How to Pray for your Missionary Jay Ballou

The experience of furlough comes with so many blessings, along with challenges. A missionary can set their expectations, and some things will go as planned, while other experiences will require them to adjust and adapt. There is no singular plot line, but these are a few common threads.

How much time does a missionary spend visiting their home country and how often? This varies widely. There are similarities though, as all mission workers seek to refresh, report, and refit. Here are a few ways to pray for missionaries:


Pray for your missionary to make it to furlough. (also, maintain healthy rhythms)
Pray for furlough to be really awesome! (time with family, Etc.)
Pray for reporting not to be discouraging. (another podcast for this, but reporting and be really hard for most missionaries)
Pray for missionaries to return to the field ready for a great new season of ministry.

When I put on a pair of shoes, what does that mean? I mean, what does it really mean? The task of navigating cultural meaning and letting communication fall within the right context is a huge challenge for missionaries. Here is how you can pray for balanced contextualization:


Pray for missionaries to understand what they don’t understand (so they can ask the right questions)
Pray for missionaries to be understood, even when they miscommunicate.
Pray for missionaries to slow down and take in the setting
Pray for missionaries to courageously engage error with truth, knowing that some will mistake this for cultural ignorance or insensitivity. 

How does spiritual warfare look different in regions of the world not like your own? What would the pressure feel like for a new believer to end a multi-generational line of

Praying for a missionary as they encounter spiritual warfare is one of the greatest ways you could join into laboring with them. Here are three ways to pray:


Pray for the strength and sanity of the missionary
Pray for the lost to have the courage to stand in truth
Pray - as in the Lord’s prayer - "deliver us from evil"

After rupturing my achilles in 2021, we saw God work through the prayers and generosity of a faithful church member in Los Angeles to provide a miraculous path for my rehab and recovery. Often you pray for your missionary without knowing exactly what they are going through, but God will hear and answer your prayer!

Here are 4 ways to stay faithful in intercession:

1. Create a monthly calendar of missionaries to pray for on each day.

2. Use a reminders list on your phone.

3. Collect photos or prayer cards to keep in a place you will regularly see them.

4. Use a prayer app on your phone with notifications to pray for specific missionaries.

From encounters at intersections to exploding funeral pyres, there are plenty of moments when a missionary deals with culture shock or culture stress. Here are four ways to pray daily for your missionary dealing with culture stress:


Pray for a daily dose of grace for both the little encounters and some extra shocking ones.
Pray for regular rhythms to de-load the stress of cultural differences.
Pray for the missionary not to get cynical.
Pray for the message of the gospel to make across those barriers.