Do you know who some of the most powerful pray-ers are in your church? Your youth. Some of the most transformational prayer conferences we've ever conducted have been when we had a hundred - or eight hundred - teens together to pray. They tend to take God seriously. They tend to believe His promises. I'm not sure of its source but I think it was among some Christian youth that the phrase was born, "God said it, I believe it; that settles it for me."

So, are you drawing that prayer energy into the prayer times in your church? A friend of ours tells of a worship time in his congregation when they were focusing their prayers on those who were the victims of human trafficking. They showed a 3-minute documentary and then asked a group of teens to come forward and pray. To hear those kids pray for their peers, for other kids who were the same ages as themselves, to plead for an awakening to the catastrophic harm being done, to beg that God would press back the forces of darkness...before they finished, everyone in the room was in tears. Don't underestimate the strength your youth can bring to your intercession time.

Are you familiar with "See You At the Pole"? Several years ago a group of high school kids were distressed to discover that they couldn't pray at school. So they set a time (which has since become the 4 th Wednesday in September) when any who wish can meet at the flag pole in front of any school and pray. The last year for which I can find numbers there were more than two million public school kids who met at their respective flag poles at 7:00 am on that Wednesday to pray - for their parents, for their teachers, for their siblings, their friends, their country, themselves. Now it has become an international event and has spread to places like Canada, Ivory Coast, the Congo, Ghana, Guam, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru, Portugal, Scotland, and South Africa. Teens had the vision, the tenacity, and the conviction to make it work.

And by the way, human trafficking is not the only issue they're concerned about. Spend some time with them and see what matters they would like to pray about with your congregation. In moving your church toward becoming a House of Prayer, what better way to draw your youth into the process than to give them a serious role? Maybe they'll want to call it, "See You At the Pulpit."

-Don Jacobsen