Prayer coverage is simple to say and easy to miss: you hire people whose full-time work is to pray for you and your business, every day, and by name. Not one hour a month. A constant umbrella.
Start with something you already understand
Most churches pay a worship leader. It's a real job: picking the music, running rehearsals, writing, not recycling the same songs year after year. The worship leader brings training and skill and the gifts the Lord has given, and the church pays for their time.
We do the same thing with prayer.
The only strange part is that almost no one has seen it before. We all have a picture of a paid worship minister. We don't yet have a picture of a paid prayer minister. So start here: prayer coverage is a person, or a team of people, doing the work of prayer for you as their vocation.
What "coverage" actually means
When my family first hired Bob, I wanted to know: do we get an assigned prayer time? A friend had once hired me to pray for her business, one hour a month, and I assumed this was the same.
Bob's answer changed how I think about it. He said:
"When you hire me, I carry you all month. Not just for an hour."
That's the heart of it. Coverage isn't a slot on a calendar. Our team prays daily, and we pray for our clients by name. We welcome requests any time, by email or text.
As a paying client myself, what I treasure is not one hour of prayer a month, but a constant umbrella of protection.
Almost everyone asks
Is it okay to pay for prayer?
Who's actually praying
Over our first years, we noticed that a healthy prayer team needs five distinct roles.
- The heavy hitter
Someone who prays as many hours a day as humanly possible and takes new ground in the spirit. Bob once slipped out of a Broadway-style show so he could pray more.
- Connectors
The relational glue. They send out the weekly prayer, respond to requests, and seek to make sure that no one falls through the cracks.
- Healers
Because when a client is carrying chronic pain, a wound, or a memory that needs mending, so much of life goes to just keeping the pain at bay. Jesus heals bodies, memories, and the ability to forgive.
- Prophets
Regular, personal proclamation over your identity, your gifts, and your role. (I once received: "You need to take a vacation." Ha! Good to know!)
- Teachers
Because we don't only want to cover you. We want to raise up more people of prayer, always looking for more prayer this month than last month.
But isn't that outsourcing prayer?
A fair question.
My friend Kristin put it well: a business outsources what takes specialized knowledge and sits outside its core competency. A tree service still hires an accountant for its taxes. A tech firm caters lunch rather than hiring cafeteria workers. Each one keeps its focus and lets someone else keep theirs.
Effective prayer coverage takes specialized knowledge, and most businesses aren't dedicated to prayer as their main task. You have goods to make, or services to render. Partnering with people devoted to prayer makes as much sense as partnering with a CPA.
But outsourcing isn't abdication. If I hire a lunch service, I still handle breakfast and dinner. We still cheer our clients on to pray, and we hand them resources to do it. We want to free you to focus on your specific calling.
What it looks like in practice
When you partner with us, we send a simple intake form. Some clients never fill it out. We still pray for them, and they still see results.
The form is just a baseline of what you're hoping for. We welcome every request, business and personal, because no one is just in business. We are also spouses and children, siblings and friends, with volunteer positions and challenges in various domains. God has solutions for everything we face.
And we love big requests. One client stopped himself mid-sentence once and asked, "Is it okay if I ask for these things? I don't know if I've ever said them out loud." Yes. Say them. We'll even take your big prayers and add to them.
After that, you send us as much or as little as you like. Most people send far less than I first expected, and that's fine. God knows the cries of our hearts, and he answers.
Does it actually work?
We can't promise what God will do. But we asked him for a return on investment. We mostly serve business people, and if our clients don't see a return, they won't keep paying us.
In aggregate, it works.
For one of our first clients, I prayed for a hundredfold in new business for every dollar he invested with us. A year later I asked him the figure. "Oh, it ended up being more like 142 times," he said. Some clients hold steady. Some are in fields that aren't what they once were.
But the most common thing we hear isn't about money at all. It's that someone finally has their back, maybe for the first time.
So, what is prayer coverage?
It's a team of people whose full-time work is to pray for you and your business, every day, and by name. It's a constant umbrella, not an hour on a calendar, brought to the place you spend most of your waking life.
The real question was never whether it's strange.
The real question is: who is covering you and your business in prayer?