Wednesday, January 14, 2009

so...

I have been doing all of this training in discipleship/stewardship and becoming a church coach.I love it. It is interesting, engaging, and makes me think creatively.

Now, I am not what you would call an old fashioned evangelist, or even someone who will say, let's pray about this for God's answer. My embrace of prayer and of Christianity would be what some label progressive or liberal.

However, I do firmly believe that if the Church, and congregations feel the need to grow, feel the need to be revitalized, then the center of those endeavors is an active, communal, personal, intentional prayer life. Pray and listen. Be still...and know.

I don't know how to talk about prayerin New England churchspeak without scaring people. I mean, we pray for each other on Sundays, but the only people praying out loud--except for my youth and children, are the pastoral staff. We have a prayer circle, but it is virtual. They don't meet in real time--or have an intentional plan for what to pray for except for what is on the list from Sundays--which again, is really, really, important. I guess what I am really asking about is how does one encourage adults who aren't used to praying out loud in a circle of community members, to pray together? Am working on this........

2 comments:

Terri said...

It is a curious dilemma...I remember being very shy about praying out loud until, well, until I wasn't - and that just took practice and some guidelines: Name God, offer thanks, share concerns, ask for help, say amen. The guidelines help.

Hope this goes well for you however you work it out.

Peceli and Wendy's Blog said...

Karla we have a group that meets every Friday morning - about eight of us, and most participate each week. The minister is part of the group unless he's away. It's informal and extempore prayer, and it gets into a 'shopping list' at times, but it's part of being in the compassionate space with God - that's how our minister puts it. In Prayers of the People on Sunday most volunteers still write it all down as they are shy to just go with the flow - grace, or whatever you want to call it.
At Altona the other day they had a dozen candles to light and anyone who wanted to, came forward and just said what was on their mind - just a sentence or two.
w.