THE PROBLEM WITH PRAYER EMAILS
If you’re like most churches, you send your folks a regular prayer email with a subject line something like Prayer Requests – March 3rd. If they click on the email, they’ll see something that likely looks like this:
THIS WEEK’S PRAYER REQUESTS
-
- Joe: my Aunt Cindy is having hip surgery
- Tammy: looking for a job
- Mia: comfort for my friend whose father passed
On the surface, this prayer email is fine. The prayer requests were communicated, and people will read through the enumerated prayer requests and say, “amen”. But, dear reader, your prayer email could be so much more. Emailing a bulleted list of prayer requests is a missed opportunity to teach your church to pray.
Emailing a bulleted list of prayer requests is a missed opportunity to teach your church to pray.
– Pray for Your Church Share on: Twitter
5 SOLUTIONS FOR PRAYER EMAILS
Here then, are 5 ways to write better prayer emails:
1. Start with a first-person prayer
Before getting to your prayer requests, get your people praying!
Writing out a prayer in first-person helps people get into a rhythm of prayer before they hit the bulleted list. A great time–saver here is to copy and paste the free weekly emails from Pray for Your Church to the start of your prayer email. In doing so, the people on your prayer list will lift their thoughts out of their routine prayers for the sick or the grieving, and begin calling on God for the greater needs of his kingdom.
2. Include a Bible verse on prayer.
It can be anywhere in your email, but when you include a Bible verse you inspire the faith of the person praying and give them language to use in their own prayer.
There are hundreds of Bible verses on prayer you can rotate into your prayer email to stir the faith of the person praying. Like 1 John 5:14 tells us “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” Or the way God dares us in Jeremiah 33:3 to “Call on me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”
3. Keep the design clean.
Bad formatting in a prayer email may not stop people from praying, but it sure doesn’t help.
Don’t use more than two font styles, and make sure your font sizes are consistent. In the same way, if everything is bolded and highlighted, nothing is bolded and highlighted. The formatting of your prayer email may seem trivial, but it’s easier for people to take the prayer email seriously when they see that you did, too.
A great way to clean up the formatting on your prayer email is to used headers to help people navigate through the email. For instance, you might try a design like:
THIS WEEK’S PRAYER SCRIPTURE
[Verse]
TODAY’S OPENING PRAYER
[Prayer]
THIS WEEK’S PRAYER REQUESTS
[Prayer requests]
PRAYERS ANSWERED
[Content]
4. Include a Prayers Answered section
Speaking of headings, most church prayer emails don’t give a chance for people to let the church know how God answered their prayers. A simple example would be something like:
PRAYERS ANSWERED
Did God recently answer one of your prayer requests? Send us an email and let us know!
Here are just a few of the answers we’re celebrating because of YOUR prayers:
[Content]
Obviously, this gives the chance for you to also include a Prayers Answered section to your prayer email. Again, writing in first-person helps people learn the language of prayer: Thank you God, for Cindy’s successful surgery. We praise you because you are our Healer and provider!
5. Keep a consistent schedule for your prayer emails
Instead of sending your prayer emails at random times on random days, learn how to schedule your emails in the email service you use for bulk emails. (Using a personal email to send bulk mails is a great way to end up in people’s Spam folder.) If it takes too much time to put together your list at a consistent time on Mondays, schedule the email for something like Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM. That way, people know when to expect your prayer email and can begin creating a rhythm of praying for your ministry because you set the tempo for them.
Hopefully, you’ve picked up a few ideas to not only help you write better prayer emails, but to help your people pray better prayers for your ministry. By incorporating these simple changes, people will begin to take notice of how much more intentional your prayer emails look. Over time, you’ll notice your open rates will improve, and the climate of prayer in your church will rise.
All because you decided to make the most of your prayer emails.
