Presbyterian Youth NSW knows it is sustained by the grace of God and the generous giving of its supporters. But it also knows there is another key ingredient in keeping their ministry healthy and flourishing: prayer.
Recently, the PY team in NSW has been making some changes to be more intentional about praying for the ministry, and also want to encourage their supporters to do the same. Anna Yu, a Timothy Partnership Certificate unit coordinator, shares about some of the things she has been doing to be more deliberate and disciplined in her prayer practice, and how she is making it a part of her regular work routines.
While completing paperwork recently, Anna found herself logging the amount of time she spent on different tasks related to her role. “There’s admin, pastoral support, and actually teaching. And I found I wasn’t actually spending much time praying.”
Anna wanted to build more personal prayer into her work as a valuable form of pastoral support and care. She pulled up a list of her students, and started a habit of personally praying for a couple of students each day, and then sending a message to those students to let them know she had been praying for them. As students finish up their studies, Anna will pray for wisdom as they make decisions about what’s next. For the students who are MTS apprentices, she uses the MTS website to see the specific prayer points they have shared there.
“It’s generally nice to know when someone’s praying for you. Even when the prayers are a bit vague, God knows what they need more than I do, and so committing them to God in that way is helpful,” Anna says.
When Anna shared her new practice with the wider PY team, the team decided to start trying to pray more intentionally for each other as well. Even simple things like changing the wording and attitude of their team meetings has helped cultivate a more prayerful attitude.
“As we update each other about what we’re doing, we’ve changed from going ‘oh today I am marking or today I am reviewing assessment,’ to ‘please pray for me as I do this marking, or have this meeting.’ Even just using the word ‘pray’ reminds us to bring it all to God,” Anna says.
Anna has found praying through her list of students a helpful discipline, and sharing about it with her team as a helpful form of accountability. Building prayer into her regular work routines has also transformed how she thinks about the role of prayer in a Christian ministry.
“It’s one of the questions in my theology unit actually, so I got to hear a lot of people talk about it. It’s such a privilege that we get to be relational with God through prayer. Sometimes we might think prayer is just telling God things, but actually in the act of praying God gives us peace, like it says in Philippians 4:6-7,” Anna shares.
PY also knows it has been supported in prayer for many years by the prayers of churches and individual Christians from near and far. “It’s encouraging when other people are praying for your ministry,” Anna says. She recommends scheduling prayer for ministries you support into your calendar, as a regular appointment on a day of the week or month. For PY supporters, they could use different days to pray specifically for different aspects of PY ministry, such as SRE, Timothy Partnership, PY Camps, and others. This way, you will be regularly praying for various things that you may not be prompted to pray for otherwise, but are valuable and worth bringing before God.
Another strategy that has helped Anna with praying is to use pre-written prayers by other faithful Christians to guide her thoughts and requests to God. “If an organisation has a vision statement or other written material, I use that. Someone else has already written the words. I just need to put my heart into it and here are the words. It’s also helpful to develop your wider vocabulary of what you could be praying for,” she explains.
It’s been encouraging for Anna to put some of these prayer practices into action in her own church context as well. Recently, her church ran a kids club for the first time. They had done all the planning and things were ready to go, but they took the time on the Sunday before it started to pray for half an hour, with all the leaders, helpers and other interested adults from church. They provided lists of things to pray for, things to praise God for already from the planning process.
As the adults were praying, a number of the kids from the church were outside playing. But Anna realised this was an opportunity to involve the kids in prayer as well. “I grabbed a few of the prayer sheets, and brought the kids in. We sat on the ground and the kids went around and read and prayed one sentence each from the prayer sheet. They didn’t have to pray anything but the sentence on the sheet. And we went through the whole A4 page of prayer points like that. And at the end, the kids prayed for a friend they specifically want to see come along to the kids club. Then they went off and back to playing,” Anna shares. This shows how modelling and teaching intentional prayer can start from a young age: how wonderful and powerful to have kids of all ages praying for their friends to come to kids club and hear about Jesus!
The following week, Anna pointed out to her own children that God had answered their prayers – all of them had at least one friend come along.
For those wanting to join with the prayer supporters and pray more intentionally for PY and the work happening in NSW, PY is looking at ways to make ongoing prayer points known more widely. You can find updates on the PY website and our social media platforms to guide your prayers. You can also sign up to our newsletter, to hear about the work God is doing through PYNSW.