Ministry Team Training

What I would like to do in this lesson is to share a practical ministry model. It is meant to serve as a guideline. There will be times when you may have to skip a step or do the steps in a different order. It is more important to be Spirit-led than to be ministry-model led. So use this model as a basic launching point but listen to the Holy Spirit and obey whatever He tells you to do.

Also, let me remind you how important it is to minister in love. Be gentle and nonjudgmental as you interact with the person. If you get any words of knowledge, deliver them in a tentative way ("I'm getting the impression that..." or "does ___ mean anything to you") instead of "thus sayeth the Lord." Give the person the space to reject the word if they are not comfortable with it. (You might be right on and the person just is not willing to face that issue or admit that problem yet. Or maybe you have simply made a mistake. Either way, just let a word go if the person is unreceptive to it. Trust the Holy Spirit to deal with that person in His own time and in a way where they are willing to accept His ministry.)

If you minister in genuine love, the person will usually feel ministered to, even if you make mistakes or miss important issues. If you are 100% correct with words of knowledge and prophesies, but deliver them in a harsh or unloving manner, the person will usually feel abused and dissatisfied with the ministry time. So, if you do nothing but minister God's love to the person in a gentle and unassuming fashion, the person will go away feeling ministered to. And they will be more open to the Holy Spirit (and less guarded), so the Lord can continue ministering to them after the prayer time is over.

A Ministry Model

This healing prayer model is a 5 step process --

1. Talk to the person and find out what they want prayer for, and any relevant data. Listen to them with one ear and listen to God with the other. (Sometimes the Lord is on them too heavily for them to talk. When that occurs, we don't insist on talking to them, and we must listen very carefully to God to hear how He wants us to pray for this person.)

2. Ask God (silently) what He wants to do here. Form a tentative diagnosis of what to pray for. If the person has stomach pain but also has frequent nightmares and is holding a severe grudge against her sister and is enveloped in bitterness, you have to decide what you're addressing in prayer. In this example, just praying for stomach pain probably will not do the trick -- even if God heals it, it will probably come back soon if the other issues (especially unforgiveness and bitterness) are not dealt with.

   Trust the Holy Spirit to reveal to you what the key issue He wishes to address for this person is. It might be a straight physical healing, it might be some type of inner healing, it might be to deal with (and release) bitterness or unforgiveness, it might be to repent of sin in their life, it might be deliverance from a demon, etc.

3. Choose a prayer strategy. Once you've determined what God wants you to pray for, you need to find out how He wants you to pray.

   Let's assume you are praying for the person with stomach problems and bitterness against her sister, and you've decided to address the bitterness and unforgiveness. There are different ways you can pray. You could ask God to bring His healing for those past hurts that made the person bitter. Or you could ask for a divine empowerment for that person to let go of the bitterness. Or you could help them to confess their sin of unforgiveness to the Lord and ask for His forgiveness and then help the person to release forgiveness to their "offender." Or you could rebuke a demon and break it's power off of the person so that they will not be under an oppression that makes it more difficult to forgive. So you need to find out which prayer strategy God wants you to use in this case.

   There are usually many valid ways to pray for a given thing. The secret is to find out which way God is doing it for this person at this instant...then you do it with Him. If you are unsure of which strategy God wants you to use, ask Him.

4. Do the prayer. Be sensitive to the Spirit's leading. Keep your eyes open and watch for natural evidences of what God is doing in the Spirit. Pray according to the strategy that you have prayerfully selected, but keep your spiritual ears open to hear God. He may give you further prayer direction after you start to pray, so keep listening to Him. (It is OK to break from prayer and talk briefly to the person and get feedback, then go back to prayer.)

   In fact, I strongly encourage you to get feedback from the person. If God is not speaking clearly to you, you can still get very valuable ministry direction based on what God is doing in the person as you pray. Depending on what they say, you may choose to keep pressing in, address another issue in prayer, or you may realize that God has already done the healing or deliverance. During this whole process, we ask God to lead us, to reveal words of knowledge and any truths that He wants to reveal. We trust Him to do so.

5. Post prayer counseling and follow-up. After you've finished praying, you don't just walk off and leave the person standing -- unless, of course, they are slain in the spirit on the floor or something like that. You "debrief" with them or give them some type of closure -- even if it is just a hug and a smile.

   If, for example, you've prayed for physical healing and it did not happen instantaneously, you might mention that sometimes God starts the healing as a process and it takes a little time to complete. Sometimes God wants us to soak in prayer on several occasions. Sometimes when we pray for healing, nothing appears to happen, but that does not mean that there is anything wrong with the faith of the person who is being prayed for, etc.

   If the person received a healing, you might warn them of how the enemy sometimes tries to bring the symptoms back and talk them out of their healing. Teach tell about standing in faith, etc.

   In short, post-prayer counseling is dialoging with the person about what we've just done in prayer and any follow-up that they may need to do.

   Also, if you are in a meeting where they are taking testimonies of those who are healed, you should see if they have the type of condition where they can know they are healed. If they had constant back pain for the past ten years and the pain goes away and they can't make it hurt no matter how they move their back, then ask them to testify in the meeting. If they were unable to walk on their own and now they can walk, that is a valid testimony; get them to testify. If they were blind or deaf in one eye or ear and now they can see or hear, encourage them to testify in the meeting. Their testimony will help others' faith to grow so that others can receive a healing as well.

   However, if they have a condition where they can't really tell if they were healed, such as liver failure that requires dialysis, please don't have them testify "in faith." Let them get medical validation from their doctor of the healing, then they can testify at some subsequent meeting.