Every list of spiritual practices includes prayer, and every one of them puts it first. Which is how it ends up being the practice everybody affirms and nobody schedules.
The B in BLESS is begin with prayer, and online it has a specific problem: you do not know who these people are. You have a display name, an avatar, and whatever they chose to type. Praying for “our online community” is easy and costs nothing, and it is not what this practice asks for.
It asks for names.
What begin with prayer actually looks like online
Open your notifications and scroll back a week. Not your analytics — your notifications, the actual humans who did something.
You will find the same handful of people. The one who comments on everything. The one who argues in good faith and will not let a thing go. The one who reacts to every post and has never said a word. The person who sent a DM you have not answered because you did not know what to say.
Write down five of them. Handles are fine. That is your list.
Then the part that makes it a practice instead of a sentiment: pray for those five before you open the app. Not after. This is the whole discipline in one instruction, and it is harder than it sounds, because the natural order is to read what people said and then feel something about it. Pray after scrolling and you are not praying for them, you are praying about your own reaction — usually asking God to help you deal with a person who annoyed you eleven seconds ago.
Praying first is different. You are asking for someone before they have given you a reason to.
Two things that make it stick:
- Put the list where the app is. A pinned note, your lock screen, a sticky on the laptop. It needs to be in the way, at the moment you reach for the phone.
- Pray about what you actually know. You do not have a name, but you have their words. “The guy who keeps pushing back in the comments” is enough to pray specifically — for whatever is underneath the pushing back. Specificity does not require biography.
Five names, thirty seconds, before you open the app. That is this week’s version.
The leader’s move
Here is where most churches lose it. The instruction goes out as “let’s be praying for our online community” — which is unmeasurable, unassignable, and will be true of nobody by Thursday.
The move is to hand your digital team an actual list.
- Name the people. Five to ten real handles in a shared doc, reviewed monthly. If your team cannot say who they are praying for, they are not praying for anyone; they are holding a warm feeling about the internet.
- Put it before the work, not after. Before the stream goes live, before the comment moderation shift, before the DMs get answered. Prayer that happens after the work is a debrief.
- Ask the question out loud. “Who are you praying for by name this month?” You will know within one sentence whether this is real. That single question does more than any policy.
- Stop reporting only reach. If the only number your team hears is views, that is the only thing they will care about. Ask about people alongside it. What gets asked about is what gets tended.
And the honest cost: this will make your team slower. Someone who has prayed for a commenter by name for three weeks does not fire off a dismissive reply. That is not a productivity loss, it is the entire point — but name it up front, or it will feel like the process is failing.
Questions people ask
How do you pray for someone you only know by their username? By what you actually know about them. You do not need a legal name to pray specifically — you have their words, their arguments, the thing they keep coming back to. Pray about that. A username is a person with a life you cannot see, and praying for them by handle is closer than praying for nobody in particular.
What does begin with prayer mean in the BLESS framework? It is the first of five practices: before you try to reach anyone, you pray for specific people by name. In the digital adaptation that means the people already in your feed and your notifications, rather than an abstract mission field somewhere else.
How do I get my church’s digital team actually praying for the people they serve? Give them names, not a directive. A shared list of five to ten real handles, reviewed monthly, prayed over before the stream goes live rather than after. Asking a volunteer who they are praying for by name tells you within one sentence whether it is happening.
B.L.E.S.S. is Dave and Jon Ferguson’s framework. The digital adaptation is Dr. John Harris and Jeff Reed’s, in Sharing Jesus Online, with Dave Ferguson’s foreword.
Part of the BLESS series. The full framework is The BLESS Framework.
