Something we can be thankful for this year is that prayer is still very much alive in public schools. While “state-sponsored” prayer is no longer a part of a school’s daily routine, the biggest deterrent to a student praying in school is a parent who fails to encourage him to do so.
Here are six ways you can encourage prayer and Bible study in public schools:
- You can meet with students on campus before or after school hours to study and pray.
- You can eat lunch, pray & study with a student in the cafeteria.
- You can send encouraging text messages to students while they’re at school to remind them to pray.
- You can take lunch to teachers and pray with them as well.
- You can build relationships with staff and students to form prayer alliances in the school.
- You can build relationships with coaches, take pre-game meals to their teams and offer to share encouraging words and prayers over the team.
The key to all of this is commitment, commitment to pray for our schools, build relationships with students and staff and make time to invest in those relationships.
As Christians, we can talk all day long about what we’d vote for, but at the end of the day, we vote with our prayers. We should rightly expect to cast votes for those things over which we most fervently pray. If our home prayer life is weak or nonexistent, we should expect little more in our school system. If our home prayer life is strong and focused on prayer in public schools, we will not need to sit idly awaiting a legislated prayer time in the classroom. We will instead, boldly join together in prayer at will, both off and on the public school campus. This will undoubtedly warrant a certain level of criticism and suffering from time to time, but which is worse, to suffer for praying or to suffer in silence because we’re too afraid to pray? As they say in baseball, “if you’re going to strike out, you’d better go down swinging.”
Want more info about how we can exercise our faith in the public school system? Check out these resources: