The Prayerful Leader: A 60-Day Devotional Journey to Transforming Your Life and Leadership

by Ryan Skoog, Cameron Doolittle, Peter Greer

From the authors of the beloved and bestselling Lead With Prayer, a 60-day invitation to experience the life-changing practice of regular prayer.

When you’re a leader, prioritizing prayer—for your own growth, your family, and your team—isn’t just a nice thing to do. It’s an essential spiritual discipline. Yet it’s difficult to make daily prayer a priority.

In The Prayerful Leader, Ryan Skoog, Peter Greer, and Cameron Doolittle—leaders and authors of the beloved book Lead with Prayer—draw from personal experience and the wisdom of world-changing global leaders to help leaders make prayer an anchor, not an afterthought. This 60-day devotional distills the wisdom of the bestselling book into inspiring daily readings, enhanced with Scripture, reflection prompts, application points, and prayers.

Our world needs leaders who pray. Discover the refreshment your soul has been longing for as you journey toward becoming the prayerful leader God intended.

Genres: Nonfiction, Christian

224 pages, Hardcover

Published July 21, 2026

About the author

Ryan Skoog has co-founded several travel technology companies, such as Faith Ventures and Yonder Travel Insurance, and he is also the founder and president of VENTURE, a nonprofit that works in the toughest places of the world, serving war refugees, trafficked people, oppressed children, and the unreached. VENTURE has planted thousands of churches that serve in their own communities to rescue girls from trafficking, start farms, and train in microenterprise and feminine hygiene, leading to generational transformation. Ryan is the co-author of the book Chosen: A 30 Day Devotional.

Reviews

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prayer as Architecture, Not Atmosphere
How “The Prayerful Leader” Makes Devotion Visible in Bodies, Budgets, Rooms, Meetings, and Names
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | June 11th, 2026

Do not ask a Christian leader whether prayer matters; ask for the calendar. Ask for the budget. Ask what happens before the meeting, after the crisis, when the room goes silent, when the gifted founder becomes exhausting even to himself. “The Prayerful Leader,” Ryan Skoog, Cameron Doolittle, and Peter Greer’s 60-day devotional, is built around that quietly prosecutorial instinct. Prayer is one of those virtues almost no believer openly disowns and many lives discreetly misplace. The book’s sharpest question is not “Do you believe in prayer?” but “What evidence would convict you?”

Even before it becomes a book about prayer, “The Prayerful Leader” is a book about high-capacity believers exposed by their own competence. Its imagined reader is not someone who rejects dependence on God. It is someone fluent in the language of dependence while staffing, fundraising, speaking, counseling, solving, and being needed into a state of sanctified depletion. Its least flattering suspicion is also its best: Christian leaders may become spiritually endangered not because they are lazy or faithless, but because they are effective. Skill can become a narcotic. Influence can become a costume. Holy work can still come with a full inbox and a talent for avoidance.

Modeled as a 60-day devotional companion to the authors’ earlier “Lead With Prayer,” the book moves through three sections: “When Leaders Learn to Pray,” “When Leaders Pray Through Fire,” and “When Leaders Multiply Prayer.” First come knees, breath, Scripture, silence, open hands. Then those habits meet exhaustion, repentance, forgiveness, persecution, grief, and the kind of quiet that makes active people fidget like children in dress shoes. Finally, prayer moves outward into teams, budgets, rooms, intercession, and meeting rhythms. The path is plain, but it presses: prayer is learned alone, tested when usefulness falters, and multiplied only after it has become more than a leader’s favorite neglected value.

Every entry takes the same basic shape: Scripture, opening question, story, diagnosis, reflection prompt, written prayer, and practice. Repetition is the method. No one will accuse the book of wandering into devotional fog and returning with a mood. It prefers handholds: roll out of bed onto the knees, walk with Jesus without an agenda, pray one sentence before a meeting, review the day through the Examen, invite a prayer partner, look at a budget and blush. The mind may assent quickly. The body needs rehearsal.

The prose is built for use: short-to-medium sentences, direct address, quick turns, not much shadow. No cult of the sentence here. The vocabulary is familiar contemporary evangelical leadership speech – surrender, fruitfulness, breakthrough, calling, dependence, revival, Kingdom, culture – and at times it arrives with the laminated shine of a conference badge. Yet Skoog, Doolittle, and Greer are good at phrases with handles: “wasting time with God,” “open hands, not clenched fists,” “multiplying by zero,” “when y’all pray,” “if it’s important, it must be in the budget,” “canisters in the rubble.” The sentences rarely shimmer. They report for work.

