21 Day Fasting and Praying Resources for Churches
I love that we've begun a new thing that has become a church-wide trend. Many of our churches ring in the new year with an emphasis on prayer that includes a 21-Day fast.
I'm writing this post on Day 2 of our 21 days and am feeling the physical and spiritual effects of this fast already! Every year we challenge our congregation to join us in a fast. We provide resources to help them know what fasting is all about, and we create a daily devotional guide to accompany them along the way.
In order to hold each other accountable, we ask participants to sign-up by giving us their email address. These emails go right into an online group where we can send the group emails of encouragement along the way. And, because we want our people fasting and praying MORE than just for 21 days in January, we use these 3 weeks as a time to recruit them to become a part of our ongoing prayer and fasting team. I share with you what that team does in this blog post, What is a Prayer and Fasting Team?
Here are some of our resources we are using this year:
Click on this link to see how we are sharing our daily devotional videos, a printed version of our daily prayer guide, and an article on fasting. 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting
If you'd like to go directly to a downloadable pdf version of the article I wrote called "Fasting: What it is, Why We Practice It and How to Do It" click here.
At the end of that article I share 3 other great articles on fasting. Here are those links:
Fasting, the Feast that Frees by Jack Hayford Ministries
What is Biblical Fasting and How Does it Work? Campus Crusade Ministries
What Christians Need to Know About Fasting and Prayer by Bible study Tools
I hope you find these resources helpful as you lead your congregation to take seriously the challenge to fast and pray. I don't know exactly why fasting works, I just know that it does. God tells us how to partner with Him in bringing heaven's pleasure to earth's desperation. All we have to do is obey.
Happy New Year! Let's making fasting and prayer a large part of it.
