love me enough to pray for me when they've never even met me? How how does God give the ministry of prayer to some people like this dear man?
Jeff Iorg:So many questions. Such a humbling moment to receive this sweet letter.
Jeff Iorg:Well, I read the letter. I added, Cal Poncho senior to my prayer team, and a
Jeff Iorg:few months went by. I was over in that region of Oregon preaching one night at some kind of baptist meeting, and I noticed that there was an older man afterwards who was sort of standing on the fringes of the crowd, sort of waiting. I could kind of tell he wanted to talk to me, but he wasn't pushing himself forward. So I edged my way over to him and said, sir, you I'm glad you came tonight. I'm my name is Jeff.
Jeff Iorg:And he said, I know. He said, my name's Cal Poncho senior. You don't know me. I said, oh, yes. I do know you.
Jeff Iorg:You wrote me a beautiful letter. You're on
Jeff Iorg:my prayer team. And he
Jeff Iorg:smiled and said, yes, I am. And I just wanna shake your hand, let you know that I love you, I care for you, I appreciate the work you're doing, I believe in what we're doing at Southern Baptist, and I want you to know I'm praying for your family as well. And he and I stood there and had this beautiful conversation, this dear, sweet man, and what he meant to me in that moment. Well, he kept praying for me until he passed away. It was later my privilege to meet his son and have him on the board of the Northwest Baptist Convention as he was also a leader in that church over in the Warm Springs Reservation.
Jeff Iorg:What delightful people they were. So that's how I developed the prayer team and how it got started because I recognized that I had a need for people to pray for me. I also developed a prayer team because I respect people who are powerful in prayer.
Jeff Iorg:And I also wanna admit that I'm not one of those people. Now don't misunderstand me.
Jeff Iorg:I I pray. I pray every day. I usually start my mornings with devotional time and reading the word of God and praying and talking with God about the events of my day and about the circumstances in my family and about specific needs I have. And then it's not uncommon for me to be in meetings throughout the day where we pause to pray about different aspects of our work. And quite honestly, sometimes when I'm just out walking or driving, I find myself talking, sometimes out loud like I'm talking to you right now to God and just talking with him about my work and my life and in that context of prayer, communicating with him.
Jeff Iorg:But even though those things are a regular part of my life, I have never considered myself a prayer warrior, never considered myself to be powerful or mighty in prayer. I've always felt like it was one of those areas where I, was doing what I could, and I was doing what was adequate, but I wasn't doing all that some others are able to do in this area. Well, I also developed a prayer team because I know that I need God's power and protection in my life and ministry, and I need it through prayer, and I need it through the prayers of others along with the prayers that I may add as well. So what is a prayer team? A group of people you facilitate to pray for you on a regular basis.
Jeff Iorg:And why did I develop the prayer team? Because I recognize the need, the biblical pattern of prayer support and the need that I have to have God's power and protection in my life. I respect people who are powerful in prayer, I'm willing to admit that I'm not, and that I need other people to pray for me. Now, how did I recruit this original prayer team, and how do I sustain it over the years? Well, as I've already told you, I started the prayer team by writing an article that went out in the Northwest Baptist Witness, our newspaper at the time.
Jeff Iorg:Back in those days, that was our best means of communication, and so I would follow that up each year with just a little a little addendum to one of my columns that I wrote on a monthly basis, just reminding people there was a prayer team. If anyone was out there already praying for me, that they could communicate back to me, and we could add them to the prayer team. I I also sent something out that first year in our Christmas letter that went out to our family and close friends, letting them know of this opportunity as well. And I asked people in the beginning just to commit for a year, but no one ever dropped out. Once they got on
Jeff Iorg:the prayer team, most of them only quit when they went to heaven. But I asked them for that kind of commitment upfront. Now over the years, how have
Jeff Iorg:I sustained it? Well, this might surprise you. I've sustained it by just quietly adding people along the way who said something to me about their prayerful support of me, my family, or of our work.
Jeff Iorg:And when I came to
Jeff Iorg:the executive committee, I did one time make a public statement about this and invite people who were praying to join the prayer team if they chose. I wanna emphasize though that in thirty years, I have made very few public announcements about the prayer team. I've made very few public appeals to anyone to be a part of the prayer team. I have depended more on word-of-mouth, on people connecting with me personally, or people asking to be added to the prayer team rather than trying to recruit people to it. So that's how
Jeff Iorg:I initially recruited the team, and that's how we've sustained it over time. Now, who is on the prayer team? And what does it mean to them as well as to me? Well, I wanna emphasize this. I've already said it on the podcast.
