Help me to pray as I ought to

I've attended quite a few churches. One thing that most of them have in common is that their prayer emphasis is on sick people.

That's not what the early church did. A search for occurrences of "prayer," "pray," and the like, in the New Testament, not including the Gospels, was done. That is, the search was in the Bible's record of the early church. I found about sixty such occurrences. Of these, only three were for a sick person, and only one was for the salvation of others, and that was for Jews in general (Romans 10:1), not for any particular Jew.

The first mass conversion in the early church was at Pentecost, where about three thousand people were converted. There's no indication that the believers had been praying for the salvation of any of these people, as individuals. Apparently, they were praying for their own group, for the Holy Spirit to empower them. And Spirit-filled believers were able to influence others to become believers.

Almost all of the New Testament church’s prayers or prayer requests were for believer’s growth and/or for their ministry. And besides that, of course, there's the most important prayer in the Gospels, that of Jesus, for believers, in John 17.

It’s not wrong to pray for the sick or for the salvation of others. But it is wrong to spend little or no effort in praying for believers to grow, to stay pure, to be guided by the Spirit, to absorb the Bible, and to have effective ministry. Am I a good example of this? No. I wish I were a better one.

Thanks for reading! Pray for other believers, and their ministry.