What actually happens when the church prays? In this episode, Gina has a conversation with Diana Dietz. Diana is a full-time volunteer intercessor for the Worship Department at Gateway Church in Dallas Texas.
Yes! Her full-time job is to pray for the pastors, leaders and teams who lead worship at Gateway! Listen in and be encouraged to step in faith, hear his voice and see the beauty of redemption.
Click below to listen starting at 16:35 to follow along.
A Bodybuilder Disco Revival
Gina:
Can you talk a little bit about prayer and intercession and the importance of that? The things God’s taught you, things that you’ve learned?
Diana:
I realized I was an intercessor and called to prayer right after I got saved. I realized it was modeled for me my whole life, because I grew up in a Catholic home, and my mom and dad made and prayed over rosaries. They made the rosaries and then they would give them away. My whole upbringing was very prayer-filled and prayerful.
My heart for ministry came from the people that came to our home, because the priests and the nuns from the Catholic church would always be at our home. It was a refuge, a safe place for them. They could be themselves. I grew up in that, with that heart for prayer and to serve those who serve people.
When I got saved, the pastor of that church was really amazing. He had just come off the mission field and he had been a missionary for a number of years and he was taking over a dying church. At the time I was a bodybuilder. We were the group of people who would go to the disco.
We were professional bodybuilders. I didn’t do it as a profession, but most of the people I was with did, my boyfriend at the time did. And then we go to the dance club and go disco dancing. One of the guys got saved from our group and he started talking about the church he went to, so we all started to visit.
One by one, our whole bodybuilding-disco-crew came to Jesus. We were all friends prior to that, and we were all maybe between 19 and 25 and we all got saved at the same time. This pastor was so wise, he grabbed us right away and started discipling us. Part of his discipleship was that he would invite us into prayer after service.
One of the guys from our crew was a piano player, so he would start playing after every service, and pretty much everyone else would be gone, but our crew of bodybuilder disco dancers would be left behind. By that time there were maybe about 30 of us. Our friend who played the piano would start playing songs based on what the pastor had shared that day.
We didn’t know they were prophetic songs, and we didn’t know anything about this. He just would pick up some things that the pastor had spoken about and start to play. We would just lay out around on the floor for hours before the Lord, and after a while they gave us a key. We could get in and out by ourselves when we left, because the pastor was wise enough to realize God was doing something with this group of young people.
We did our basic foundational Bible study with him once a week, but then he would just leave us to lay before the Lord for hours. That’s when you met Sunday morning and Sunday night, it was an assembly of God church, and then Wednesday night. That’s really where I learned to pray, just laying quiet before the Lord.
If anyone would have walked in, they would have thought, “What on earth is happening here?” Because all of these athletes and huge muscle-people are lying all over the sanctuary.
Prayer was fun right from the start. I and every one of those people is somewhere in the world, still in ministry. It was a called out group of people. It was such an interesting time for the whole group. I think that somebody had to have been praying for our group at the time. I’m sure I won’t know until I get to heaven who to thank for that, but it was a really unusual spiritual time.
We came together for a few years after that, but always with prayer centric to anything that we did. That church, at that point, had about 200 people, and by the time I left to go to Bible college, it was in the thousands, and it grew thousands past that. I really believe a lot of it was those few years that we all just spent before the Lord, revival really broke out in that area and in that church.
Gina:
That’s so good. I love that. I love how organic that was. I love the wisdom of that pastor to see God moving and just not try to put his fingerprints all over it, but just give permission to have that space to come in and teach you truth in the Word, but then step back and let you then go into that Holy place of meeting with Holy Spirit.
You can have that conversation, then those things are gonna go deep. Any questions you have, those are gonna be dealt with in those moments. What a beautiful training ground for you, and a place of discovery and intimacy and learning to hear His voice.
When Jesus says, “My sheep will hear My voice”, will you learn to hear His voice with the familiarity? Being in His presence and He becomes familiar, you start to recognize His voice in a crowd of noise, because you’re that intimate and that close to Him.