Rather than competing with broader formation books such as John Mark Comer’s “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry” or Justin Whitmel Earley’s “The Common Rule,” “The Prayerful Leader” presses on a narrower sore spot: the leader whose pace has become proof of importance. Like those books, it distrusts hurry; unlike them, it asks what happens when hurry learns religious vocabulary. A pastor, nonprofit executive, entrepreneur, elder, founder, or board member will recognize the accusation: the work can be holy and still become evasive. Holy hurry is still hurry. Even the ministry calendar can become a fig leaf, though one with better color-coding.

In the first section, the shrewdest early move is to give prayer a body. Billy Graham is found on his face before a short address, pleading for God’s strength. Justin Whitmel Earley kneels because his distracted mind needs the body’s instruction. Brother Lawrence refuses to “hang up” after formal prayer, carrying God’s presence into ordinary labor. These examples work because they do not treat the body as a devotional accessory. Prayer is not kept safely in the head, where leaders can admire it without being inconvenienced by it. Knees know certain things before ambition does.

Prayer keeps being set against the leader’s closed hand. The contrast between open hands and clenched fists gives the early chapters one of their cleanest images. Many prayers, the book suggests, are not questions but drafts of desired outcomes submitted for divine signature – God asked to notarize decisions already made. The chapter on Gethsemane, later echoed throughout the book, gives that image theological weight. Jesus does not pretend not to dread the cup; He tells the truth and still says “nevertheless.” Prayer does not annihilate desire. It reorders desire before God.

As the book moves from habit into loss, the practice sections begin to feel less like exercises than tests. Ryan Skoog describes the collapse of his travel technology company during COVID, the loss of savings, layoffs, and his daughter’s terrifying nightmares. Lying face down on the carpet, he sees Jesus crying with him and hears that he has never cried alone. Payroll remains impossible. The business remains in danger. The child’s pain remains unresolved. The answer is not rescue but presence. That is where the book stops asking prayer to perform.

Pain sharpens the book most when it refuses to move on schedule. Joni Eareckson Tada’s chapters are among the strongest because they do not make relief the only faithful prayer. Her practice of spending less time asking for deliverance and more asking for courage, patience, endurance, and Christ’s nearness gives the book a harder vocabulary for affliction. The reading of Psalm 23, where David’s language shifts from “the Lord” to “You” in the valley, is another fine turn: pain becomes the place where God is no longer merely described but addressed.

And yet the book cannot quite stop counting. It repeatedly insists that prayer is not a technique for getting what leaders want, not sanctified productivity, not leverage disguised as piety. Its best chapters mean this. They praise friendship with Jesus, silence, surrender, hiddenness, repentance, and presence. But the book often takes away the calculator with one hand and offers impressive arithmetic with the other. Prayer is followed by healing, vindication, expansion, strategic clarity, public apology, provision, access. The authors are not crude success merchants. The problem is subtler: testimony sometimes arrives with its hair too neatly combed.

David Denmark’s story is the hinge that keeps the book from collapsing into its tidiest habit. After a miraculous healing leads him to launch a million-dollar prayer initiative, the effort stalls. He asks God why, and senses the devastating reply: “You’re multiplying by zero.” The lesson is not that the strategy needed fresher branding. It is that he was trying to organize what he did not yet possess. He begins praying alone in his office, on his knees. Only then does prayer at Maclellan become more than a program. It becomes a life shared outward.

It is with Denmark’s failed campaign, not his strategy, that the book says its most useful thing about institutions: no one can memo people into prayer. This seems obvious until one remembers how often organizations try to create culture by retreat, initiative, slogan, committee, or, in the late stages of panic, branded lanyard. Skoog, Doolittle, and Greer are interested in evidence less easily faked. If prayer matters, where is it in the schedule? Which room is set aside? What meeting does it interrupt? Who knows the names? Piety, here, has to survive contact with logistics.

Much of the third section will thrill some readers and make others reach for the receipt. The authors describe churches and nonprofits with prayer rooms, paid intercessors, prayer coordinators, silent prayer blocks, communal fasting calendars, prayer budgets, intercessory maps, and spiritual advisory boards. For readers formed in this evangelical leadership ecosystem, these examples may feel bracingly concrete. For others, putting prayer on payroll or inviting prophetic impressions into business decisions may raise more questions than the book pauses to ask. The authors are less interested in settling those objections than in pressing a simpler one: do leaders invest in what they claim to value, or merely praise it with handsome sincerity?