Jeff Iorg:I wanna say it again. The people who are on the prayer team are people who are already praying for me before they got on the team. People who are already praying for me. This is so important.
Jeff Iorg:I have never tried to talk anyone in to praying for me or gone out and tried to recruit more people to get more people on the prayer team. I've never made it into a numbers thing where I had to keep a count or anything like that. In fact, today, I have no idea how many people are on the
Jeff Iorg:prayer team. It's not a material number to me. I realize that I'm in a world, especially here at
Jeff Iorg:the executive committee, where numbers are important. We're the place that gathers the data about Southern Baptist, and we watch that data carefully. Look, I believe numbers matter, but sometimes they don't matter that much. And the number of people on your prayer team is not evidence of its strength or its power or its capacity to support you or uphold you in life. So I would discourage you from trying to go out and recruit a lot of people to get them on your prayer team.
Jeff Iorg:That's really not what this is about. If you're trying to form a prayer team to support you in your life and ministry, rather than saying, I'd like to invite as many of
Jeff Iorg:you as possible to join me in praying for me, no. Instead, say it this way. If you're already praying for me on a daily basis, would you identify yourself? Send me
Jeff Iorg:an email or a text or come up and talk to me after this meeting. If you're already praying for me on a daily basis, I'd like to meet you. And you'll find that there'll be people who'll come forward and say,
Jeff Iorg:yeah, I'm I'm praying for you. Or, yeah, I I didn't know
Jeff Iorg:that you were gonna ask about that, but since you did, yeah, I've been praying for you. That's the kind of person you're looking for. You're looking for people who are already praying. Now, in that context, it's been interesting that there have been some people who've joined the prayer team that I have known for a long, long time. In fact, I have people who've been praying for me for the whole thirty years.
Jeff Iorg:It's amazing, honestly. They they joined in the earliest days. One of them was my wife's aunt, Buff Legal.
Jeff Iorg:She joined the prayer team early,
Jeff Iorg:early on. When I
Jeff Iorg:first made the announcement, she said, you know, Jeff, I've been praying for you and your family. I'd like to be on that team. We added her. And for the thirty years since then, she's been praying for me. And I know she prayed because she was one of the people who would frequently send me a little text or a note and say, I see you're going to be so and so place preaching.
Jeff Iorg:I'm praying for you today, or I hear you're traveling today. And the only way she would know those things is because she was paying attention to the prayer letter, which I'll talk about in just a minute, and she knew about where I was and she'd communicate with me about that. But the main thing I want you to know is there's some people that you'll know on your prayer team who'll be with you for a long time. I have friends like her that have prayed for me for these decades. She just recently went to heaven, and we miss her on the prayer team.
Jeff Iorg:But that's one group of people that you can depend on, that's people who've known you for a long time. Now those people, I've often had some kind of relationship with or I've known them or they've been church members or in some cases family members. They're not the most astounding group that's ever joined the prayer team. The people
Jeff Iorg:that have astounded me have been the people that I've never met, like Cal Pancho senior that I just mentioned a few moments ago.
Jeff Iorg:I'd never met him, never heard of him, didn't know anything about him when I got that first letter telling me, I'm praying for you, and I wanted you to know that. When I went to this church recently that I told you about at the beginning of the podcast, they gave me this book with all these names in it, There's only two people in that whole church that I ever even knew before I went there that day. Now I've got these dozens and dozens and dozens of people who've all said, I'm gonna pray for you, and I'm gonna commit to praying on a certain day for you.
Jeff Iorg:Wow. People who you've never met,
Jeff Iorg:don't know well, will step forward and say, I I'm praying for you. And the more widely known your ministry, the the more that you are doing things in more of
Jeff Iorg:a public way, you may be surprised at the people who do come forward and say, I'm praying for you. These are people who are already praying,
Jeff Iorg:some that you've known for a long time, some that you've never met, who will step forward and say, they wanna be on the prayer team. And then one final question. How do I keep the prayer team going? In other words, what sustains it over the time? Well, very simply, I made a commitment when we formed a prayer team to send a prayer letter every month that has two things.
Jeff Iorg:First, it has about a three paragraph summary of some personal and, professional prayer needs that I have, some things about our lives and about our ministry. I summarize some key issues or some key things or some key challenges and ask people to pray about those
Jeff Iorg:specifically. And then the second part
Jeff Iorg:of the prayer letter is my calendar, Just a a list of the days of the month that's upcoming and where I'm going to be or what I'm going to be doing on those various days.
