Blog

The Antidote for Schizophrenia 

 We suggest your ministry set up a system for calling donors and offering to pray for them. 

If we have a certain reluctance about prayer, we’re exhibiting one of the most heartbreaking symptoms of “ministry schizophrenia.”  

• If we do not pray for our donors, we have seriously devalued some of the most crucial members of our team.  
• (If we pray for our donors, but don’t want them to tell us what their needs are, we’re keeping our donors at arm’s length, in a cool, business-style relationship.) 

Prayer, after all, is the most fundamental activity in the life of any Christian.  

While many of us fall short — we don’t talk to God often enough, maybe only when we have an emergency, and we certainly don’t listen to God enough — prayer is still the ideal of our Christian walk. 

The flow of communication between ourselves and our God should become second nature over the span of our life in Christ. 

Accordingly: 

• Our ministries should be born in prayer  
• and nurtured in prayer.  
• Our marketing strategies should spring from our time with God,  
• and be steered by Him through prayer. 
• Prayer should be evident in our ministries — impossible not to notice. 
• Praying for our donors should be almost automatic, a “natural” outgrowth of who we are and what our ministries are. 

When all the workers in a ministry are praying for the ministry (and for each other, and for the donors), the Spirit of God has the chance to speak the same message to everyone, uniting the team and unifying the effort. 

Prayer, then, is the surest antidote for schizophrenia, for it allows a single Master to pull together all the specialists.