12/11/24 - 2072: The Power of Collective Prayer - at Work!

Jim: You've tuned in to iWork4Him, the voice of collaboration for the faith and work movement.

Martha: We are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg, and our mission is to transform the workplace of every Christian into a mission field. What could that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: Jesus did it, and he was the Son of God. Do you do it? Do you pray? Really pray? Growing up, I thought prayer was boring and inconsequential. Today, I know that prayer is limitless and boundless and has no rules. It's about talking and listening to my Heavenly Father, building an eternity long relationship.

But can I do all that at work? Is it even legal? What if I told you that it's not only legal, it can make a huge impact on your work culture? Okay, so you think I'm saying it's okay to pray with employees when they agree? Now it's so much more than that. We're going to talk with Pam Mann from Regent Bank and she's going to tell you how the prayer team at Regent Bank prays for employees and their families, but also wait for it, their customers.

Pam Mann is VP and an internal control officer at Regent Bank. So you know she's been tracking what God has been up to at Regent Bank, and she's also willing to work within the controls that the FDIC places. I can't wait for you to hear Pam's story. Pam Mann, welcome to iWork4Him.

Pam Mann: Thank you for having me.

Jim: I hope you'll still be thanking us at the end. It won't be this bad. I worked in a bank as an insurance agent for many years. And so I know bankers aren't used to over controlled, under controlled or out of control. That's it. Out of control. Out of control. They're not used to anything out of control.

Not having control. All right, Pam, we can't wait for you to talk about the prayer team at Regent Bank. But first we want to hear about your Jesus story. How did you become a Jesus follower?

Pam Mann: A little bit different story. My parents were both Christians, but for whatever reason, they didn't go to church, but growing up, we lived two doors down from a pretty large church in West Tulsa. And I was probably in first grade and somebody came to the door. I was invited to vacation Bible school one summer. And I went and I had a blast and I had friends from school that went to that same church. And I just started going every Sunday by myself and I was saved when I was around eight years old.

And then the rest is history. I've just grown in my faith over the years and met my husband who is a strong believer as well. And we've just both grown in our faith. So a little bit different story, but since I was a kid.

Jim: Did you meet your husband in Sunday school? Met at church?

Pam Mann: No, we met in college. .

Jim: Okay.

Martha: You never know. Jim's making up stories here. (laughter) Okay, as Jim said, you work for Regent Bank, how long have you been in banking?

Pam Mann: So I've been with Regent for almost six years. I've been in banking, it's going to age me a little bit... probably over 30 years. I spent about 15 years with the Federal Reserve, in the Federal Reserve System. And I also worked for a large bank here in Oklahoma but had the opportunity - God's just led me to Regent almost six years ago. And that was a whole nother story. It was a step of faith for us to move back to Oklahoma and I had not heard of Regent bank and knew a few people here, and here I am and absolutely love it.

So I've been banking for over 30 years. And in audit. All of that has been in audit. I'm a career auditor.

Jim: Wow. Anybody that's ever worked in a banking system and they know auditors... when auditors walk into a bank, people get the chills. They literally get freaked out. In fact, one time, Pam, just in full disclosure, there were auditors, so I had a business partner who was a banker. And my agency was in a bank back in southwestern Minnesota, and there was auditors in the basement one day, and I bought donuts for everybody in the bank that day. And I came down and I offered the auditors a donut and they're like, you can't offer us donuts. It's like a bribe. I'm like, it's a doughnut people.

 (laughter)

Jim: I just, there was a great bakery in town with the best doughnuts in the world, by the way, Bob and Emily, how you doing? Seriously. And they were like, that's like a crime. I'm like, yeah. It's a donut. It's the best donut on the planet. That's when I realized that auditors have, they have no sense of humor, but you're laugh, Pam. So you must have a sense of humor.

Pam Mann: I have a sense of humor.

Martha: Yes. She still abides by rules.

Jim: I thought I was going to jail that day for offering a donut to an auditor.

Martha: Oh man.

Jim: All right. So you've worked at other banks, other than Regent bank, were they different? Regent, the cultures, were they different?

Pam Mann: Yes, clearly different. The culture here is unique and you guys probably well know that. I have had people come in and they'll talk to me and they're like, it just feels different here. You can just feel it in how people are treated here. It's family. Whether they're clients or I've had friends that have come to visit me or meet me for lunch or whatever, they're like, it just feels different.

And until you've been here, it's really hard to explain. But other places I've worked, people knew I was Christian. They knew I taught Sunday school. They knew I did, all the things, deacon's wife... but it wasn't where I could just, I never felt like I could openly pray for my co workers or friends.