Jeff Iorg:I write this monthly prayer letter every month. Now listen to this.
Jeff Iorg:I have not missed a month in thirty years. You say, oh, you had to miss one, not a one. Haven't missed a one. Every month, round about the twenty fifth of the month, I sit down and write this simple letter. It's usually about a page and a half to two pages where I have three or four paragraphs at the beginning saying, here's what's happening.
Jeff Iorg:Here's what I've asked you to pray about and how God has answered, and here are some needs that are going on right now in my life. And then following that, I just list my calendar, just a list of the days and where I'm going to be or speaking or traveling or working in the office, and just highlight what some of those specific things may be. And I send that letter, electronically these days. Although back in the old days, we did it by mail, believe it or not. But now we just send it electronically to the people who are on the prayer team.
Jeff Iorg:Now thirty years.
Jeff Iorg:Never missed a month because this is one of the most important communications that I must maintain. It's my lifeline to my prayer team. It's how I remember the definition, facilitate them praying for me on a regular basis. I want them to know enough about what's happening with me that they can pray specifically for me, and I want them to know where I am and what I'm doing so they can pray in support of the travel, the events, and the office administration days that I have on my
Jeff Iorg:calendar. Now, there's a couple of things about that that you might think are a little bit risky. In other words,
Jeff Iorg:if you're sending something out like this, isn't there a risk that it's going to become public? Well, there all obviously always is. So I have to do two things. Number one, I remind the prayer team from time to time that this is a private letter and that it's not a letter from me to their church prayer group or me to their church bulletin board or me to their social media feed. That the goal is not to get more people praying.
Jeff Iorg:That's not the goal. So don't send it
Jeff Iorg:out to anyone. That this is
Jeff Iorg:a personal letter from me to you as a prayer team member to give you information about praying. So when I write the prayer letter, it's a private letter. It's a personal letter. And there have been a couple of times when that's been violated, but really not in a malicious kind of way. No one's ever tried to send anything out that did any kind of harm to me or in any way tried to publicize.
Jeff Iorg:What they've typically done is sent out information to try to get more people to pray or sometimes contacted someone I might have mentioned in the prayer letter about where I'm going to speak or something like that, and and they wondered about that coming to them from an outside source. So occasionally, we've had to say, hey, remember, it's a personal letter and a private letter, but very seldom has this been a problem. You do have to be wise in what you put in a letter like this, but you wanna be specific enough and personal enough that it becomes a real communication to to the person that's praying without jeopardizing any inappropriate information. Well, having said all that, let me just come back to where I started, and then we'll come to the conclusion. This all started because a church said, we're praying for you, and gave me this beautiful little booklet with these individual names spelled out of people who are praying for me every day this next year.
Jeff Iorg:That just reminded me of this prayer team that I've had for these thirty years and how much they've supported me and stood with me and and prayed for me. And I've tried to give you some examples today of how you could do the same thing, but I wanna challenge you now as we come to the end.
Jeff Iorg:Develop a prayer team. It may only be three to five people. That's enough. You may have a small ministry or an in an out of
Jeff Iorg:the way place, and you're just gonna recruit some family and friends and others that you know are praying for you. That's fine. You may have a much broader ministry with a much more public footprint in what you do, and you may have other people that wanna join in prayer that you've maybe even never met. Listen, this is not a contest. We're not trying to get hundreds of people signed up.
Jeff Iorg:What we're trying to do is identify the people who are already praying for us and then facilitate their praying with a simple letter every month that says, here's how you can pray for me and thank you. Here's how God has answered our prayers and thank you. Friends, we need people to stand with us. Ministry leadership today is hard. And one of the ways that you can experience the spiritual support of people who will stand with you is by developing a prayer team, a team of people who will come alongside you and uphold you as you do the work that God has given you.
Jeff Iorg:I am thankful that thirty years ago, because of my illness and my age and the job I'd been thrust into, I felt overwhelmed. Today, I still feel that way. I've never gotten to the place where I stepped up and said, I've got it all together. I figured this out. I know what I'm doing.
Jeff Iorg:I got this. I've never had come to that point yet. I still come to the place regularly where I feel overwhelmed and I know I've got the prayer team out there and that keeps me going. So I'm challenging you today. Think about how you can form a group of people around you to support you in ministry and do it so that you will have the strength that comes from God answering prayer in your life as a tremendous source of spiritual power, spiritual strength, and even spiritual success as you lead on.