This past week I asked one of our main chorus leaders here at IHOP-KC to write down a few main points about developing and leading a prayer meeting with a chorus. This is what she wrote: 

Language from the intercessor’s prayer

Lyrically the best choruses use biblical language or sometimes even direct quotes from the Bible. We want to proclaim truth in our choruses. Keep choruses positive, not focusing on the negative aspects of human failure, but rather on God’s promises. Singing from biblical prayer passages helps tremendously with this principle. 

In developing choruses we want to always make sure we are supporting the intercessor by creating choruses that agree with their prayer. Use language from the passage they prayed (biblical prayers) and be intentional to listen to their prayer so you can pick up the main theme. Then, develop a chorus using that same theme.

Rhythmic or melodic hook

The best choruses have a catchy “hook.” A hook grabs your attention, is easily remembered and stands out. A hook can be rhythmic or melodic. A rhythmic hook relies on the rhythm to be catchy and enjoyable to sing. A melodic hook relies on the melody line of the chorus to grab attention and cause the room to sing along.

When we develop choruses we must remember that not everyone participating in the prayer meeting is a skilled singer. Keep your choruses easy so everyone can participate; this will cause greater enjoyment for all attending the prayer meeting.

In all of the prayer meetings I’ve ever led or attended there is easily one simple fact I know for sure: There’s nothing that carries the people of the meeting together in unified, enjoyable prayer more effectively than singing a chorus of prayer together. 

Pray to God that He will send singers to your prayer meeting; ones that are bold, know the scriptures and that love crying out to God. I assure you these are the ones that will be the point of the arrow in the great worship and prayer movement that is now beginning to break across the nations.

As singers, give time to learn the prayers of the Bible that the prayer leaders are praying.   I encourage you to make these prayers your own personal prayers during your devotional time. Gain history in these prayers. 

From these prayers ask the Holy Spirit for choruses that are simple and easy to sing along with. These are the intercessory choruses that will lead a prayer meeting with effectiveness. This may be awkward at first; that’s normal. I assure you once you begin to gain some history in these prayers and trying a few choruses you’ll catch one and the whole meeting will love you for it.  :-)

For some help in developing choruses watch the IHOP Webstream during our intercession sets. Pay close attention to the prayers that the intercessors are praying from.  Find the same passage in your Bible and pray along. Then, listen to the singers as they begin to sing about the prayer passage. You will then hear the chorus leader lead the meeting with a chorus that is based upon the passage. 

After leading corporate prayer meetings for years we have come to find that the easiest prayer to achieve unity with everyone is to pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. There are two biblical passages that come to mind regarding this, Acts 2 and Ephesians 3. Both inform us of the desire of God to release the activity of the Spirit of God upon us and in us. Everyone can agree with that!

I encourage you to target the body of believers (including your prayer group) within your geographic region with these prayers. Pray for believers in Jesus from the Catholic, Charismatic, Methodist, and Baptist. In one of my early prayer groups we focused on all denominations and every congregation within our small county of 20,000 people. The more focused of a target you pray for the more tangible your prayer will feel within your group. As we prayed every week for all of the different churches in our region we begin to experience God’s heart for them. 

As you pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, think of biblical stories when the Holy Spirit touched a group of people and pray for the same activity. The book of Acts is a great place to gather stories or the gospels that tell of the ministry of Jesus. When God pours out His Spirit people are healed, delivered and set free, saved from their sin as they repent and turn to righteousness, and the Kingdom of God goes forth in great power. 

Acts 2:17 locks in on the promise that the people of God will prophesy when God pours out His Spirit. God says that we will see visions and dream dreams when God pours out the Holy Spirit. When you gather, pray for God to pour out His Spirit within your region and that both male and female, old and young would see visions of God and dream dreams of God. This is a prayer that never grows old. 

Ephesians 3:19 speaks of being filled with the fullness of God.  Paul is asking for the revelation of the love of Jesus to the believers in Ephesus that they may be filled with the fullness of the Spirit.  Again, target this prayer towards the believers in your prayer group, campus, and the church in your region. Pray that God would reveal the width, length, depth, and height of the love of Christ; that they would be filled with the fullness of the Spirit of God.

As you are starting a new prayer meeting, I want to encourage you to not be afraid to give direction during the meeting. The briefing will give clarity to the three or four of you that will be leading the meeting by either leading worship or leading in prayer, but the others who come will not understand the flow of the meeting until they experience it a few times. I find that giving a few small sentences of direction during the meeting gives understanding to them, which leads to confidence in participation.

