The Power of a Praying Wife

What The Power of a Praying Wife is

The Power of a Praying Wife is a 30-chapter prayer manual for wives, organized by area of a husband’s life. Stormie Omartian — a Christian author and recording artist whose own marriage to producer Michael Omartian nearly ended in the early years — wrote the book as the practical method that had worked for her. Each chapter names an area (His Work, His Mind, His Fears, His Faith, His Future, His Relationship With His Father, and so on), tells a short story or unpacks the area in 3–5 pages, and ends with a written prayer the reader can pray verbatim or adapt.

The book is part of a larger franchise. Harvest House has published The Power of a Praying Husband, Parent, Single Woman, Teen, Adult Children, and Grandparent volumes, plus devotional editions, journals, and Spanish translations. Omartian is the author across the series; the format — short chapter, focused area, sample prayer — is preserved throughout. The Wife volume is the original and remains the best-known.

Why wives still reach for The Power of a Praying Wife

The single biggest practical difference between this book and almost any other marriage or prayer book is that it answers the question wives actually have: not "should I pray for my husband" but "what on earth do I pray." Most wives who want to pray for their husband can name two or three areas — his job, maybe his faith, maybe his health — and run out. Omartian gives them thirty, and a sample prayer for each. That single design choice is why the book has outsold every imitator that has copied the structure since.

The other reason is tone. Omartian doesn’t write like a marriage expert. She writes like a wife who almost lost her marriage and found that prayer was the part she could actually do when nothing else worked. That posture — humble, specific, not preachy at the husband — is the thoughtful person’s entry point into intercessory prayer for a spouse. The book is read so widely partly because it’s genuinely usable, and partly because it doesn’t make the reader feel judged for needing it.

30-area structured prayer for a husband — the differentiator

The spine of the book is its 30 focus areas. Omartian moves from the obvious (His Work, His Faith, His Marriage) to the easily-overlooked (His Fears, His Past, His Walk, His Talk) to the rarely-named (His Reputation, His Temptations, His Deliverance, His Future). Each chapter is short — typically 4–6 pages — and ends with a one-page sample prayer. The reader is not asked to write her own prayer from scratch; she’s asked to pray a prayer that already exists and adapt it to her actual husband.

This is what the genre owes Omartian. Before 1997 there were books about prayer in marriage; there were not books that pre-wrote thirty different prayers covering thirty different angles. Wives who have tried free-form prayer journals and given up after three days find that they can do this — fifteen minutes, one area, one prayer. The structure is the engine.

The companion series — Husband, Parent, Single Woman, and beyond

The Power of a Praying Wife was the first volume; the rest of the catalog grew out of its sales. The Power of a Praying Husband (2001) flipped the structure for men praying for wives. The Power of a Praying Parent applied it to children. Later volumes extended to single women, teens, adult children, and grandparents, with devotional and journal editions of the bestsellers. The whole series is published by Harvest House and has crossed many millions of total copies in print.

For families, this matters: a couple can read the Wife and Husband volumes in parallel, parents can pick up the Parent volume, and grandparents have their own. The format is consistent across the series — short chapters, focused areas, sample prayers — which is why people who liked the Wife volume tend to buy two or three more. It’s the rare Christian-living title where the franchise expansion didn’t dilute the original.

A charismatic-evangelical voice — what to expect on the page

Omartian writes from a charismatic-evangelical background. That shapes the book in specific ways: spiritual warfare is named directly, the enemy is referred to as a real adversary, and Omartian regularly recounts moments where she felt God prompt her to pray for something specific that later turned out to matter. Some readers find this language refreshingly direct; readers from more reserved liturgical, sacramental, or cessationist traditions sometimes find it warmer than their usual register.

Importantly, the book’s framework — pray for specific named areas of your spouse’s life — is portable across traditions. Wives in Catholic, Latter-day Saint, mainline Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox homes read this book and adapt the prayers to their own theology of marriage and intercession. The complementarian gender framing (husband as head, wife as supporter) is more comfortable in some of those traditions than others; readers for whom that framing is a non-starter will feel it on every page, and readers for whom it is the assumed default will barely notice it.

Pricing

Where The Power of a Praying Wife falls behind

Light on theology. The book is a prayer manual, not a theology-of-marriage book. Readers wanting biblical exposition of Ephesians 5, the household codes, the imago Dei of husband and wife, or the gospel-and-marriage frame that Tim Keller and others have built will find very little of that here. Omartian assumes a theology rather than arguing for one, and the assumed theology is mid-1990s charismatic-evangelical complementarianism.

One-directional by design. The book is written for the wife to pray for the husband. There is comparatively little on mutual confession, joint prayer, the wife’s own areas of growth, or what to do when both spouses need to repent toward each other. The Power of a Praying Husband fills part of the gap from the other side, but the Wife volume in isolation can feel like the wife is the one doing the spiritual work.

Charismatic register may feel foreign. Spiritual warfare language, "I felt God lead me to pray," and stories of specific answered prayer are constants. Readers from cessationist Reformed, traditional Catholic, mainline Protestant, or Latter-day Saint backgrounds may find this warmer than their tradition’s usual prayer vocabulary. None of it is presented as the only valid way to pray, but it is the book’s native voice.

Some 1990s artifacts even after the 2014 update. The revised edition refreshed some references but didn’t restructure the book. A few sample prayers — particularly around media consumption, workplace culture, and finances — still sound like the cultural pressures of the late 1990s. Most readers don’t care; it just means a small number of paragraphs feel dated.

Not a couples’ book. This is written to be read by one spouse alone. Couples wanting to read and pray together as a discipline will be better served by a couples’ devotional — the Wife and Husband volumes read in parallel get closer, but neither was designed for joint reading.

The Power of a Praying Wife vs. A Praying Life vs. Boundaries in Marriage

These three books get recommended together to wives in a hard season, but they answer different questions. The Power of a Praying Wife answers "what specifically should I pray about my husband?" — 30 areas, 30 sample prayers. A Praying Life (Paul Miller) answers "how do I actually develop a prayer life that lasts?" — a broader, more reflective book about prayer itself, not specific to marriage. Boundaries in Marriage (Cloud & Townsend) answers "what are healthy limits between two spouses?" — a relational and psychological framework, not a prayer book at all.

Different strengths. Omartian is best at giving wives concrete words for areas they wouldn’t have thought to pray about. Miller is broader — better for someone whose prayer life itself is the problem. Cloud and Townsend are operating in a different category entirely; they’re the right book when the marriage problem is enmeshment, control, or unhealthy patterns rather than something to pray through. Many wives end up owning all three over the course of a marriage.

If you can only buy one and the question is "how do I pray for my husband?", get Omartian. If the question is "how do I pray at all?", get Miller. If the question is "how do I think about what’s healthy here?", get Cloud and Townsend. They’re complementary, not competitors.

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