In the world around the book, several pressures are already in the room: burned-out pastors, frayed institutions, privatized prayer, and organizations whose values look best in sans serif. “The Prayerful Leader” is not chasing the moment so much as naming an old temptation in contemporary shoes: leaders confuse motion with obedience, influence with fruitfulness, exhaustion with sacrifice. The chapter “When Y’all Pray” is especially useful here, challenging the habit of treating prayer as wholly private. Jesus, the authors note, taught His followers to pray in plural. The Lord’s Prayer is not “my Father.” Solitude matters; isolation can merely impersonate depth.

The larger pattern does more than the daily machinery. Entry by entry, the hum is steady, sometimes too steady: Scripture, anecdote, application, practice. But the design works. The first section gives prayer a body and habit. The second gives it tears, weakness, silence, and repentance. The third gives it rooms, teams, budgets, and descendants. The book widens from bedroom floor to boardroom to history. It begins with a person kneeling and ends with prayers buried where no strategist could count them.

Readers who want sentences with electricity will find only a few sparks. The prose is too eager to help, too disciplined by use, too fond of escorting trouble toward a practice before the day’s end. There are moments when immense suffering is compressed faster than the suffering deserves, as though grief could be gently shown to the application section and thanked for its participation. That is the cost of the form. Devotionals trade spaciousness for return, jaggedness for rhythm, unresolved pain for a next faithful step. “The Prayerful Leader” makes that bargain knowingly, and mostly well. The stitching holds, but the stitches show.

Of all the book’s examples, the quiet ones have the longer afterlife. Regi Campbell’s hidden whiteboard of names, discovered after his death, is more moving than many of the larger ministry numbers. John Kim’s “wasting time with God” is more corrective than another story of expansion. Rosebell’s flowers around a makeshift baptismal in a war zone hold more mystery than the metrics attached to them. The book is most persuasive when prayer is not proved by scale, but revealed as attention, love, waiting, and faithful uselessness in the world’s preferred ledger.

Perhaps that is why the ending revises the book’s sense of evidence. In “Canisters in the Rubble,” a team in post-communist Russia repurposes stones from a former gulag to build a church and discovers a metal canister containing a note from believers forced to dismantle their church and use its stones to build their own prison. They had prayed that one day those stones would build a church again. Decades later, the prayer is uncovered, not as a leadership success story but as hope stored in history’s debris. The image works because it slows the book down. It lets prayer outlive usefulness.

One can admire the book’s usefulness without pretending it is finer, stranger, or more stylistically alive than it is: “The Prayerful Leader” lands at 75/100, which corresponds to 3/5 Goodreads-compatible stars. It is genuinely usable, structurally strong, emotionally alive in its best passages, and limited by formulaic prose and an unresolved tension around prayer and results. It is not a book of sentence-level surprise. It is a well-built devotional for leaders with overdeveloped competence and underprotected souls.

Under the counsel, the practices, and the leadership examples, the book is most convincing when it treats prayer not as the spiritual technology of effective leadership, but as the slow conversion of leaders from control into dependence. Its most persuasive pages do not make prayer sound powerful because it produces more efficient executives, pastors, founders, or boards. They make leadership look suspect until it has knelt, waited, listened, confessed, blessed an enemy, asked for help, and learned to be interrupted. In that sense, “The Prayerful Leader” is less a manual for getting God into leadership than for getting leadership out of God’s way.

Like many devotionals, it wants to be practiced more than admired. That is both its limitation and its charm. One can wish its sentences risked more, its stories let pain remain unrecruited a little longer, its theology of unanswered prayer had more room for shadow. But one can also imagine the book doing what devotionals at their best do: moving a real person to block the first hour, kneel before opening the laptop, write down the names, pause the meeting, bless the critic, fund the prayer room, close the door, and speak to God without an audience.

One of the book’s revealing ironies is that, despite its appetite for scale, its best image is finally hidden and buried. Not a platform. Not a campaign. Not a strategy deck. A canister in rubble, holding a prayer no one could see until long after the praying hands were gone. That is where the book’s truer wisdom rests: prayer may shape the meeting, the ministry, the budget, the movement; but it may also simply wait, sealed in the ruins, until God decides that stones once used for a prison are ready to become a church.

Still, the final image does not solve the book’s tension; it teaches the tension to wait. “The Prayerful Leader” spends many pages showing prayer that moves mountains, heals bodies, opens doors, funds missions, redirects organizations, and accelerates visible work. Then, at the end, it gives us a prayer that waited underground. That buried canister is the book correcting itself tenderly. The most faithful prayer may not be the one that makes a leader more effective. It may be the one that survives the leader altogether.