What Place Does Prayer Have In Our Church?
We are part of the Uniting Church (UC) in Australia. Our current status is actually a Faith Community of the Uniting Church in Australia. The UC have a liturgy for use in corporate worship, which has many valuable parts to it. One of those is the Prayer of Intersession or the Prayers of the People.
Our journey has been to ask the question: how does the church pray for it’s community, for people and for the world in a context where most of that world may never find out that they are being prayed for? This journey has taken us to some interesting places and so far this is what it looks like:
Prayer for each other
Whenever we gather we pray for each other. Usually by encouraging people to break into smaller groups and pray for those in need. It’s been great to see people become more confident in praying for others.
Prayer in our Gatherings
We also pray as the people of God, together as we gather.
Daily Prayer
Every weekday we gather around a picnic table in the centre of Burleigh to pray for this in need. There’s nothing like praying in teh centre of our mission field where everyone can see us. It’s been a wonderful time each day of encouraging one another and praying for our growing list of prayer needs.
This is the latest idea we’re working on. To provide a SMS based prayer service to those in our community who need prayer but don’t know how to get it.
Team Prayer Share
We also share prayer requests important to those on the team and commit to praying for people.
Go To Prayer
When the right time presents itself we want to be able to go to people who have a prayer request, sit with them and pray. It seems there is something powerful about being with people when praying.
If Jesus is going to build his church, then those who are his church need to be people of prayer. We know that the only thing we have to offer people is Jesus. And the only way we have to offer Jesus is through prayer. When we pray together we are seeing God do some amazing things and we know the more we pray the more we will see.