Yesterday, I had the chance to visit with the senior leadership of a very large church in Australia. Fabulous church, wonderful ministry, and really impacting people across the globe. And like a lot of our clients, they are growing very quickly.

As churches often do, they shared with me their staff structure, which had much of the normal setup of high growth churches.

However, I saw a staff position I’ve never seen before.

At the senior level, they have a Pastor of Prayer Ministries. The church has a dedicated ministry of prayer, where people can text in concerns, and the Pastor of Prayer, along with his team, develops a list and notification system so that the volunteers in the prayer ministry are immediately notified.

Unlike some “prayer concerns” (a.k.a. – gossip morsels) I’ve seen elsewhere, these guys are serious. They have developed a volunteer corps that is structured, supervised, and set up such that the church and its prayer needs are being lifted up all day long by at least 4 volunteers – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with individuals taking assigned 30 minute slots.

They told me of a boy who was hit by a car last week in a relatively minor accident. By the time he got to the hospital, he had several people from the church there, and scores of text messages telling him he was being lifted up in prayer. And by the time he got to the hospital, he was healed.

Spiritual and strategic, huh?

I wonder why they’re growing so fast?