Parish Prayer Program - Launch
By the time you read this, the launch of the new Parish Prayer Programme (PPP) will have begun. The first sermon and distribution of the PPP Launch Leaflet and September Prayer Diary is at P&J on Sunday 2nd September, to be repeated at All Saints the following week. We ran successful pilot schemes in July and August for two aspects of the PPP - the Prayer Diary and Prayer Hub – and have used the experience gained to refine them both. I know that many of you are keen to know more about the PPP but, apart from these pilots, we have waited until now to provide you with full details in order to ensure that we distribute coherent and correct information. I hope that by reading the magazine articles in July and August, and when you have read the PPP Launch Leaflet distributed in September, most of your questions will have been answered.
A key objective of the Parish Prayer Programme is to involve as many people as possible in focused prayer aimed at underpinning God’s work in our parish. We are all different in the ways we like to pray, and have varying amounts of time available, so the PPP deliberately offers a varied menu of prayer activities. In this way we hope that everyone will find at least one aspect of the PPP that fits his or her requirements, and may also choose to try out something new. For example, those who like to pray with someone else may be attracted to the Prayer Partner or Prayer Triplet schemes. Others may prefer to use the information in the Prayer Diary to allow their private prayers to be more specific and focused and this is particularly useful for those with very little time to pray each day. The Prayer Diaries fold up to go in your pocket or handbag so you can even make good use of time on the train! If you would rather commit half an hour a week and are interested in a more ecumenical flavour, Churches Together In Fleet runs a Prayer Wall which would be ideal for you. Some people may want to invest more time and be involved to a greater extent by praying for the parish ministry at the weekly Prayer Hub, or through intercessory prayer for one another through the Prayer Telegraph or by attending the Tuesday Morning Prayer Group. Finally, if you prefer to pray in church, Morning Prayer is said four times a week in P&J, and there are regular Taizé Prayer and Celtic Worship services that are prayer based.
We also want to provide additional routes for people to request prayers, for people, initiatives or events, and the Prayer Telegraph is intended to allow rapid dissemination of prayer needs, whether urgent or requiring persistent prayer over a long period. We encourage the inclusion of thanksgiving prayers so we can all rejoice in the answers to our prayers. To this end, the Prayer Boards, at the back of each church, will be extended to become Prayer and Thanksgiving Boards. You can jot down your prayer request or thanksgiving prayer and pin it to the board. These prayers will then be circulated via the Prayer Telegraph and also prayed, as before, by the Tuesday Morning Prayer Group. No request is too small – we want to share in bringing the needs of our church and our membership to God.
The parish website has a list of relevant points of contact, times and venues. Further details are in the PPP Launch Leaflet that will be issued at the services through September with the Prayer sermons and also available for download on the website.
Robert Smith
Chairman of the Parish Prayer Programme Working Group
This article appeared in the September Parish magazine.