Engaging with prayer
Last Autumn I was away preaching one Sunday and found myself being interviewed live before the church during the worship. This was not a surprise, as I had suggested it to the church in advance. It can help to avoid a guest preacher ‘coming in cold’. However, what did take me by surprise was the nature of the questions. One of them was about the biggest single threat to the church in the United Kingdom and the other was this: what is the secret of church life? What would you have said? My answer to this unexpected question was:
Engagement
I truly believe this to be the case. If we are to harness churches for growth then we have to find a way to engage people, even with those elements of their Christian life from which they feel most disengaged. For most churches one of these is corporate prayer. Even where it does happen, it is often beset with problems of boredom, intimidation and uncertainty. We have to find ways we can help people to pray.
Last December in my own church we took the decision to replace every evening service in January with a prayer night. Numbers have held up, and people have shown great enthusiasm both in their prayers and their comments afterwards. Recognizing that people are slightly ‘out of the habit’ of praying together, certain techniques have been followed:
- Each session has lasted little more than an hour
- Each session has had a single clear focus
- Each session has included time to pray on your own in silence, in addition to large and small groups
- Each session has included the use of simple and arresting graphics
- Each session has concluded with a prayer read out loud together
- No sung worship has been used, as the aim is to pray.
Last night’s session was concentrating on our desire to reach out to the community through and beyond the church. I created a giant street map of the area, and asked an 8 year-old Lego enthusiast (and his dad as it turned out) to make a model of the church. The church was then placed at the relevant spot on the map, and people then placed tea lights on those places where they most wanted to see someone in particular come to faith. You can see the results below. Note that some of the lights spill beyond the edges of the map -which seemed like a good thing!
Why not think about doing something similar where you worship?
CLICK for close-up image