For example, after the worship leader transitions out of leading us in a corporate worship song and maintains high energy music, I will give a small directional comment like, “at this time John is going to pray for us and the believers on our campus from Acts 4:29. As he prays, listen to his prayer and agree with him so we’re all in agreement.”   John would then go on to pray. 

After he finishes, one of two things can happen according to what leaders you have available in your meeting. If you have a worship leader he or she can develop a chorus of that is related to the prayer that John prayed from Acts 4:29. The chorus could be something like, “God, release Your power, pour out Your Spirit.” I would then insert another small directional comment like, “let’s all sing this intercessory chorus together so we’re all in agreement.” You can sing this chorus easily for 12-15 times.

If you don’t have a worship leader and your providing music another option is to simply have the next intercessor pray their biblical prayer. You can simply give a small directional comment like, “now Amy is going to pray from Ephesians 1:17-19.”   

Sometimes if there seems to be an unusual sense of the presence of God upon a certain prayer you can give direction for another person to pray from that particular verse or maybe have a time where you break into small groups and pray. I want to encourage you that the more structured and directional your prayer meeting is, the more that people will be able to participate and pray. 

Be sensitive with talking too much. Don’t turn your small directional comments into paragraphs of explanation. You can explain later. Remember, when people talk or explain during a prayer meeting, people are listening to them and not praying. Structure your prayer meeting to where people can come and pray without distraction.

This post is going to be specifically for ones leading new prayer meetings and the culture or model of your meeting has not be set yet.   First of all, give it time.  Don’t be discouraged if your group hasn’t flowed well together yet in corporate prayer. It will come in due time. I want to give you some pointers on how to get there quicker.

As the leader it’s important that you are not afraid to lead the meeting. We’re gentle and sensitive in our leadership of course, but that doesn’t mean we’re afraid to give structure, order and guidance. We must be consistent and aggressive, especially in the beginning stages of our prayer meetings, with setting a model of what the prayer meeting is going to look like. This makes it clear to everyone and defines for everyone what his or her role and function is. When people know their role and the boundaries to function within, they can be bold and courageous. 

One way to do this is in a short briefing before the meeting. I would plan for 15 minutes. During this time you can talk about what songs will be sung, the biblical prayers that will be prayed and “when to do what.” 

For example, if I had a prayer meeting of fifteen people I would brief with the worship leader and three or four people that enjoyed praying out loud. During this briefing I would make sure the worship leader (in my case it was a 16-year old who led with an acoustic guitar) had songs lined up that everyone knew. This is important because if we don’t know the song we don’t sing, and if we don’t sing it’s harder to connect with God and then pray effectively.

At this briefing I would also talk to the three or four who were going to pray out loud. I always made sure they had a biblical prayer they were going to be praying from and also dialogued about what they would be praying for. This was a great time to encourage each other and also get a feel for what was on the Lord’s heart. 

I found that when we had this briefing the prayer meeting went much smoother and was overall more enjoyable. 

Before moving to IHOP-KC I was a youth pastor in rural Illinois for five years. Most of my energy as a youth pastor was gathering high school and college students in small group prayer meetings. I learned a few things during those five years about leading and sustaining prayer meetings that may be helpful to you. We had two prayer meetings per week, each for one hour. The first thing I learned was that the students needed to see their leader (me) sell out to these meetings. What I mean by this is that when the “newness” wore off and it wasn’t the new and exciting thing anymore, would I still be there? Leaders MUST lead by example as far as doing above and beyond what we’re calling others to do. I learned that when the prayer meetings get tough and mundane that this is the prime time for leaders to lead. As leaders we MUST set it in our hearts that these meeting times for corporate prayer are of utmost importance to our lives and ministries and that ONLY extreme circumstances will keep us from attending. When others see this they too will be inspired to stay the course…even when it gets tough. What a beautiful thing to pass on to a generation! I look back at those five years in Illinois and I’m so thankful that by the grace of God we sustained consistent prayer together. There were times that the prayer meetings were packed with 30-40 of us and then there were times there were only 2-3 of us. There were times when everyone was talking about it and it was the “in” thing, and there were times that no one was talking about it and it wasn’t the “in” thing. 

So I encourage you to rally a few people of like-mindedness around you as a leadership team and start a prayer meeting to pray for God to visit your school, business or the church in your city. Invite others and as a small leadership team to set the standard in your commitment to attend and pray.

