24-7 Prayer loves the fresh ideas that people have of communicating Jesus and the Gospel in new and interactive ways, making prayer rooms into places that both strangers to the Gospel and long term Christians can engage with the Holy Sprit and God’s word.

We want to continue to encourage such creativity in prayer rooms, and recognise that many people have been building prayer rooms regularly over many years. That’s why we thought it would be great to have a place to share these ideas and for others to be inspired by them, in our aim of communicating the Gospel of Jesus & engaging people in prayer.

We have put this Creative prayer bank together from ideas that have worked well in prayer rooms around the world.

This link is for an online translation of the Cathedral Labyrinth created by London alternative worship groups Grace, LOPE, and Epicentre. The original is described as ‘an interactive installation for spiritual journeys’. It consists of a pathway mapped out on the floor for visitors to follow. During this journey participants pause and listen to a piece of music and a meditation. They also undertake some symbolic action or ritual.

With this online version the pieces of music are the same (make sure your speakers are turned on) but the actions and activities have been translated to suit the medium.

The Online Labyrinth has been created in 11 separate pieces just like the original. You are advised to proceed in order as each piece relates to the next and if time allows complete the labyrinth in one go. This could take 40 minutes.

Download times have been kept to a minimum. With a 56k modem and an average connection of 4.5kbps you shouldn’t have to wait for more than 2 minutes for a piece to begin playing. Most begin in less than a minute. All the pieces stream into your computer and to keep waiting down to a minimum you will be able to begin before the whole piece has loaded. If you experience a pause in sound or animation please wait as more media loads.

Please remove your shoes and click here to begin the Labyrinth

Ultimate Creative Prayer is crammed full of creative and imaginative ways to help you and your children’s group get praying. Ideas include prayers to draw and make, prayers to shout and sing, prayers to pray alone and pray together. Inside you’ll find all the instructions and guidance you need to help your group pray and grow together.

To buy the book from SU go here.

www.prayerstorm.org

Prayer Storm, led by Message prayer coordinator James Aladiran, is a movement of radical worship and intercession calling the youth of the nation to a lifestyle of prayer and intercession. Explains James,

‘It’s not a one-off event. We are being stirred to seek His face like never before. Our hunger for reaching more people for Jesus is leading us to stand in the gap for our nation. We believe God wants us to be a people who pray not just because we should, but because it has become a part of our lifestyle, our way of being.’

Although the event is aimed primarily at young people, it is open to anyone who is passionate about praying for our nation.

Next Gathering:

When? Saturday February 27

Where? Audacious City Church, 5 Mary Street, Manchester, M3 1NH

Time? 10.30am – 9.30pm

Morning Session: 10.30am – 1pm

Afternoon Session: 2 – 5pm

Evening Session: 7 – 9.30pm

For more information, please email James Aladiran or call him on 0161 946 2300.

Do you feel worried? Or wonder what can be done? Or do you pray?

There are 1500 schools in the UK, and Pray for School’s vision is to see every single one of them supported by regular Christian prayer. Pray for Schools is not an organisation to ‘join’, but a network that exists simply to encourage prayer for schools in partnership with prayer groups, churches and Christian organisations. With prayer the combined efforts of Christian teachers, parents, governors, school board members and many others will become more effective.

Pray for Schools is a partnership between CARE, Youth for Christ, Scripture Union, New Generation and Churches Together England. Together these organisations promote Pray for Schools in their networks, and provide resources for Pray for Schools groups and events.

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the database of schools being prayed for is facilitated by CARE. In Scotland, it is held by Scripture Union Scotland, as the Schools Prayer Network Scotland.

Pray for Schools encourages prayer for schools in three ways:

1. Maintaining a record of all schools in the UK who are supported by prayer groups [link to PFS groups page] or praying individuals at any time. Those who pray for any school are asked to register with us.

2. Promoting larger prayer events for schools in an area, organised around Education Sunday, Pray for Schools Fortnight, Back to School Sunday and Pray Day for Schools

3. Encouraging churches to pray for and support their local schools, through the churches charter

For more details please visit www.prayforschools.org/

In addition to prayer it was hoped that the original event would help churches to consider the place of children in their church life and activity, and consider how they might reach out in love and action to more children in the local community. For more about ‘On Our Knees Again’ (OOKA) please go here.

In preparation for the event the Baptist Union produced this pdf document which is full of ideas and resource suggestions that are well worth considering, and here you will find a number of other related resources.

For a radical approach to prayer that many young people find incredibly refreshing and inspiring you might llike to look in to the 24/4 Prayer movement. As their website suggests, “24-7 Prayer is an international, interdenominational movement of prayer, mission and justice that began with a single, student-led prayer vigil in Chichester, England in 1999 and has spread, by word-of-mouth, into 100+ nations.

For more than a decade the global 24-7 prayer meeting has continued unbroken, impacting locations as diverse as the US Naval Academy, a German punk festival, war-zones and underground churches, the slums of Delhi, the jungles of Papua New Guinea, ancient English cathedrals and even a brewery in Missouri.

Along the way, this unusual prayer meeting has given rise to numerous new initiatives, communities and ministries particularly focusing on the poor, the marginalised, students and those outside the reach of normal expressions of church.

Thanks to an innovative approach to spirituality and culture, 24-7 Prayer has also captured the attention of newspapers and magazines from Rolling Stone to Readers Digest, and was the subject of a British television documentary.

