Instructions for House of Prayer Administration
Here are the detailed steps for the administrator to set up the pastor’s prayer team:
1. Appoint the Pastor’s Armor Bearer: Someone at the church with a heart for prayer and a gift of administration needs to be assigned to be the pastor’s armor bearer, or administrator for the prayer team. One of the most important responsibilities is to make sure the pastor keeps his/her prayer requests up-to-date. Another important role is to monitor the pastor’s prayer site email address; printing and distributing the requests appropriately. The armor bearer will also oversee the recruitment the pastor’s prayer assistants, who will help pray for each of the prayer partners.
In a
smaller church the pastor should be able to pray for each partner monthly.
However, multiple people praying for each partner is better yet. In a larger
church, the pastor will need a team of volunteers to help pray for each of the
partners on the appointed prayer days.
2. Create the Pastor’s Prayer Site: In order that you don’t flood
the pastor’s regular email address, establish a special email address for the
pastor – either using the church’s URL or a free email service such as Yahoo,
Hot-mail or Juno. Then set up the pastor’s prayer site at
MyPrayerTeam.com. Ask the pastor to enter his/her prayer requests and
spiritual growth goals.
Suggestion: Avoid entering prayer requests into which some member/partners might
be tempted to pass judgments and gossip about the pastor’s supposed weaknesses.
We recommend that these requests be positioned in a very positive light, such as
“being filled with all the fullness of God” or “discerning the perfect will of
God.”
At the same time, each pastor needs to have his/her own personal prayer team with other pastors and/or close, trusted friends (generally from outside your local church family) who make up an accountability team. The pastor may want to set up a separate private prayer site to handle those relationships.
3. Review and Edit the Confirmation email
Before you create the first prayer partner site, go to the Preferences screen for your church site and review the recommended partner invitation email to the new on-line prayer partners.
On-line and Off-Line Prayer Partners
Online users regularly use email and will have provided an email address on the Prayer Team Commitment card. Offline users do not use email and will have provided a mailing address to which the monthly prayer requests should be delivered.
3. Send an invitation to each new On-line prayer partner. From the Partners tab, select “Invite a new partner”, enter the partner’s email address. Set the frequency for monthly. The day will be the day of the month of the member’s birthday. Click on “Prepare an invitation letter I can review and edit. Check it over and then click “Send”.
4. Setup the Off-line Partners. Set up another email address that will
be used for all of the prayer partners who do not have email (example:
offlinepartners@FirstFriendlyChurch.org). You will set up a prayer site for
each off-line partner using that same email address. Be sure to enter their
street mailing address. The off-line users’ monthly prayer assignments will be
scheduled to be emailed to that email address on the day of their birthday.
The prayer assignments are set up to go into a #10 window envelope so you don’t have to print labels or address envelopes.
By adjusting the date on the upper-right corner of the pastor’s summary page, the armor bearer can print all of the prayer assignments for the off-line partners for an entire week at one time.
Ideally, you would mail the prayer assignments for the off-line users three days before the partner’s birthday.
The prayer requests from off-line users can be entered by you into their individual prayer sites. You will also be receiving the emails with their prayer requests in the pastor’s special email address for the offline users.