I could tell them I'll pray for them if something was going on, but there wasn't that open dialogue. Like here, I will have people come in my office all the time and say, Hey, this is going on. Or, Hey, can you guys pray for me? Or they'll send it to the prayer team. And it really is just a unique culture and I personally feel very blessed by it, but I know our employees and our clients do too.

Jim: You said at the beginning of the show that it was a God story how you ended up at Regent bank. I think maybe you should share that story.

Pam Mann: Okay, so about six and a half seven years ago we were in dallas, my husband and I were in dallas working, and really felt God calling us back to Oklahoma. This is our, this is home for us. A lot of things were going on. My mom's health was declining. Our son was having some serious mental health issues and we really felt like it was time to go back. Plus our first grandchild was being born. That was important.

So we really did feel like God was calling us back. I had, we were here for the summer for a vacation and I was having lunch with a former coworker friend that I used to work with and she knew somebody that worked here and she said, Hey, they had lunch like the week after, because I told her, I said, Hey, if you hear of anything, let me know. We're thinking about moving back. I said, but probably not till later on six, seven months down the road.

Long story short, he reached out to me and said, Hey, we're going to create an audit department. Would you be interested? I was like, absolutely. So I sent in my resume. We were home for Christmas to visit family. We were here for about a week. I came in, interviewed for the position and here I am. Started the internal audit shop from the ground up here, and I absolutely love it here. It's been awesome.

Martha: Talk about an opportunity to use all of the experience and the giftings that God has given you. It's just such a miraculous story, because if they didn't already have that department, you may not have even had that opportunity to use it in that environment.

Pam Mann: Exactly. It's been a fun ride. It's been, it's busy, but it's been fun.

Jim: I absolutely love it. And if you want to know how fun it is, you got to go back to listen to a couple of podcasts we've done with the boss, the one of the owners of Regent bank. Sean Copeland, and then you'll know why she's talking about what a great place it is.

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Martha: All right. So Pam, I am just very curious in having you share with our listeners how you got started praying at Regent bank. Cause there's quite a story here.

Pam Mann: It is. And honestly it was Sean Copeland. So our CEO, God, he felt God telling him, you need to start a prayer team. And so he came in one Tuesday morning, sent out an email to all employees and said, Hey, we're going to start a prayer team. If you would be interested in joining, just send an email to me and let me know.

So there was another employee, she's no longer here. She was actually leading it for about a year before she left the bank. And so when she left, Sean was like, Hey, will you lead this prayer team? And I've been leading it for several years now. But it was one of those.. Sean followed God's leading, and he reached out. And it's not mandatory, and we have over 25 amazing prayer warriors on this team, and I love each and every one of them with my whole heart. And I, this is not a Pam team, this is the prayer team, and I absolutely love it.

Jim: Now, as a prayer team what's your mission? Who are you praying with? When it started off, who were you praying for, and now, who are you praying for?

Pam Mann: Everyone that reaches out to us. So we have our, so we have two different emails. We have one that's for employees that they can send to us. It's an internal email box. But then we actually have another one that was created for external. So whether they're clients or whether they've heard about Regent from one of Sean's podcast or whatever it might be, and that one is actually prayer request at Regent dot. com And it comes to me and then I send it out to our prayer team.

But one of our things that we actually do is we promise those that we receive a prayer request, we stop and pray right then at our desk and we pray for them. And then, being the auditor and I track everything, I actually keep a list every week. So I keep track of here's our praises for the week because we want to celebrate those and then we have our prayer requests and then everyone, we meet every Thursday morning for about 30 minutes and we just do a team's call with our prayer team and whoever's available. But I send that out at wednesday afternoon.

So everybody has the updated but as they come in during the week, we get those throughout the week and then we just culminate them. And then what I did at the end of the year last year at the beginning of this year, I should say, is I was like we've had a lot of really awesome praises this year. I just went back and pulled all those together and that was pretty amazing just to see that.

Martha: You know, and Jim and I thought that was so cute when we heard Sean sharing this one time and he was like, he was surprised that you had put together a list. And we're like, she's the auditor. Of course she does. But it's beautiful. (laughter)

Jim: She's auditing God. She's saying, did he do the work he's supposed to do or the I's dotted and the T's crossed? (laughter)

Martha: But that's the cool thing is celebrating the praises so often we forget to focus on that. And again, just looking at how God has equipped you and using your gifts. Not only in prayer, but in your career to put you in such a position and to be able to keep track of it all. Because there are some people that would not be on their radar to, Oh, let's actually track this to see and be able to celebrate what God is doing and the ones to continue lifting up.

Okay, you talked about you have 30, you said 30 some people, I think, or 25 people on your prayer team. That's so awesome. What does that look like? You have the emails and the prayer requests that come in for people internally, but then you also get things externally from people. What does that look like to be praying for those clients, your customers and beyond?