Diana:
They used to have long pews. Everybody would be under a pew or in between rows. But we still had our dancing back in the eighties, we kind of had our spiritual mosh pit upfront where everybody went dancing.
That was fun, I wish some of us would have taken pictures at the time. We went from dancing in the discos to the gathering upfront and dancing before the Lord.
A Church that Prays
Gina:
Fast forward, here you are, you said yes to this call to just pray. You pray for Gateway, pray for the people, pray for the church, pray for the ministry, and the things that God’s doing. Eventually, you start getting asked to come in and pray specifically. Now, here you are full-time, you’ve got an office, you’ve got volunteers, you have a little army.
Diana:
It’s a starting of one, because I’ve really only been over here since August in this role, where there is a lot more freedom. Being an intercessor, you always want to make sure you’re under spiritual covering. Because I actually have an authority in prayer now at Gateway, there’s a lot more freedom to run.
I have, at this point, around 300 volunteers right now that I have in different areas of prayer, and that’s just my area. There’s other people at Gateway who do prayer in different areas too. There’s lots of different pieces and parts of prayer all across. I just have one part of it.
Gina:
You have your special ops team! I would love to talk to you about something that Loisa shared. She said that one of the things that you have really encouraged and even challenged the worship staff with, is that they would gather their own personal group of intercessors. And I am like, “Yes. And amen.” I would love for you to talk a little bit about that, and unpack why that’s so important, and the power that you see in that, and how you see that play out.
Diana:
That’s a great question, and that actually comes from pastor Robert Morris. He is the pastor of Gateway Church and that’s something he started in his own life. When he originally started the church, he put his own personal prayer team together who are still with him. When I got to Gateway and heard that, I thought it’s spectacular, and It’s Scriptural.
When I got here, I thought, “That’s something I can easily help people with.” We pray to the Lord about who is supposed to be on their team, and we figure out how it works best for them, because it really is a ministry to that pastor, or that staff member.
Then another area is prayer shields over each department, and then prayer shields over each campus. That makes it a lot easier to do what God has asked you to do, with all that prayer support. It also makes it a lot harder for the enemy to come in and cause any problems when everyone has the foundation and the support realm is all in the spiritual realm in prayer.
Gina:
I would take it even further to say, this is the body of Christ, this is how we love one another and bear one another’s burdens. This is Biblically spiritual community. What would it look like if we all would recognize that? What would it look like if sons and daughters would trust and allow and draw in people, not just to have earthly relationships, but also to have spiritual relationships with, and bear one another’s burdens in the spirit, to intercede.
In the Bible, Paul says, “It’s my desire that you would make all kinds of supplications and intercessions for all people.” This is one of the things that I teach in my prayer classes. People like to say, “Oh, those are the intercessors over there”, but it’s pretty clear that all of us are called to be intercessors.
What would it look like if we would recognize and take advantage of covering one another in that way?
What has the Lord taught you about that? What has The Holy Spirit taught you personally about that? Have you seen that play out as you’ve encouraged people in the worship ministry to maybe take an uncomfortable step and gather people to pray for them? What’s been the fruit of that?
Diana:
What we have found, is the testimonies that we get back after they get prayer teams in place, life becomes easier, It becomes more fruitful, It becomes more joyful. How I personally feel about that, is if there hasn’t been a lot of prayer over anyone’s life, you’re praying in the weeds at first and daily things that are going on daily.
As there gets to be more of a prayer foundation in anyone’s life, or Gateways life, as an organization, a person’s life individually, a department life, then you can start praying into what I would call more “prophetic”, or praying into purpose or original callings, original intent. Then anointings and giftings become a lot easier to walk in once you have enough prayer foundation over a life or over an organization, rather than getting stopped.
I’m not saying we all don’t have things that happen, and I’m not saying sickness stops, I’m not saying that stops, but there’s definitely a marked difference. There is even a difference in someone’s ability to walk through those harder things when there’s a spiritual formation that’s already been done in the spiritual realm.
Check out Gateway Church
Check the rest of this conversation Calling, Covering & Contending, What Is Prophetic Intercession?
Check out the Dwell Meditations
