War and Peace Prayer Requests
This is the fourth blog in the series, “A Field Manual for Pastors.” Each post will offer practical advice that I offer to pastors I work with. These are insights I never learned in seminary. They are lessons I learned from leading firemen and soldiers and from forty years of leading churches through every challenge imaginable. I will be sharing the core strategies I used as I sought to give my life to the church while protecting my heart and my time so that I could do what matters most to Jesus.
In my third year at university, I took Russian Literature. I loved it, but we had to read War and Peace by Tolstoy in two weeks. War and Peace is long. It’s like carrying rocks in your backpack for a long hike in the high country for weeks.
There’s just so much.
What does this have to do with prayer requests?
Most pastors will immediately identify with my explanation of “War and Peace Prayer Requests.” They come from congregants who want you to rehearse the pages of their life story via prayer requests every Sunday after the service as they add the next sentence or paragraph. It usually involves a review of the hundreds of pages that have already been reported and an exasperatingly detailed introduction to the latest addition.
As they’re talking and praying, you’re thinking, “There go another fifteen minutes while the people I feel the Lord wants me to connect with are walking by or have already left the parking lot.”
Maybe it’s not high on your radar because you enjoy spending a lot of time with dear believers living in a cul-de-sac of issues it seems like they never want to drive out of. But when you think of your stewardship of the entire flock, it likely bothers you.
It drove me crazy. I wanted to be sensitive, but I knew the story of the sister-in-law who had hurt the family better than the pledge of allegiance.
So, what to do?
My aha moment came when studying Mark 10. Jesus says to the blind man, “What do you want me to do?” (vv 51-52)
So simple, so compassionate, so to the point.
From that day forward, I would ask the War and Peace prayer-story-rather-than-a-request saints this simple question, “What do you want God to do?”
After their initial shock at my interruption, they would ask, “What did you say?”
I would sincerely repeat, “What do you want God to do?”
Once they worked it out, they would usually reply with just a few sentences.
I would immediately say, “Let’s ask God to do that, right now.”
Done.
They were prayed for, I had been a gentle but firm shepherd, and we did what we needed to do from the beginning: bring their request before the throne of grace.
Then I was free to be present with the next person who needed my attention.
When your call to be a compassionate shepherd gets mixed up with your need to be accepted or protect your reputation, the people who beg for your undivided attention end up dragging you into their world and stealing your responsibility to shepherd the entire flock. You want to offer them a truly healing response that comes from your faith in Jesus’ power to work through your words and care.
Resist being hooked by self-protection and a need for affection, or you will lose the ability to leverage the power of the gospel to those who need it most.
You can be very close to people in need without forgetting why God sent you to this local church. You can be free to carry the love and care of Jesus far and wide.
