House of Prayer Spotlight: Andy Sanchez, Intercessory Missionary

On March 3, 2019February 19, 2022 By CaitlynIn House of Prayer Spotlight

Andy and Vina Sanchez with their daughters (oldest to youngest, from left) Ava, Ana, Abigail, Adalie

House of Prayer Spotlight is a monthly feature of Fragrance Arise (and honestly, probably my favorite series)! Every other month features interviews with different houses of prayer, and the in-between months feature interviews with my fellow staff members at The Prayer Room. God is doing so much in the house of prayer globally (check out my House of Prayer FAQ for more info) and this series aims to shine a light on what it looks like in different places.

This month, I am featuring Andy Sanchez, who serves with me at The Prayer Room Missions Base. He’s an intercessory missionary who raises support to do this full-time, and he’s also a family man with a wife and four beautiful little daughters. Andy was a full-time public school teacher simultaneously serving on volunteer staff at The Prayer Room for years, holding onto a promise that God would one day transition him into full-time ministry at The Prayer Room. That moment came in early 2018, and it is a joy to run alongside him as he serves the Lord and this house so excellently and faithfully!

What is your role at The Prayer Room?

I am a full-time missionary at TPR and serve on the Senior Staff. I am the Director of Staff and I oversee part- and full-time missionary staff and volunteer staff. I get to teach theology in our Immerse Internship, School of Supernatural Ministry, Forerunner Music Academy, and in our Daniel Academy, which my four daughters are a part of, I teach 1st and 2nd grade.

Currently, I am managing our Base Operations Department and I also handle the audio/video recording, editing, and online posting. I am also the unofficial tech support guy.

[He also serves at least 30 hours every week in the prayer room, including shifts as a section leader, prayer leader, and worship leader. He taught himself to play keys so he could serve musically!]

How did God lead you into being involved?

In 2006, I was starting a lunch-break Bible study at work and inviting a co-worker. He countered my invitation and asked me to come check out his friend’s morning prayer time that had started in his living room. I stuck around and got to see that 1-hour daily prayer meeting evolve into The Prayer Room Missions Base.

In 2007, during one of the early prayer meetings, I remember developing a prayer from the Bible asking the Lord to restore the Priesthood. Suddenly, I heard the response, “I am so glad it only took you ten years to answer the call.” The Lord had been leading me to minister to Him and I had just now come to realize and agree with His plan for my life. I knew from that moment, I was to be a modern day priest and serve in His house for the rest of my life.

The Sanchezes holding down the prayer room on Thanksgiving!

What is meaningful to you about being on staff?

Being a missionary at The Prayer Room makes me feel like I am best friends with someone like a Bill Gates or a Jeff Bezos in their early days of talking about this idea they have that will one day change the world. I get to be in on God’s best-kept secret: the house of prayer!

It is special to me that I get to raise my kids in a godly community that is always talking to God and about God. I spent my 20’s establishing a root system for my family so that together, we can live our lives as an offering of worship. I am really excited to see how my kids will outrun me and surpass anything I was ever able to do.

What has been the greatest difficulty and the greatest joy of being part of The Prayer Room?

The greatest difficulty for me is managing the mental and soul traffic that is constantly going on inside me. I am thankful that I get blocks of hours to be in prayer meetings because some days it takes a lot longer than I would like to quiet myself and engage with the Lord.

A big joy for me has been watching people transform in the prayer room. Over the past 13 years, I have seen so many people encounter the One True Living God in a prayer meeting. Some come in with hurts and burdens and they just melt when they get before Him. Others come in numb and become awakened. It is so fun to watch Jesus do His thing in real time.

Andy’s website, with blogs, teachings, and testimonies, is andysanchez.us. He also sends out monthly email updates with glimpses of family life and ministry life — sign up for Andy’s newsletters here!

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Kansas City IHOPU Recruiting Trip

On February 18, 2018January 6, 2019 By CaitlynIn Ministry Life

Every year, IHOPU in Kansas City, where I was a student for four years, hosts an externship expo and ministry fair for their students who will be required to serve on a senior externship. Various ministries and houses of prayer come to recruit students to come spend a season serving. This was how I first got connected with The Prayer Room in 2014 and 2015.

The past several years as we’ve recruited from IHOPU, we have had 14 externs, 5 of whom stayed on staff. The same three of TPR’s senior staff (Brad, Lisa, and Caslin) go together every year, and due to a scheduling conflict, I was invited to go for Lisa this year.

