How to Develop Powerful Prayer and Intercession Teams

Developing Powerful Prayer and Intercession Teams

October 11, 2023•8 min read

Developing and leading altar prayer and intercession teams is a privilege! Oftentimes, though, it can be challenging to know exactly how to start or how to revamp an already-existing team. This post aims to help give you tools and resources to initially create or to develop an increasingly powerful prayer and intercession team.

About Our Teams

Our prayer and intercession teams flow inside and outside of the local church, through our outreach ministry, Hope Night Wisco. Our altar prayer and intercession teams through have grown and the Lord has established a beautiful atmosphere where people feel safe to encounter the presence and power of God! Our altar prayer team is privileged to receive vulnerable requests every Sunday and through various on and off-site events. We consistently witness Jesus redeem, save, restore, baptize in the Spirit, heal, set the captives free through deliverance, signs and wonders, miracles, and more!

Our intercession team prays for every request that comes in online for our Church, and helps to make up our State-wide ministry outreach, Pray Wisconsin. Our intercessors also intercede over our Pastors, staff, Church, and events. We also hold pre-service prayer prior to every service at our church and our outreach events. We value the work of intercessory prayer! Our intercession team has witnessed God: defeat principalities and powers, heal, move in dire situations, redeem, restore, bring prodigals home, and more!

How To Develop Prayer and Intercession Teams

1. Develop a Vision and Mission

Why do you desire to develop a prayer or intercession team? What do you hope that God will accomplish through it? What is the purpose of your team?

Examples:

Our Mission- To intercede in love on another's behalf, powerfully partnering with God through Spirit-led prayer.

Our Vision- To be disciples of Jesus who are devoted to intercession and prayer. To partner with God as He continues to advance His Kingdom in individual's lives, cities, states, and our nation.

2. Choosing the Right People

The key to developing powerful prayer and intercession teams is to allow the Holy Spirit to guide you in discernment with the people who He is calling to join your team. At the core of powerful prayer and intercession teams are people who cultivate and steward powerful prayer and intercession lives. The Holy Spirit doesn't flow through processes or formulas, but through people who intimately love and follow Jesus.

Serving on an altar prayer or intercession team isn't just something you do, it's something that God calls you to.

Our process for adding people to our prayer or intercession team is to generally have every person serve on another Church service team first. This allows for them to become acclimated to our Church culture and to demonstrate faithfulness in serving. Then, those who desire to be part of our prayer team meet with one of our pastors, as a way to establish support and relationship with our church leadership. Next, we give our prayer team info and application to those who are interested in joining our team. Following this, our prayer team leader meets with the applicant to hear about their call to join the team, their experience, and about their personal prayer life. Our prayer team leader prayerfully discerns whether the applicant would be a good fit or not.

See the resources below for a template for a prayer team application and visions and protocols.

3. Individualized and Hands-On Training

We have developed key leaders from our prayer team who have demonstrated maturity in praying for others and faithfulness to our team. These prayer team trainers are paired with new prayer team members to provide for them hands-on training in praying for people at the altar. Because our altar ministry time is so varied, and because we see lots of different ministry at our altar, we have found that this hands-on training is crucial! Hands-on training is conducted for at least three altar ministry times, but is extended for each individual to provide what they need for training and for their comfort in praying for people. See the resources below for more information about our training.

4. Creating and Maintaining a God-Honoring Culture and Hosting the Presence of God

Honoring God and hosting His presence is key to our prayer and intercession teams being effective. Apart from Jesus, we can do nothing! Our prayer and intercession team culture is the final piece of how we believe God has developed a powerful prayer and intercession team in our ministries. The culture of our team is vital to being vessels that honor God and the work that He is doing during altar ministry time. The next section gives an in-depth look at our prayer and intercession team culture.

Prayer and Intercession Team Culture

As mentioned above, the culture of our team is vital to being vessels that honor God and the work that He is doing during altar ministry time. The health of the culture of the prayer and intercession team depend upon Jesus to continue growing each person and maintaining the health of their hearts and motives for serving Him in these ministries. Here is a comprehensive look at our team culture:

1. We commit to carrying out the Vision and Mission of our Church.

2. We rejoice that we are part of a TEAM. We do not serve with a mindset that we are on our own or that it is about us, we come to the altar in order to serve God together. We each bring the gifts that the Holy Spirit has given us, and we celebrate the gifts that the Holy Spirit has given others. We each listen to God's voice, and we each acknowledge that we all will catch nuances others miss, and vice versa. We teach each other. We strengthen each other. We learn from one another. We encourage one another. We are a team.

3. We realize that this is Jesus' ministry. We understand that God accomplishes the work, not us. We joyfully partner with God through prayer as He redeems, heals and restores individuals - setting captives free to live as His much loved sons and daughters and fulfill the purposes He has for their lives. This also means that we cast the cares and burdens of those we intercede for upon Jesus and we bear other's burdens through the power of Christ-not in our own strength!

4. Love is our highest aim and the gifts of the Spirit flow through the fruit of the Spirit. We carry a sincere love for the people we are interceding for and ministering to as well as the team we are serving with. We regard them with respect and treat them with honor. Having the gifts of the Spirit flow from the fruit of the Spirit means that we are not clanging cymbals or noisy gongs (1 Corinthians 13:1). Instead, we speak the truth of God, we intercede, and we operate out of the gifts the Spirit has given us in love. This means that we seek for God to continually forge in us His character and that the fruits of the Holy Spirit are increasingly evident in our lives so that God is glorified through us.

5. We serve from a firm identity from God, not for one! We set out to obediently do the works that God has called us to do, but we do not allow those works to define us; we are defined by the identity of who God says we are-His Sons and Daughters!

6. We seek to be pure vessels for the Lord to use, allowing Him to cleanse us throughout the week and to grow us, causing this to become someone we are rather than something we do. We acknowledge that ministering on the Prayer and Intercession Team means all the more that we are representatives of Oasis Church-and, most importantly, Jesus!- during and outside of Church. We want to represent Jesus and the work God is doing in our Church well, so we continually seek Him as He matures and purifies us each day through His Word and Spirit.

7. We do not allow pride to creep up and steal our identity. We acknowledge that ministering on the Prayer and Intercession Team may cause others to look to us. When others look to us, we want to ensure our hearts, instead, that they are not looking to us, but looking through us to Jesus.

8. We keep our altar time and space sacred, safe, and honorable. We partner with the Holy Spirit to keep our altar sacred, safe, and honorable unto God and for the respect of those we serve.

9. We intercede with the expectation that all who we pray for feel loved, known, and seen by God. We desire and eagerly expect that those who approach our altar to encounter the Presence, power, and love of God.

10. We do not pass judgment on those we serve. We keep our hearts free from judgment and see each person as God sees them. No matter what they confess or how God touches or frees them, we do not pass judgment- we rejoice with and for our brothers and sisters! As God is, we are also no respecter of persons, and we minister to each equally. We are an inclusive-not an exclusive- ministry.

11. Prayer and Intercession are not something we do solely at or for our Church. It is the way we live and operate as disciples of Jesus. We prioritize our own personal prayer and relationship with Jesus. We minister out of the overflow of that personal prayer and relationship. We do not stop praying or interceding for others when we walk outside of our Church; our Church exit doors are the continuation of our ministry field.