What would it look like to take your church outside its four walls and pray for the people, places and communities God has placed around you?
That’s the heart of Walk the World, a fun, simple and community-building prayer event from Baptist Mission Australia, running over the weekend of 6-8 November, or whenever works best for your church calendar.
The idea is simple: get outside, walk through your local area and pray together. Notice the people and places around you, enjoy God’s creation, and take the opportunity to connect as a church and engage with your neighbourhood.
Praying through Walla Walla
Walla Walla and District Baptist Church has taken part in Walk the World in 2023 and 2025, with each year bringing a different way of praying through their town.
In 2023, the church walked, with some people driving, from their church in Market Street along Commercial Street. The group walked “in our old clothes” and carried a simple lunch of cold potatoes and sandwiches, prepared without access to modern facilities.
“We prayed for houses and businesses along the way,” explains Alan Rayner from Walla Walla and District Baptist Church.
Along the way, they passed a well-patronised Food Mill and coffee shop before visiting Walla Walla’s beautifully painted Water Tower, where they stopped to read the story of the Woman at the Well.
When Walk the World came around again in 2025, they decided to take a different route and visit a newly developing housing estate. This time, a member of the congregation prepared prayers for the different places they would visit.
Their first stop was the Police Station, where they prayed particularly for the safety of the local policeman and his family. From there, they stopped near the sportsground and prayed for the volunteers who give their time to local sporting clubs, as well as for the safety of their sports people.
Their journey then took them to a lunch spot beneath a shady tree, overlooking the new housing development. The pastor gave thanks for the houses and families who would one day become part of the town and community. And once again, they ate their “humble” sandwiches, remembering those who are “doing it tough”. It was a simple activity, but it gave the church an opportunity to pray specifically and intentionally for the community around them.
Finding what works in Maroubra
For Darren Wykes, Senior Pastor at Maroubra Baptist Church, Walk the World also became a way of helping people think differently about prayer and their local community.
One year, the church organised a whole-church prayer walk following the morning service. They created prayer cards and divided people into groups of three, using a raffle to assign the triplets.
Each group was given three prayer cards before heading out from the church. The church structured its prayers in concentric circles, beginning with the church, moving out to the local community, and finally the world, including the missions and ministries they supported. The walk would end with an evangelistic lunch at the local beach.
“People loved it at the start!” Darren says. There was enthusiasm, energy and plenty of fun around the idea, particularly in those early years. But over time, engagement began to decline. The church eventually found that people were still keen to come together for lunch at the beach, but the organised prayer walk itself was becoming a barrier for some.
For Darren, that experience highlighted an important lesson: a prayer walk doesn’t necessarily need to involve the whole church at the same time. Instead, people could be encouraged to pray privately or in smaller groups, in ways that fit their lives and comfort levels.
Rather than expecting everyone to participate in the same way, Maroubra now invites those who are particularly interested to get involved, while making space for others to engage differently.
After all, many people are already walking. “They put music on, or podcasts,” explains Darren, “I would encourage them for a season to meditate on the Word of God. That could mean challenging people to meditate on a passage or chapter of Scripture while they walk, try to remember it, and then use it as the basis for prayer.
That flexibility is at the heart of what Walk the World is designed to be.
It doesn’t need to be a major church event. And it doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s prayer walk. It can be a family walking to get ice cream, using the journey to pray for people in their community.
It can be a couple of friends meeting for a walk. It can be a youth group adapting the idea for their own context. It can be someone who already walks every day choosing, for a season, to use that time to meditate on Scripture and pray.
Walk the World is designed to be simple, community-building and intergenerational, something churches can easily pick up and adapt to their own context.
There are fun and interactive prayer ideas that bring people together, resources specifically for kids and youth, and creative ways for the whole church to engage. The invitation is not to create another complicated church program. It is to take a simple tool and creatively adapt it to your people.
Everything you need to prepare for Walk the World this year is available through Baptist Mission Australia’s Walk the World resource page.
The invitation is simple: step outside, walk together, notice your community and pray. Find what works for your church, gather the people who want to join in, and use the walk as a tool to help focus your prayers, for your community and for the world.
