A Prayer for Persecuted Christians, From Paul in Chains

How can I pray for persecuted Christians?

Pray the way Paul asked to be prayed for. Ask for courage to speak (Ephesians 6:19–20), rescue from danger (2 Corinthians 1:10–11) and strength to endure. Ask that they are not forgotten (Hebrews 13:3). Pray for their families, and for the people who persecute them (Matthew 5:44). Then give thanks for every answer.

Every one of those requests comes from the New Testament, and most of them from one man who knew what he was asking for. Paul was beaten, jailed and run out of town more than once, and several of his letters were written in custody. When he asked other Christians to pray for him, he told them exactly what to ask. That makes his words a good place to begin when you want to pray for believers who are in danger today and have no idea what to say.

Christian persecution in ancient Ephesus

Paul spent about three years in Ephesus in the mid-50s AD, and he did not find it easy. “A great and effective door has opened to me,” he wrote from the city, “and there are many adversaries” (1 Corinthians 16:9). He also says he “fought with animals at Ephesus” (15:32), which many readers take as a figure of speech for dangerous enemies rather than an arena.

The one scene Luke describes in full happened in the Great Theater, the building in the photograph at the top of this page. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, warned his fellow craftsmen that Paul’s preaching was hurting their trade. The crowd seized two of Paul’s traveling companions, Gaius and Aristarchus, and rushed into the theater, where for about two hours they shouted “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (Acts 19:23–41). Paul wanted to go in and face them. His friends would not let him. In the end the town clerk calmed the crowd and sent everyone home.

Looking back on those years, Paul told the Corinthians about “our affliction which happened to us in Asia,” when “we despaired even of life.” Then he adds a line that is easy to miss: God delivered him, and would again, “you also helping together on our behalf by your supplication” (2 Corinthians 1:8–11). Paul believed the prayers of Christians far away had a part in his rescue. That is the whole reason to pray for persecuted Christians.

Whether those dangers ever put Paul in a cell in Ephesus itself, the Bible does not say, but a tower of the city’s Hellenistic walls on the hill to the west has long been called “St. Paul’s Prison,” a name that comes from local tradition, not from evidence.

What were the causes of Christian persecution in Asia Minor?

In the first centuries, persecution in Asia Minor was mostly local and came in waves. The riot at Ephesus was about money and civic pride: a trade that lived off the temple of Artemis felt threatened. About sixty years later, around AD 112, Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia-Pontus in the north of Asia Minor, wrote to the emperor Trajan about Christians brought before him. Anyone who denied being a Christian had to offer incense and wine to the emperor’s image and curse Christ. Those who kept confessing he had executed, because, he wrote, “stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy surely deserve to be punished.” In the same letter he noted that the temples, which had been almost deserted, were filling again, and that sacrificial animals were finding buyers.

So the pressure came from two directions at once: Christians would not worship the gods or the emperor, and people whose living depended on that worship felt the loss. The first empire-wide persecution came later, in 250, when the emperor Decius ordered everyone to sacrifice to the gods in front of an official. Ephesus remembered that time in its own way. The legend of the Seven Sleepers, seven young Christians who hid in a cave outside the city and woke two centuries later, is set in the reign of Decius.

Paul’s own request: an ambassador in chains

The letter to the Ephesians ends with a request for prayer. Paul asks for it “on my behalf,” and then he says what to pray for:

He could have asked for his chains to come off. He asked for courage instead. He makes the same request in Colossians 4:3–4, and he closes that letter in his own hand with three words: “remember my bonds.” Elsewhere he does ask to be rescued, “that we may be delivered from unreasonable and evil men” (2 Thessalonians 3:2), so both prayers are right. But the first thing he wanted was not to lose his nerve or his voice. Our page on Paul’s prayers in Ephesians shows what he prayed for other people from that same prison.

Two more voices from Ephesus fill out the picture. In his last letter Paul thanks God for Onesiphorus, “for he often refreshed me, and was not ashamed of my chain,” and reminds Timothy “in how many things he served at Ephesus” (2 Timothy 1:16–18). And around AD 107–110, Ignatius of Antioch, being marched in chains to his death in Rome, wrote to the Christians of Ephesus. He called his chains “spiritual jewels” and hoped to rise “through your prayers.” His letter ends: “Remember me… Pray for the Church which is in Syria” (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 11 and 21). A prisoner asking a free church to pray for the church he had left behind: that is still the shape of this prayer.

A prayer for persecuted Christians, in Paul’s words

This prayer follows Paul’s requests in order. It takes about a minute to say. Where it says “them,” you can name a country, a church or a person you have read about.

Six things to pray for, with the verses behind them

If you would rather pray one request at a time, here are the prayer points in the prayer above, each with the verse it comes from.

• Courage to speak. Paul’s first request from prison: “that I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak” (Ephesians 6:20). Pray it for pastors, converts and anyone questioned about their faith.
• Rescue. “Pray for us… that we may be delivered from unreasonable and evil men” (2 Thessalonians 3:1–2). When Peter was in prison, “constant prayer was made by the assembly to God for him” (Acts 12:5).
• Strength inside. Paul prayed that believers would be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person” (Ephesians 3:16). Christians have long joined their own suffering to prayer for others; our page on the stigmata of Anne Catherine Emmerich tells how one bedridden nun offered hers.
• Not to be forgotten. “Remember those who are in bonds, as bound with them” (Hebrews 13:3). Pray for visitors, lawyers and friends like Onesiphorus, who was “not ashamed” of Paul’s chain.
• Families and churches left behind. Ignatius, on the road to his death, asked the Ephesians to pray for his church in Syria rather than for himself. Pray for husbands, wives and children waiting at home, and for congregations meeting in secret.
• Those who persecute them. “Pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Paul himself had once been Saul, the young man at whose feet the witnesses laid their coats while Stephen was stoned (Acts 7:58).

Close with thanks. Paul wanted the answer to his rescue to become “thanks… given by many persons” (2 Corinthians 1:11), and gratitude is part of the prayer, not an extra.

Praying for persecuted Christians around the world

Many churches set aside one Sunday a year for this prayer. The International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church is usually kept on the first Sunday of November, which in 2026 falls on Sunday, November 1, and some churches continue it through the whole month. The numbers behind it are large. Open Doors’ 2026 World Watch List, reported by Vatican News, counts 388 million Christians facing high levels of persecution, 8 million more than the year before.

Numbers that large can make prayer feel small. It helps to pray the way Paul did, one name and one need at a time. If you pray at Mass or in a church service, a single intercession is enough: For Christians who suffer for their faith, that the Lord will give them courage to speak, strength to endure and friends who do not forget them. Lord, hear our prayer.

Figures and dates last reviewed September 2026. Sources: Open Doors World Watch List 2026 via Vatican News; the International Day of Prayer date as published by its organizers.

Send a prayer for those in chains

Paul wrote to Ephesus from prison and asked the church there to pray. Two thousand years later, prayers still come to the same place. Our family carries the prayers people send us up the mountain to the House of Virgin Mary, a short drive from the theater where the riot happened, and places them on the wishing wall. There your prayer “for those in chains” rests among thousands of others.