Pam Mann: So if we receive from an external at the prayer request at Regent dot bank. I will actually, because that only comes to me. As just the way it's been set up. And so I will actually reply back to them. And we will try to follow up with some. There have been a couple, one was a a serviceman. He was in the military and had a major surgery. And I think his mom had reached out to us. We actually sent him a card. It just depends. So that's what it looks like.

But those go to the prayer team as well. And they're on our list and we pray for them. We follow up. They're a little harder to follow up on versus the internal because they may or may not always reply that the internal we can follow up with, cause we will have clients that know about our prayer team and they will tell their banking officer, Hey, this is going on. Can you pray for me? And that officer may send us the prayer request. So it's, there's a lot of ways that these prayer requests get to us.

And it's not even just the email. Like I said, people will stop by my office or they'll stop by other people's offices and say, Hey, can you guys pray for me? This is what's going on in my world right now. And it's just really amazing to see how this is just all played out. And it's just amazing.

Jim: We were together in October in Tulsa at the 94X conference and there was a banker from Minnesota talking about how they did drive thru prayer. Like people were in the drive thru going, Hey, can you pray for me? And people pray. Do you guys get an opportunity to pray with clients right there? When they come into the bank lobby, you got bank lobbies all across Oklahoma and one year in Springfield, Missouri and online at Regent dot bank, of course, and also believe dot bank. Talk to me about, do you get a chance to pray with people right then and there?

Pam Mann: I have with employees. I personally haven't with clients. I can't speak for others because I don't have that direct client interfacing every day. But I have with employees for sure. And it's possible that some of our other employees have, and I just don't always hear about it. But the interactions that we have with our clients we have clients to say, Hey, this is what's going on because we have those relationships with our clients. We know if they're struggling with health issues and things like that, and we will pray for them.

Martha: What an amazing reputation that Regent Bank has established in their communities and being able to have that open book and saying, we want to pray for you.

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Jim: No, not me. (laughter) I could wrap them, but I'm more preferable to the gift bag guy, a little of that squishy, tissue paper.

Pam, I want to know stories. I want to hear stories. And I know you can't mention names and that's fine, but tell us some amazing stories that have come through the prayer that happens at Regent dot bank.

Pam Mann: Okay. There's several. There's a lot. Could go on for hours, honestly. But I'm going to talk about just a few from when we knew we're going to do this. So there's one actually, so one of the nurses at OU children's, her mom, she knows this little girl and I had followed this little girl on Facebook and her story, and she's just had so many health issues and she had been in the hospital. And she was very sick. And the doctors had finally got to the point they were like, they called the family in, they called the siblings in to say goodbye. And they did like handprints and footprints and all the things. Everything we knew, it really did sound like that as we were following her story.

And we just continued to pray for this family along with so many people, because her story was all over social media. And I will tell you this little girl had the most miraculous turnaround. She still has a lot of health issues, but she is home and she's ready to celebrate Christmas with her family. And it's just been an amazing story to see what that family's walked through. And I still follow their family on social media, but another one that's really close to us, so just recently within the last couple months, one of our sweet, dear coworkers, she and her husband were expecting their first child. And that's such an exciting time, but bless her heart, that pregnancy was just rough from day one, with so many things. And it was just heartbreaking to see her walk through that.

But her little girl was born about 4-5 weeks early and maybe a little bit more than that. She only weighed 2. 5 pounds. She was super tiny but Perfect in God's creation. And four weeks to the day from when she was born, she went home and we're actually having her baby shower this afternoon and she will be here this afternoon.

But we prayed for our sweet friend from day one for the pregnancy, from the sickness, for all the complications that she was having. And now we get to celebrate this new little life. And honestly, like when she was born, she was perfectly healthy. She was just tiny. She was on no oxygen, none of those things. So she was just tiny.

But I will tell you, I have a personal story. This was pre prayer team. But you asked about the culture at Regent banks. I think this will tell your listeners, just the culture here. So I had only been with the bank about six months and, My second grandson was born and to us, we thought he was perfectly healthy. Eight and a half pound, chunky little boy . At five weeks old - my, my daughter's a NICU nurse and she was like, something's not right and called the pediatrician, took him in. They immediately took him to the hospital, started running tests. He was in heart failure. He had to be lifelighted to Oklahoma city to OU children's.

And he had a congenital heart defect that no one knew about. And it was undetected. And he had to have major open heart surgery. And let's see if I can get through this without tears. And so anyway, I had, Sean had messaged me because I had messaged a few people and said, Hey, our family needs prayers. I won't be in for a couple of days. This is what's going on. Sean messaged me 4 a. m. and said, Hey, we are praying for Graham and you just let us know what you need. That morning, my husband and I were sitting in the cardiac ICU room waiting room at OU Children's and it was just he and I all alone in there. Nobody else was there. My daughter and son in law were back with our grandson.

