Feedback During Prayer Ministry: Making Breakthroughs
You're praying for someone, and you sense God moving—but you're not sure what's happening. Should you continue? Ask more questions? Pray differently? Without a clear feedback process, even powerful prayer moments can fall short of the breakthrough God intends.
Creating space for honest feedback during prayer ministry transforms prayer encounters into opportunities for genuine spiritual healing and wholeness. The feedback stage allows you to assess what the Holy Spirit is doing, gather additional information when needed, and guide people toward complete healing in body, mind, and spirit. This critical step ensures that prayer ministry addresses not just physical symptoms but the interconnected spiritual, emotional, and relational dimensions of a person's life.
Praying Without Feedback Limits Discernment
Engaging in prayer ministry without feedback is like treating symptoms without understanding their cause. Effective prayer ministry requires more than good intentions; it requires sensitivity and responsiveness to what God is doing in the moment.
The person receiving prayer may experience a range of inner impressions or physical sensations indicating change or they may feel nothing at all. Many people do not feel anything the first time you pray with them, yet healing may still be occurring. Feedback provides an assessment point that helps you determine the next steps: continuing prayer, scheduling follow-up sessions, or gathering more information to guide further ministry.
The Feedback Process That Unlocks Healing
During the feedback portion of ministry, you assess what is happening in real-time, allowing you to discern whether healing has begun, partial healing has occurred, or additional prayer is needed. This feedback is a type of "re-interview" and is important to check with the person by asking how they're doing. The feedback they provide is an important because it makes space to hear and integrate what the Holy Spirit is doing in them during the prayer ministry process. It can also help guide the person on their journey with Jesus.
Essential Questions for Gathering Feedback
When continuing prayer ministry based on initial responses, specific questions can reveal underlying spiritual dynamics and direct your prayers more effectively. These questions should be asked gently, inviting feedback without accusation, as gentleness in the questions opens space for the Spirit to work and communicates Christ's compassion.
Some questions that can provide helpful feedback are:
Do you remember if any incident or trauma coincided with when you began experiencing this condition?
Are there others in your immediate or extended family who have experienced this condition?
Do you experience persistent fear, anxiety, or worry? If so, what do you think is the cause?
Are there other incidences related to this condition?
Have you or others in your family participated in any occultic games or practices?
Each situation is unique, and the questions should follow the direction of the responses the person provides concerning the condition prompting their request for prayer.
Sometimes seemingly unrelated incidents can be connected to the spiritual realm and this is one way feedback becomes essential for clear discernment.
Feedback Provides Clarity in Prayer Ministry
Recognize Spiritual Indicators During Prayer
During prayer ministry, people may report that pain has moved to a different location or changed intensity. This can be a key diagnostic sign that the issue does not have a natural or psychosomatic cause. This issue can be caused by an afflicting spirit and this needs to be addressed with a different type of prayer.
Long-term conditions or conditions that resist medical treatment may also fall into this category and may need specific prayer or breaking of spiritual power through deliverance. When this occurs, command the spirit to leave in Jesus' name. These situations require discernment and sensitivity to what the Holy Spirit is revealing during the prayer time.
Address Wholeness, Not Just Physical Healing
God has created humanity as integrated beings, which means people seeking physical healing often need healing in other areas—including past hurts, emotional wounds, and false beliefs about themselves or God. These interconnected issues can prevent complete physical healing.
God is interested in wholeness, not only in healing physical bodies. This doesn't downplay physical healing but elevates the importance of how God views a person's emotions, relationships, and thoughts. Seemingly unrelated issues can be interconnected, so God may use one area to prompt a person to seek prayer that eventually leads to healing in other areas as well.
Create a Safe Environment for Feedback
The prayer ministry space needs to be a safe environment where people experience God's presence and love. Sometimes people react with weeping, sadness, joy, or laughter when the Holy Spirit touches deep places in their lives. There needs to be space for these reactions when they occur. Feedback from the participant during prayer ministry can include personal or sensitive information that needs to be handled with care.
Respond with encouragement and demonstrate God's compassionate love throughout the ministry time. This atmosphere of safety and acceptance allows people to be vulnerable and open to what God wants to do in their lives. Prayer ministry flows from a relational, interactive model where prayer responders engage with both God and the person receiving ministry.
If a person is under the care of a professional counselor or therapist, they should be encouraged to continue in those relationships. People who receive prayer ministry should continue with prescribed care and medications until they consult with their care provider, even when they believe healing has occurred. The person who has sensed God's power in their lives should be directed to consult with their care provider before making changes to prescribed treatments. This wisdom honors both the medical profession and the healing work of the Holy Spirit.
Receiving Feedback is a Learning Process
In most ministry contexts, it can helpful to pray for someone up to three times during the feedback portion. When we only pray once and nothing happens, often we do not see as much healing as if we engage in feedback that provides direction to pray again. This continued interaction allows us to begin to understand how God works through the healing process in people’s lives.
This process makes sense in many settings. There are occasions when people linger or the setting provides ample time for extended prayer ministry. It is not unusual for people to report healing after a prayer ministry time, sometimes even several days later or over a period a time.
The person praying needs to be sensitive and process the feedback well because that is one way to join with how the Spirit is at work and honor the person receiving prayer.
Close the time with a prayer of gratitude that acknowledges God's work. It can be helpful for the person receiving ministry to repeat a prayer of thanksgiving spoken by the prayer minister to close out the time.
What Happens When You Pray with Effective Feedback
When you implement this feedback-driven approach to prayer ministry, you'll experience:
Greater discernment of what the Holy Spirit is actually doing
More complete healing as you address root causes, not just symptoms
Increased confidence in prayer ministry through understanding results
Deeper experiences of God’s compassion
A model for prayer ministry that includes how the Holy Spirit works in everyone involved
Without a clear feedback process, prayer ministry can become a form of prayer that excludes the Holy Spirit or is imposed on the recipient. Some the failures to include feedback in prayer ministry can include addressing only surface-level symptoms, causing the person to feel unheard, failing to address root causes, Limiting the impact of prayer ministry, and missing the wholeness God desires to bring to a person’s life.
A clear process for feedback and discernment makes space for us to work with what God is doing in a person’s life. This points towards the importance of maintaining dependence on the Holy Spirit throughout the feedback process.
Your Next Step: The next time you engage in prayer ministry, implement these feedback questions and observe what God does. Start with the simple practice of re-interviewing after prayer: "What are you sensing? What's happening in your body? What do you sense God saying to you?" Then allow those responses to guide your continued prayer.
This content is adapted from my upcoming book on prayer ministry. The feedback stage is essential for prayer ministry that honors the person receiving prayer and the Holy Spirit's work in their lives.
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This is part five of a seven-week series on the five-step prayer model. You can read all seven blogs to develop a deeper understanding and practice of praying for others well.
Prayer Engagement: Knowing How to Pray
Mastering Discernment in Prayer Ministry: How to Listen Well to God and Others
How the Interview Unlocks Confident Prayer Ministry
The Five-Step Prayer Model: Understanding Confident Healing Ministry
