If you feel called to pray for your community, your prayers will probably include individuals and families who are homeless or who have inadequate housing. A person is considered homeless when they have insufficient, safe, stable housing of their own.
A homeless individual or family may live in a motel, car, tent, shelter, on a friend’s couch, or crammed into a basement with two other families. Kids who are homeless may live together in an empty shed with no adult supervision. College students are homeless when they can’t pay their dorm fee.
Homelessness or inadequate housing occurs for many reasons: divorce, health crisis, car accident, fire or destruction caused by extreme weather, layoffs, death in the family, drugs, a spouse in prison, elder poverty, chronic underemployment, domestic violence, and more.
Individuals who are homeless often need immediate help, but they also need a long-term plan. They also need a relationship with God and ideally a relationship with a church that has life. All of these are ways to pray for people experiencing homelessness in your community.
When God touches your heart to pray for homeless people in your community, listen to how He leads you to pray. He knows the individuals affected and their needs.
Here are some prayer points that can help you get started.
Pray for:
- God to meet immediate needs like food, clothing, shelter, health care.
- God to open doors for help with a long-term plan.
- Community investment through mentors and volunteers.
- Appropriate church outreach.
- Adequate and healthy childcare support and parenting skills.
- Emotional counseling, trauma healing, and healthy coping skills.
- Transportation and car repairs.
- Effective work and educational opportunities.
- Financial literacy and counseling, including debt reduction and savings.
- A growing awareness of God’s love, help, and constant presence.
- The strength to seek help and to make often difficult changes.
- Guidance and encouragement through the people God would place in their path.
- Safety and protection.
- Accountability instead of enabling.
- Clarity of resources available and how to pursue them.
- Family reconciliation in healthy ways.
- Hope for their future and the future of their kids and grandkids.
- Generational blessings to be released and received.
If there are organizations in your community or region, pray for them as well—that they will hear God’s prompting for how to serve particular needs, that homeless people will find the right organizations to help them, that the focus will be on people and what they truly need, that the right supporters will be prompted to reach out, that people with unhealthy agendas will be redirected, and that workers will discover the appropriate work-life balance and healthy boundaries to avoid burnout.
Intercession invites the Lord to work in powerful ways. He knows best what each person needs. Your prayers invite Him to work in each situation.
Don’t let yourself feel overwhelmed by such a huge need. Your prayers are planting seeds that the Lord will grow and harvest. He will pull many people together. Your prayers are the invitation.
Close with prayers of gratitude for God’s heart for the people in your community, for the ways He has provided for you and your family, and for the help He has raised up in your community.
Thank you for your heart to pray for homeless individuals and families in your community.
Adventures with God 