One of the clearest ways to have an anointed prayer life (or an anointed prayer meeting) and to pray according to what is burning on God’s heart is to simply pray the prayers of the bible. In the New Testament you’ll find several prayers from Jesus and the apostles. I strongly encourage you to make it a personal goal to have these prayers become the main prayers you pray over yourself, your family and your church (the church in your city or region). These prayers are guaranteed “will of God” prayers. They are of highest importance to the heart of God and burn on His heart. We want to pray according to His Word and His heart.     

When having a corporate prayer meeting pick three or four of these prayers and assign different people to pray them over the church or over the believers on your campus. The power of praying these prayers in a corporate prayer setting is so effective in sustaining an enjoyable prayer meeting. Everyone can agree with these prayers. They keep the meeting focused (compared to getting off subject and praying for too many things and losing people’s attention), and they also keep the focus of the prayer on talking to God rather than the devil. The prayers of the New Testament also focus on God pouring out His Spirit on believers, for when the church is equipped by the Spirit the lost get saved, people get healed and the name of Jesus goes forth in power. These small things mean a lot when you’re trying to have a consistent, corporate prayer meeting.

In Matthew 5 Jesus calls every believer to seek to grow and mature in the Beatitudes. These eight blessings come from our Father as we cultivate these values deep into our heart. He’s teaching us that this is the kind of heart that attracts the blessing of our Father. Hence we should aggressively seek to lay hold of each of these beatitudes until they are the true fragrance of our lives. It’s not enough to know about poverty of spirit, meekness or purity of heart. We must become poor in spirit, be meek people and purify our hearts and minds before God. As we mature in these beatitudes it will lead us to great impact in the world (Mt. 5:13-14). 

I want to highlight one of these beatitudes: Matthew 5:8 Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. What a profound reward for those who cultivate a pure heart before Jesus... they shall see God! What an invitation! Purity of heart is the place of intimate communion where God is the greatest reward to the human heart. It is the focused gaze of love with the purest motive of serving and obeying Jesus. Purity of heart has to do with the things that motivate our actions. It has more to do with why we do the things we do than it has to do with what we actually do. It is the purifying of the inward place of fleshly desires that corrupt us as we form biblical truth in the depth of our heart.

Jesus says the ones that purify their hearts will be rewarded... ‘they shall see God’. What does He mean by this? I’m sure there’s an ocean of meaning that I have yet to discover but I do believe one of the areas He’s speaking of is the revelation of God as we study His Word. In Ephesians 1:17 Paul prays that we would receive a spirit of revelation in the knowledge of God. He’s praying that God, by His Spirit, would reveal God to our minds and hearts as we pursue Him. Did you know that to the degree that we purify our minds and hearts before God has a direct effect on the revelation of God we receive in prayer and study? I tell the interns all the time that the purity of our hearts and minds or lack of greatly affects our Bible study. I long to purify my mind and heart and rid of the things that would taint me that I would be able to ‘see God’ as I search for Him in the Word. As we set our hearts and minds to pursue and embrace purity we attract the blessing of our Father to see Him. This is the promise of this beatitude.

There are many fronts that we must wage war on in regards to sin as we seek to purify our heart. One of the fronts I want us to be aware of is our speech. There are many verses in the Bible that relate purity of heart to the way we speak (Prov. 22:11; 15:26; Ps. 12:6; Mt. 5:22; 15:11; 18; 1 Tim. 4:12; 5:1-2). What I’m mostly thinking of when I think of our speech is the ‘spirit’ in which we speak and not so much the words. Of course, we are to abstain from filthy words (Col. 3:8). But there’s more than just not saying ‘bad’ words that can taint our hearts. When we speak in the wrong spirit towards or about someone we are sowing in the flesh and will reap corruption of the heart (Gal. 6:8). It is critical that we resist the flesh in regards to our speech. Jesus taught us to speak in the opposite spirit... to bless and pray for our enemies. As we do this we are guarding and cultivating purity in the inward place of our heart before Jesus. 

The rule that I have always operated by in regards to my speech is that if I cannot speak in a godly spirit to or about a person or situation I don’t speak at all. I take my ‘offense’ to God and hash it out with Him. He has the ability to change my heart about a situation and give me wisdom to speak into it if it’s necessary. Beloved the promise from God is that we’ll see God as we radically pursue purity of heart. There’s no greater experience for us than when God reveals God to the human spirit. When He touches me with revelation of who He is I’m exhilarated in my love for Him and in my joy to be alive. 

Amen. May the Lord bless us and keep us as we pursue purity of heart.