When you hire prayer coverage, you should know a little about who is praying. Bob Perry is the intercessor. I'm Amy Lykosh, the one who came looking for him, and then decided the world needed more people who pray the way he does.
A garden hose and a fire hose
For thirty years I watched my family's company pray. My parents founded a homeschool business, Sonlight Curriculum, in 1990, and they covered it in prayer from the first day. I knew prayer worked. But we hit a season that felt like watering a football field with a garden hose. We would get there in the end, but I wanted a sprinkler system, or rain from heaven, or a fire hose.
I went looking for prayer coverage.
I found Bob.
The first thing I heard him say was, "I am a fasting intercessor." I didn't know you were allowed to call yourself that. I wanted to be one too.
I begged God to let Bob mentor me. When we finally talked, we discovered his family had used my family's curriculum for twenty-one years, all the way through raising four kids. So my family hired him, the first time we'd ever put anyone on retainer.
He started praying for us on June 1, 2020. Two days later, at eleven at night, I texted him: "Bob! We've had ten answered prayers today!"
He texted right back: "Let's go for a dozen." And we did. For the rest of that month, my family never saw fewer than a dozen answered prayers in a day. Some days, two dozen.
By mid-month, I asked: "How many people are on your team? Can I join?"
"It's just me," he said.
Right: because, as an intercessor, he wanted to pray, not deal with all the other business-related things.
So I joined him to deal with the business side of things, and realized something I'd somehow missed: even in prayer, we can grow. God always has more.
Bob added his fire hose to my garden hose, and I quit my job to build Workplace Prayer full time.
Partnership in prayer offers an excellent return on investment: "Five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand, and your enemies will fall by the sword before you" (Leviticus 26:8).
Bob Perry
The intercessor
For more than forty years, Bob has prayed one single-minded prayer: Lord, teach me to pray. The Lord answered him, and now answers Bob's prayers for others.
He and his family served in the Soviet Union, and then Latvia, for eleven years, raising up the body of Christ. He has led praying teams to more than fifty-five nations. He prayerwalked every level of Air Force One. He helped plan The Call on 07/07/07, when more than seventy thousand believers gathered to pray.
He even served as head of intercession for the college basketball Final Four, where the team tracked the results of their prayers. Not the scores, but the ancillary things: player injuries, brawls, the marriages of coaches. By every measure, prayer made a demonstrable difference.
When his friend Paul Van Hoesen asked why he didn't turn all of that toward the business world, Bob saw a new frontier and took it.
"If prayer doesn't offer solutions, why bother?"
He holds a Master's from Oxford in organizational leadership, is the son of a Navy captain, and prayerwalks something like thirty-five thousand steps a day. He is happiest praying all day, all the time. If you want someone praying for your business, you want Bob on your team.
He and his wife Sharon live in East Tennessee, and enjoy spending time with their four adult children and their families.
Amy Lykosh
The one who wanted more
I grew up inside a praying business, so when I joined Bob, my part was clear: take the administrative weight off him so he can stay in his sweet spot, and raise up more intercessors so more people can have what I was so desperate for.
My family lives on about forty (mostly wild) acres outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Some of our five sons are young enough to live at home; some work with my husband Phil in his tree service business. I listen my way through at least two hundred books a year (some years closer to four hundred), and love to write.
Bob and I founded Makarios Press to get prayer training into the world as fast as possible. I host the daily Make Prayer Beautiful podcast, and send daily emails about prayer.
A reader once told me, "You're like a spiritual coach." I'll take it.
Why it takes both of us
Bob would happily pray in a parking lot for the rest of his life and never send an email. I love the emails, the cheering, the teaching, the building. Prayer is his highest and best use. Raising up prayer is mine. Together we can cover more businesses, and train more people, than either of us could alone.
When we went looking for a name, we were stunned to find that workplaceprayer.com was simply available. No one had taken it. While we were thankful for the name, it showed us how few people were thinking about prayer in the place we spend more of our waking hours than anywhere else.
It's not just the two of us
Around Bob and me stands a team of about two dozen. Advocates who carry our clients in daily prayer. A prophetic team who write the monthly words. Healing prayer ministers. And the Friendship Intercessory Hour, praying together week by week.
They join us from at least three continents: the United States, South Africa, Australia, Belize, and wherever the Air Force sends one of us.
So when Workplace Prayer covers you, you're not leaning on one person, or even two. You have a whole body praying for you, by name.
We'd love to be the ones covering yours.