Mobilizing Prayer: The Sticky Note Prayer Challenge

Prayer is the tip of the spear in the arsenal of a disciple maker, so what are the tools we can use to mobilize it?

Seeking God’s heart for our communities, neighborhoods and cities is the first step in seeing movement happen. There are many prayer tools we can use to do this, but today we’re going to focus on the Sticky Note Prayer Challenge — specifically what it is and how you can use it to mobilize prayer. Let’s dive right in!

What is the Sticky Note Prayer Challenge?

The Sticky Note Prayer Challenge is a tool designed to help us mobilize prayer for our local areas and the needs therein.

It’s an opportunity for us — either solo or in a group, from wherever we are in our disciple-making journey — to seek God’s heart for our communities and pray for the things He wants us to pray for, the work He is doing, and how we can be involved.

With that, here’s how to do it!

1 - Materials

The first step is to gather your materials. Here’s what you’ll need!

• A map, whiteboard or other physical visual representation of the geographical area you’re praying for.

• Sticky notes

• Pens or pencils

2 - Listening Prayer

Take 5 minutes to listen to God, asking Him to show you how He wants you to pray for your area, then write down on the sticky notes what comes to mind (one idea per sticky note).

He could bring to mind a word, phrase, verse, person or people group, etc. He could give you one or twenty ideas. No need to feel pressure on the amount.

3 - Sticky Notes

At the end of the 5 minutes of listening, attach the sticky notes to the map and, perhaps, the specific areas on the map that your ideas apply to.

4 - Recurring Themes

Read all the sticky notes on the board. If you’re in a group, pay special attention to any ideas that come up multiple times. Maybe several people had the same word or phrase come to mind.

5 - Popcorn Prayer

Spend some time praying aloud for the areas and ideas that came to mind. If you’re in a group, do so in what we call a “popcorn prayer” method. This kind of prayer should simulate a prayer discussion between the group and God.

• People pray as they feel led.

• Keep the prayers short and conversational — no more than a minute or two at a time.

• People can pray more than once.

• Keep the focus on petitioning and praying about the topics on the sticky notes.

Once it seems appropriate to end, have someone appointed to close out the prayer time.

6 - Vision Casting and Follow-up

If you’re leading a group through the Sticky Note Prayer Challenge, you can spend some time at the end to answer any questions, hear any comments, and give the group an overall sense of how this fits in with other tools like the Prayer Calendar, Conversation Quadrants and DBS.

• The Prayer Calendar, like the Sticky Note Prayer, is designed to grow us into disciple makers who pray with and for others daily, and to help us mobilize others to pray.

• The names on our Conversation Quadrants and the things we prayed over our area in the Sticky Note Prayer are connected. The Conversation Quadrants take the ideas, people and places we prayed for in the Sticky Note Prayer and boil it down to the people God has put in our lives where we are right now. As we review our Conversation Quadrants and watch our conversations with nonbelievers progress through the quadrants week after week, we not only praise God for that, but also celebrate how He is answering our sticky note prayers as well!

• The Discovery Bible Study is the tool that our prayers and conversations are leading towards. The goal is to see the nonbelievers in our lives and cities come to discover God for themselves in His Word, so we review and practice DBS in order to be ready when the people we’re praying for are.

With that, you now have everything you need to mobilize prayer with the Sticky Note Prayer Challenge, so get out there and start praying! Thanks for reading!