(This article is from WayMakers website – Seeking Out Cities For God.)
What is prayerwalking?
God is stirring us to take our prayers beyond the walls of our church buildings. As we put feet to our prayers, we’re beginning to pray with huge kingdom-sized hope for entire cities.
Prayerwalking: Praying On-Site With Insight
We’ve come to call this sort of on-site intercession “prayerwalking.” It’s simply praying in the very places that we expect God to bring forth His answers.
The prayers are intercessory rather than devotional. Prayerwalkers learn to pray beyond their own concerns, focusing prayer on behalf of their neighbors.
Prayerwalking is usually a low-profile affair: Friends or family stroll two-by-two through their own neighborhoods, schools and work places, praying as they go. There are some occasions when the prayer should be demonstrative, but usually it’s being on the scene without making one. Though they usually walk unnoticed, prayerwalkers quickly become aware of the realities and needs of their neighbors.
Why is God raising up prayerwalking now?
God is swamping Christians with hope. It’s a huge hope; something like a collective holy hunch that He’s about to do some of the finest displays of city-wide salvation. Prayer has always been God’s way of putting His name on future events. He’s positioning us to pray larger things by giving these things very specific attatchment to places and people.
Perhaps prayerwalking is a way that God is granting us a good look at the “Before” portrait of our cities. When days of great harvest come about, we will clearly see a very different “After” picture, and praise him all the more exuberantly.
Fulfilling Our “Seek and Save” Mission
Prayerwalking certainly isn’t the only way God is calling us to pray, but it may be the best way to be sure we have prayed for every person of our land. No list includes all of the homeless, or every child, or the transient, or fresh immigrants, or many others. If we are serious about praying for every person, it will require systematic, sustained prayerwalking as an important part of our praying.
I’m convinced that Christ is fulfilling His “seek and save” mission (Luke 19:10). Our part of that mission involves seeking people. He will do the saving. Prayerwalking may be the simplest way for us to seek people. Our prayers are without question God’s preferred way to save people, because He is honored and thanked with every answer to prayer.
