As the founder of Teachers Who Pray, I like to ask teachers probing questions to get a sense of their working environment: On a scale of one to ten, how much do you like the colleagues you work with at your school? Would you care to hang out with them after school? How about on the weekends? Answers vary, but I’ve never met a teacher who looks forward to spending eternity with her co-workers … until now.

Meet Gloria Cookson, a teacher at Mount View Middle School in Thorndike, Maine.  She recently sent Teachers Who Pray a letter that explains how prayers with fellow teachers every Tuesday morning before the students come in has transformed her and her teaching practice from the inside out. Read Gloria’s letter below:

Teachers Who Pray plays a very important part in my professional life.

It provides a new viewpoint – the devotionals and reading – acknowledging the presence of Christ and the efficacy of prayer provides the structure and strength of my work day.

It provides fellowship – my colleagues have become fellow prayer warriors– helping me to see the spiritual battle behind the seemingly worldly war. They provide partners with whom to share cares and concerns. They provide stories of joy and the revelation of Godly interventions in the lives of our students.

It provides strength – I know I can, with confidence, pop into a colleague’s room and ask for prayer. I know, with that same confidence, that I can share a reason for rejoicing.

I am going to spend eternity with these people…what a wonderful future promise!

Imagine the profound changes we’d see in education if every school had a core group of Christ-following teachers who regularly exercised their right to pray together—in the absence of students—before or after school or on a duty-free lunch break for the specific needs of their school. Guaranteed, we’d see more love, peace, joy, patience, and all the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5: 22-23). There would be more teachers like Gloria, fully committed to seeking God’s presence at work, and having a band of brothers and sisters in the building who support one another to get the job done for all students.

This is the ultimate definition of a “turnaround school.”

Teachers Who Pray is setting our own agenda for a public education transformation. It’s a revolution of faith, prayer, and love that begins in the heart of an individual teacher, and then connects with other like-minded colleagues in the building until it finds its way to touch every heart in the school community.

This is the true nature of “teacher accountability.”

Teachers Who Pray is spiritually ‘woke,’ and it’s ‘high time’ that we be about our Father’s business on behalf of the children whom He loves so much.

“And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”
 Romans 13:11