A new school year means many things — excitement on the part of students, preparation on the part of teachers and lots of new school supplies and clothes. To churches, it also means a new focus on prayer.
Many Baptist churches throughout Alabama devote special prayer services and activities to the concerns that come along with a new school year. It is a concerted effort, pastors and church members said, to bathe their students and schools in prayer.
At Leatherwood Baptist Church, Anniston, members recently participated in special prayer walks around area schools. Pastor Mike Owens said that he and at least 60 church members visited different elementary, middle and high schools in the Anniston area Aug. 3 to pray for the upcoming school year.
“We contacted each principal and asked permission to do this, and everyone said we could,” Owens said.
“Then on that Saturday, individuals came to the schools of their choice to pray,” he continued.
The groups walked around each school, stopping at places along the way and praying for different needs.
A printed guide helped them keep the walk organized and gave them ideas about what to pray for.
“We prayed for the students and the faculty and for success during the school year,” Owens said.
The response to the prayer walks was overwhelmingly positive, especially from teachers in Leatherwood Church and in the area.
Owens’ wife is a teacher, as are a number of their church members.
The teachers found the prayer walks to be encouraging and supportive.
“The teachers really appreciated it, and I do think the students at the high school level understood what we were doing for them,” he said.
The prayer walk was the first one for the church, but Owens said plans are under way to continue it every year. The prayer walk’s coordinator, Peggy Kelley, has a great vision for the walk, and Owens said that it will continue to grow under her leadership. “Peggy works in one of our local schools and came to me with the idea for this,” he said. “It was her idea, and she worked really hard at it.”
At North Highlands Baptist Church, Hueytown, Pastor Doug O’Brien is especially concerned by what is happening to the youth in his area. “We lost eight teenagers to traffic accidents in this area during the last part of the summer,” he said. “We feel like our youth are being attacked.”
O’Brien and other pastors in his area meet every Tuesday evening for a special prayer time. They rotate prayer locations from the Hueytown City Hall to various churches. During their prayer time, they ask that God protect their teenagers while they are in and out of school.
“We pray that God would be present with them, and that He would protect them,” he said. “We pray that God would go with them through their day and give them opportunities to represent Him to others.”
North Highlands also held a special recognition and prayer service before school started, to focus attention on the needs of students and teachers. “We asked all the teachers to come to the front of the church, and we prayed that they would be given opportunities to represent Jesus in their schools,” O’Brien said. “Then we asked the students to come down, and we prayed over them as well. We asked them to pray and commit to this being their best year ever and for them to respect and support their teachers.”
At Dauphin Way Baptist Church in Mobile, church member Phyllis Bowden started the “Adopt a School for Prayer” program after feeling a call to pray for her children and area schools. “Not long after the Columbine shootings, I began to feel heavily burdened about our schools,” Bowden said. “I prayed about it and felt impressed by God that we need to put a heavy covering of prayer over our schools.”
With the help of several other women at Dauphin Way, Bowden organized the first Adopt a School activity in 2000. She wrote the name of every public and private school in the Mobile area on sheets of paper, which she displayed on a table at her church one Sunday morning in September. “We asked church members to stop by and select a school that they wanted to pray for,” she said. That first year, approximately 70 church members prayed for a specific Mobile school.
Bowden said she has definitely felt the impact of the program. “One grandmother in our church adopted the school where her grandson goes,” she said. “She stopped me one day after church to thank me for starting this program. She had told teachers at the school that she was praying for them and she felt like she was making a real difference.”
Various churches also participate in the “Mothers Who Care” program, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ that empowers mothers to gather and pray for their children’s schools.
These various programs all operate within the same parameters and with the same overarching goal. That goal, Owens said, is to send a message to the children and youth in their churches.
“We want our students to feel loved,” he said.
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