Praying for church growth 

From a webinar by Thy Kingdom Come with the College of Archbishops’ Evangelists

Every revival in history been birthed in and fuelled by prayer. A webinar, developed by Thy Kingdom Come with the College of Archbishops’ Evangelists, draws upon extensive research into the link between prayer and church growth. 

It examines how your church can best pray into this moment, discerning God’s plan for your parish and praying intentionally, specifically and effectively for your church to grow. There are insights from various contributors and case studies of strategic prayer for growth, presented by churches of varying Church of England traditions.

The webinar is 60 mins long and you can watch below, but here is an excerpt from Rev Phillip Johnson, Vicar of Eccleshall, Diocese of Lichfield, who has been involved in academic research on church growth:

About five years ago, a group of us did some research specifically into mid-sized churches (20-60 adults usual Sunday attendance). We asked  incumbents across seven dioceses in the church of England what they were doing in their churches and what helped their churches towards church growth. There were a number of things that came out of that survey.

Thy Kingdom Come was identified as the central resource from the Church of England that had the biggest impact on church growth for those particular churches. 70% of the people who responded to the survey and also in meetings said that Thy Kingdom Come had some impact or some significant impact on the growth of their churches.

When we dug into that a bit deeper, it became clear that this was about intentionality.

The fact that people were putting aside a marked time in the year to pray, to learn about prayer, led to people being able to pray specifically for church growth and pray particularly for the success of particular projects.

They also spent time in discernment to try and work out what is going on in their churches and to try and discern where God was moving in that place.

This chimes in quite specifically with a lot of other church growth research. Other research shows the number one thing that made the difference in terms of growing churches was intentionality. Whether they had thought specifically about what they wanted to do, how they wanted to do it, and then most importantly that then prayer had been involved in making the difference.

All of the respondents who talked about intentionality of strategy and tasks and tactics had then also had quite active prayer ministry in their churches.

What's really important to notice though in all of this church growth research, is that it's not church tradition dependent. It seems to hold across all traditions in the Church of England. So in our research, we had people who had used the daily office and that had actually led towards church growth.  Other people had used Alpha. Other people had used Leading your Church into Growth (LYCIG). 

When I've been asked to do talks on church growth, where I've always started with groups is to say, "Let's talk about prayer." Interestingly, quite a lot of times, people go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but should we run Alpha or should we do this or should we do this?" If you don't start with prayer, don't root what you're doing in prayer, it becomes untethered. None of the research would support that that would be a good idea.

Watch the 60 min webinar here:
 

See other articles:
Pressing into prayer for revival
A story of ‘Regeneration and Rest’
Guide to prayer walking
Answered prayer - when a nation prays

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