It was such a special experience for me to travel with Brad and Caslin to represent The Prayer Room at IHOPU. I remember well what it felt like to be a student hearing from so many different ministries and praying about where I should go. The TPR team was amazing at reaching out and getting to know me then, and the opportunity to do the same for the next generation of students was an incredible honour.

We drove 9 hours to KC on February 8, and arrived at the home of our dear friends and TPR-to-IHOPKC transplants Andrew and Lauren Meek. The next day was the expo and ministry fair. Brad was given five minutes to give a short presentation about The Prayer Room at the expo. He shared his testimony of how in 2005 he had been a missionary in Africa getting kidnapped by crime lords and seeing Muslims get saved, and then God abruptly called him back to Texas and soon after gave him the most clear and dramatic word of his life: “Start a daily prayer meeting tomorrow morning at 5am and don’t stop until I come back. And thus TPR was born as a daily 5am living room prayer meeting that over the years has grown into our own building with live prayer and worship 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We were one of the last presentations, so the students’ attention was starting to drift, but the story had them gripped. We got to talk to dozens of them afterward at the ministry fair, and we tried to set up coffee meetings with them all. The next day we had close to 20 coffee meetings with students every 30 minutes.

We made several great connections and look forward to keeping in touch with these students as they consider their futures. Please pray with us that God would lead some of them to extern and/or serve long-term at The Prayer Room!

Clockwise from top left: Caslin, Whitney (TPR’s first extern, now a missionary in Hong Kong), Brad, and me

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2017 Highlight Video

On January 24, 2018January 6, 2019 By CaitlynIn Ministry Life2 Comments

Happy 2018, friends! It’s been quite the busy holiday season… and when I got home from California and Kansas City, I was immediately hit with preparations for The Prayer Room’s School of Supernatural Ministry! Now that it has officially launched on January 20, I can catch my breath and catch up on some blog posts.

The first thing I want to share with you is my highlight video from 2017! When I went home for Christmas, I hosted an open house for some of my friends and partners, and I shared with them this video. I’m delighted to be able to finally share it with you!

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TPR Staff Retreat 2017!

On November 12, 2017January 6, 2019 By CaitlynIn Ministry Life

The annual The Prayer Room staff retreat is our highlight of the year. We rent a huge house on a beautiful property about an hour away in Rainbow, TX, and we spend the weekend playing games, vision casting/discussing, and generally enjoying each other’s company. One of the beautiful strengths of TPR is the close-knit family feel of the community, and the annual staff retreat is a big part of fostering that. This was my third staff retreat in a row! (Check out 2015 and 2016.)

During our living room sessions, we discussed taking ourselves seriously as a house of prayer before the Lord and how rare and precious it is that He has given us the grace to sustain daily prayer for 12 years! As of last month, we passed 45,000 hours total of live prayer since our inception in 2005! That’s a culmination of five years of incense arising from our prayer room!

One discussion that really provoked and excited me was our Saturday night talk about what we could each do to make The Prayer Room better 1% at a time. We dreamed together and then made action plans to establish those plans. “What can we do to get the cords behind the sound booth more out of the way?” “I know a way to do that. Done.” “What else could we do to recruit worship leaders?” “We could make small flyers to put on our welcome desk directing people to our website.” “I can design and print some up. Done.” We talked about stepping it up, individually and as a staff, to be more proactive about our responsibilities and “raise the water level” of prayer and worship engagement in our prayer room. At the end of the day, all the clever admin solutions we come up with are about strengthening the atmosphere of prayer and worship that happens 18 hours a day in our prayer room.

I love this staff so much and am so grateful that I get to build the house of prayer with such a family!

Livermore Update

On October 31, we finally finished selling the house on Livermore Dr. that has served as our dorm for the past several years! Originally, this house was purchased to be the prayer room when the meetings outgrew Brad’s living room. When we moved into a storefront space on Pioneer Pkwy., Livermore became remodeled as a guys’ side/girls’ side dorm building. This is where I lived in 2015 on my externship. The house has some significant structural issues and we were losing money on it for months, and we’re so glad to turn the keys over to someone who can turn it into something useful to them so we can move on to a better dorm situation.

Now, we’re looking for one or more duplexes (or even a fourplex, if we can find one) where we can house externs, interns, staff, and guest speakers as needed. I was asked to move in as house manager, and after weeks of prayer and consideration, I said yes. It will be much cheaper rent and it will be an opportunity to live with and serve other staff (my current roommates both left staff to go back to school earlier this year). I’m praying that the dorm would be a consecrated place where we can provoke each other in love and pursue Jesus together. It’s going to be an exciting transition!

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