This is not a picture of believers in Ghana.
In 1727, a Moravian community in Saxony began 24-hour prayers. 48 men and women enlisted to each pray for an hour of the day—within months, the small, fractured community began to grow. The community continued the prayer watch for over a hundred years, in which they spread the Gospel around the world.
Today, Christian communities in Ghana are implementing a similar method for powerful prayer. “Right now,” Ghanaian leader Isaac shares, “prayer is going on 24 hours a day—women praying, men praying, children praying—and it all started with this prayer wheel.”
It may seem intimidating to spend an hour in prayer—Where do you start? How do you stay focused? Zúme’s Prayer Cycle offers a helpful framework based on 12 ways the Bible teaches us to pray. Each part becomes a 5-minute segment: praise, waiting, confession, reading, petition, intercession, praying the Word, thanksgiving, singing, meditating, and listening. By the end of the process, you have avoided the common trap of staying stuck in petitionary prayer. One of Isaac’s ministry partners, Terry, says, “If people learn to listen in prayer instead of always making requests, then God will speak to us.” We need to learn to listen and pray like the Bible teaches, like the church in Ghana.
The community there took the prayer wheel and multiplied it, having a member commit to praying for an hour of the day and find others to join them. Sometimes, they even use the prayer cycle for overnight prayer meetings, praying each segment of the wheel for each hour of the night. “One of the common denominators in all disciple making movements around the world is prayer,” says Terry. Why? Prayer fills believers with the breath of God and keeps us rooted in the True Vine (John 15:1–10, Heb. 4:16, 1 Thess. 5:17).
To learn more tools like the Prayer Cycle, sign up for our free course. “These tools in Zúme are very simple,” Isaac says, and “simple things multiply. And the simple things grow.”
Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels
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