Unbeknownst to me, Sean had told there was somebody different doing - because we have a daily devotional as well - Sean had told whoever the gentleman that was leading that devotional what was going on at that time. There were about a hundred thousand people on the call that morning and they prayed for Graham and I will tell you Graham is now five years old.

He's in pre k. He's a thriving healthy little happy chicken loving little boy. He has, he's a chicken farmer. So he loves his chickens but that just tells you about the culture of the bank that this whole organization - I had only been here six months. They rallied around my daughter, my son in law, my husband and I, as we were walking through that and for about that month and a half that we were going back and forth to the hospital and all the things and it's just amazing.

So those are just a few and also those are all kids, but we've had adults that have had cancer that we have seen healed. So it's just been amazing to see all the answered prayers that have taken place. It's been pretty cool.

Jim: Not all answers are yes though, are they Pam?

Pam Mann: No, they're not. They're not. And there's one that we just all went through this past summer. So it was, and I'll see if I can do this one without tears, cause this one was pretty heartbreaking too. So we had a sweet coworker about a year and a half ago died, I guess it was June of 23, was diagnosed with a very aggressive, rare form of cancer. And she went down to MD Anderson and went through seven weeks of grueling treatment and I know the details of what she went through and grueling is about the only way to describe what she went through.

She had her first scan after that. They said there was one spot of cancer. We were so excited with it because they were like just a couple radiation treatments. You should be good. She came home. She did the treatment. She went back for another scan and the cancer had spread. And she's a fighter. And she's, I'm not giving up. So she continued treatment. But then probably in about July, she had another scan and the cancer had spread more and so clearly God was not answering prayers, our prayers the way we wanted.

We wanted her with us. We thought she was coming back to work soon. God had other plans for her. It was really hard for all of us, but out of that and I honestly, I thought maybe she was going to be with us at least maybe three or four more weeks but I felt God calling Hey, just go check on her, go see her.

So several of us went to her house Friday evening after work. And we got, we had the sweetest time because when we walked in the door, her husband told us it was that end stage. So she was struggling some with just being tired and things. And so he told us, he said, she may struggle.

It was like, we just had our sweet friend back. We laughed, we cried, but we prayed. But we also had a time to just to talk to her about her faith. And I can promise you that I will see her in heaven again someday. So we lost her. We saw her on a Friday night and she went to heaven three days later. So that is one of those visits that I will forever be grateful for. I will forever be grateful that I followed God's timing, that we all followed God's push to go see her now. But it was the sweetest visit. We have a picture that we took that night because she was like, we're going to take a picture and we did and it was just a great time. But it was one of those that God answered our prayers, but not the way we wanted.

We wanted her here with us. We want her back in the office with us. That wasn't his plan. She is in heaven celebrating Christmas with him this year. And there's been others, but that's the one that really was the most recent and really just hit home.

Martha: I know that's so hard to share, but it's so important that all of those steps of the journey are a part of the story, including your obedience to say, I feel like we need to go visit her now and spend time with her talking about her faith and praying with her and things like that.

So one last thing I'd like for you to do is to just speak some words of encouragement to people that are listening that may be in charge or may work at some kind of an establishment that doesn't have a prayer team, but they think this is a good next step for them and in obedience. What can you say to them to encourage them right now?

Pam Mann: I would just say if you feel led, just do it. You can do it in the workplace. And if you read Sean's 94 X book, it walks you through all of that. You don't make it mandatory. You just say, if you're interested, feel free to join us. But I also would say you don't have to be a bible scholar to do this. I am not a bible scholar. I just, you can easily do it if you feel led just do it and God will take it from there. You just have to let God use you. And so that's exactly what I have done because I like I said, i'm not a bible scholar. Yes. I've taught sunday school. But we just honestly, we have it and there's lots of ways you can do it.

The way we do it is we'll have a short devotional Every thursday morning and I usually just use like the bible app or I have several devotional books at my desk and i'll just Open it up and where it's really cool to see what God opens up on that particular day and we'll share that and then we just go through the praises and the prayer request and updates and we pray and we're done within 30 minutes, 25 minutes. And but I would just say If God's leading you, just do it. You won't regret it. You won't regret it. And if your boss asks you to do it, just do it.

Jim: That's right. You never tell Sean Copeland no, period. Listen, a couple of plugs here. If you're looking for a great bank, Regent dot bank. Martha and I moved all of our banking there. Phenomenal bank with a heart of gold. Regent dot bank. And if you have a prayer request at regent dot bank. Pam Mann, thank you so much for sharing your story today. Thanks so much for being on iWork4Him.

Pam Mann: Thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your host, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers, our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately, iWork4Him.