Ways to pray
As a family we are passionate about prayer - but we recognise that we haven’t cornered the market - there are many other great prayer-ers and prayer advocates out there who can help us grow stronger, bolder, deeper and more creative in prayer.
Here are just a few tools and resources that we have seen and found useful recently. Let us know what others you use to inspire and invigorate your personal, family or corporate prayer times.
1) Thy Kingdom Come
The 'Thy Kingdom Come' prayer initiative, launched by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 2016, is this year more global and more ecumenical than ever.
It runs for 11 days each year, between Ascension Day (yesterday) and Pentecost (9 June 2019). The website explains: "After the very first Ascension Day the disciples gathered with Mary, constantly devoting themselves to prayer while they waited for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Like them, our reliance on the gift of the Holy Spirit is total – on our own we can do nothing."
The main focus is to see Christians praying daily for five friends who they want to see come to know Jesus. There is a different theme each day, and their Facebook and twitter feeds include daily videos, podcasts, prayer prompts and devotional thoughts to help direct your prayers.
2) 24/7 prayer resources
Pete Greig, leader of the 24/7 prayer movement has recently released a new book called How to Pray and relaunched his 8-week prayer course, with videos and resources to help groups and individuals learn how to pray.
Alongside the prayer course (which teaches participants how to pray using the Lord’s Prayer as a framework), he and his team have developed a ‘toolshed’ full of 30 downloadble resources to help you pray in different ways and for different things. It includes ancient prayer forms like the Examen and Lectio Divina, alongside Pete’s ‘3 Ps’ guide to praying after tragedies and disasters.
3) Newday prayer seminars
The prayer stream at last year’s Newday event featured seminars by Jodi Peek and Mike Bollinger teaching on five different aspects of prayer. They are all well worth listening to:
4) Prayer prompts
For ideas and information for what to pray for, check out the Pray page of our website, and sign up for our e-news which always contains details of events, initiatives and pioneering situations that need prayer. View past issues here.
Your suggestions
PrayerMate app
From the PrayerMate website:
“PrayerMate is an award-winning Christian prayer app that seeks to help you actually pray for all the people and causes you care about.”
Helen from Hope Community Church Brentwood explains:
“You can add lists of people you want to pray for, eg family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues...then it randomly picks a person from that list each day. You can also have links to charities such as Tearfund. There is a Thy Kingdom Come link until Sunday. There's been a Prayer for the Muslim world during the 30 days of Ramadan to enlighten Christians. There’s lots more to it but those are the bits I've been using. It has alerts/alarms to remind you each day too.“
Several people from Hope Community Church are using it and finding it a really helpful tool to prompt them to pray each day.
It’s free on iOS and Android devices. Learn more…