The 24-7 movement seeks to prioritize Christ’s two greatest commandments: to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:30). We pray and work for reconciliation at three levels: spiritually – where there is broken relationship with God, socially – where there is broken relationship between people, and environmentally – where there is broken relationship with our world. 24-7 Prayer exists, therefore, ‘to reconcile the world to God through Jesus Christ’. We seek to do this by mobilising the Church in prayer, mission and justice.”

For more info and a whole host of ideas got to http://www.24-7prayer.com/

If, having weighed up the pros and cons, you feel this is something you would like to explore with young people then Scripture Union’s brilliant on-line resource WordLive will be very helpful. Actually, WordLive is just brilliant and worth checking out either way.

The following information has been taken from the WordLive site and has been reproduced with SU’s kind permission:

WordLive can help you experience the Bible in a new way. Podcasts, video, music, creative prayer, meditation and group study make WordLive engaging and easy to use. Updated everyday and available on your iPod, PC, or mobile WordLive is with you everywhere you go.

The clip, which features a young Ken ‘Y-Friday’ Riley and the unmistakable tones of Mark Ritchie, is available from here.

]]> http://prayforyoungpeople.info/bbc-learning-zone/feed 0 http://prayforyoungpeople.info/bbc-learning-zone http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MobilisingPrayer/~3/h4FEYlr2NaY/twitter-as-a-prayer-tool-for-yp http://prayforyoungpeople.info/twitter-as-a-prayer-tool-for-yp#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:34:20 +0000 admin http://prayforyoungpeople.info/?p=263 The following is taken from an article on the Evangelical Alliance website entitled Twitter as a Spiritual Discipline; it may provide some inspiration for using Twitter when it comes to praying with and for young people.

“A few months ago, Ireland’s top Catholic Cardinal Sean Bray has urged his flock to use Twitter as a means of prayer. In a speech in honour of the late Father Patrick Peyton, the Priest famous for coining the phrase “the family that prays together stays together,” Cardinal Bray insists that a new movement of prayer can arise using new technology and social networks.

Publicity-seeking hype, or a genuine call to prayer? Can social networks genuinely become part of spiritual discipline in the 21st Century?

My own experiment with prayer on Twitter would suggest that they well might. At the end of February this year, I was reflecting on what value Twitter might have in my own life. It was just days after the Amsterdam air incident, when a Turkish jet crash-landed in a field a few kilometers from my home. Many people from our church community were involved in the rescue efforts and in treating the victims as they were rushed to local hospitals. And many others were astounded by the speed at which Twitter users were able to inform others of the crash. This was a week in which Twitter, in more ways than one, got everybody talking. And it got me thinking. Two things happened to me as a result. The first was a prayer that rose in my heart: “This day, Lord, be born in me. This day teach. This day heal. This day win, in death, surprising prizes. This day rise, this day rise in me.”

The second was a word: Twitturgies. Why not use Twitter as a means of prayer, all the time accepting the constraints of communication in less than 140 characters? In essence I simply took the Twitter question “What are you doing?” and translated it as “What are you praying?” taking the prayers I was praying in any case and crafting them into personal liturgies.

Two hundred and twenty-four Twitturgies later, the result has been an unexpected change in my own life of prayer. Others have expressed appreciation for the prayers they have received on Twitter, but the real benefits have been in my own spirituality. By allowing my commitment to Twitturgies to force upon me the regular question, “What are you praying?” the practice of writing Twitturgies has blown a fresh breeze through my prayers.

There are three key ways in which this has really helped me: Firstly, it has empowered me to pray frequent, short prayers, peppering my day with snatched moments of prayer, rather than waiting for the rare occasions when I can spend focused hours praying. I still seek out those times when I can, but I am praying more overall by adding these shorter prayers. I don’t update Twitturgies at fixed times, but they are often early-morning or late-evening “tweets,” with whatever opportunities I can find in between to use my computer or phone to pray.

Secondly, the forced constraint of 140 characters brings incredible focus to my prayers. On many occasions I have been surprised by the clarity that emerges. Twitturgies are shared with others, so they have to be interesting, accessible, and easy to understand-criteria that should be perhaps applied to prayer more often. Twitter posts are the new Haiku, and as the Japanese have known for centuries, the constraints of form do not stifle creativity: they give it depth. The challenge of expressing heartfelt prayers in such short sentences has been a new discipline in itself.

Lastly, the practice has made me newly conscious of my own prayers and longings. My aim is that Twitturgies be authentic-that is, that they genuinely reflect something I am praying about. They are prayers, not poems as such. I have to ask myself, “What do I want to say to God right at this moment?” “What is on my heart today?” The questions become part of the discipline. The result of this is that I am both a reader and a writer of Twitturgies; the construction of these prayers speaks to my heart also. And because they are short and sharp, they capture very succinctly what is going on in my soul at a given moment. I archive all the prayers so they are also a kind of spiritual journal. I can look back over a day, or a series of days, and see a pattern in the prayers that have emerged. “Reading” this pattern against the events of that day or days helps me to reflect on my own spiritual journey more deeply.

Twitter has become, for me, a vital part of my prayer life. Because it is intended to be a mobile medium (I write as often from my phone as from my laptop), it is a go-anywhere prayerbook. I have prayed “twitturgically” in between appointments, walking home from the office, during a coffee break, in a worship service, and in the last moments before sleep. Perhaps Twitter can become a kind of technological breath-prayer, a “pray without ceasing” application for any of us.