Why
We will have all experienced the last few months of lockdown in different ways; our various circumstances and personalities mean that we will have had different things to do and will have approached those things differently. But whatever we have found ourselves doing, the dramatic shift in day to day life has caused many of us to reflect more deeply on life as a whole. Some of us have expressed a sense of needing to repent or a desire to declutter and consider a more intentional lifestyle. Across the board people have spoken of a desire to return to prayer in a more meaningful way. In many ways people have been articulating a feeling of having things stripped back and it has offered us an opportunity to reset.
It is that desire and opportunity for reset, which sits behind this call to prayer. A number of us have sensed that God is preparing the ground for what He wants to do in us and in the wider community. There is a sense that God is tilling the soil of our hearts that we would be responsive to His call to mission, but also the hearts of those whom we would be called to bless. As Jesus says in His parable of the sower, we want to be like the seed that falls on good soil and produces a crop which is a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown in the first place. So this 36 hours of prayer is an opportunity to ready our hearts in anticipation of what He is doing amongst us as a church, but also out into the community. We want to set aside this time to meet with God and to seek His will for this season. We want to pray, ‘Your Kingdom Come!'
How
Many of us having been joining in with the Prayer Course on Monday evenings and having a great time. There are a number of resources which accompany the course, which you can use to help you in your times of prayer. Just go to prayercourse.org/toolshed
We will be putting some resources together to help you pray as a family, and you will be able to download them from the website.
We have also felt led to pray for our community intentionally and so we will be dividing our local community up into streets and giving each of us the opportunity to take a specific street to prayer for in anticipation of what God would do as we move forward into the rest of the year. You may want to use the Ffald-y-Brenin Blessing Prayers that we have been using in Devotions recently to pray for your street.
When
We are going to start with an online Presence style time of worship on Friday (26 June) at 8pm and then run through till 8am on Sunday morning.
You can sign up to pray here: http://www.24-7prayer.com/signup/9ecccf
All you need to do is sign up and then it's up to you as to how you are going to pray. You could find a quiet space in your home, or invite a friend for a social distanced time of prayer in your garden. You could go for a prayer walk or arrange a zoom call to pray together. You could use some of the resources from the Prayer Course Tool Shed or engage in a more active time of prayer as your children jump around the room! Whatever you do sign up so we can draw mutual encouragement from the fact that we are seeking God together and praying, ‘Your Kingdom Come!'