Prayer

Mission Action Plan Priority TWO: To deepen the prayer life of the congregation

GOAL 1 ‘To organise a church conference on prayer’ Laura Campbell

GOAL 2 ‘To start a prayer group and to put prayer resources on the parish website’ Eleanor Searley

GOAL 3 ‘To set up a pop up prayer station in the Baptistry’ Laura Campbell

One of the priorities of our Mission Action Plan is to grow and deepen the prayer life of the congregation. As one of various initiatives to achieve that priority, a group of interested individuals created a new prayer group: PIPs. The goal of this new group is to deepen the prayer life of the individuals in that group, and then to develop prayer resources for the church, to support the prayer life of the wider congregation.

The name PIPs is an acronym for People Investigating Prayer. Part of the purpose of the group was for its members to explore prayer generally, including different ways to create a meaningful prayer life, but we were also drawn to the idea that within a PIPis everything that is needed to grow new life. As the Bible reminds us, the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds, but grows such that all the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. So, the idea of our prayer group being like a PIP seemed also to be a very good simile to describe our aim to create a flourishing prayer life within our congregation.

The process began in January 2023, with the group spending some time exploring the literature on prayer. Across the group we read various different books including books by Stephen Cottrell, Pete Greig, CS Lewis and William Barclay. Interestingly, a lot of us found Pete Greig’s book “How to Pray” resonated with us, notwithstanding that he is from a more charismatic background than most of our group. It is full of plenty of simple advice about how to go about the business of prayer, much of which is centred on the idea of a structure for prayer: Pause, Rejoice, Ask and Yield. It also deals with some of the realities of life which can often interfere with our desire to pray, such as making time for prayer in a busy day and persistence when it appears that prayer goes unanswered.

The reality for most of us in the group was that it seemed hard to feel inspired a lot of the time. Even if you get over the hurdles of finding time to pray, finding a structure to prayer and knowing what it is you want to pray for, it can often be difficult to find the words for what you want to say. On the basis that the only way to deepen one’s prayer life is to actually pray, some of us found it helpful to have a ready-made set of prayers to go to, because sometimes the act of simply saying those words can help to create an environment for your own prayers. Letting go of the idea that there was a need to always craft the perfect words was a necessary way for some of us to get past the perceived obstacle of how to pray.

There are lots of tools out there. The Church of England produces a daily prayer app which you can download to your smartphone. It provides Morning, Evening and Night Prayer in both traditional and contemporary formats. There are also manuals you can buy (hardcopy or kindle). For example, The Divine Hours is a manual for the contemporary exercise of fixed-hour prayer which traces the physical rather than the liturgical seasons of the year and are dated from the Sunday of each week of calendar. There are also simple books to help create the habit of prayer. Books such as The Plain Man’s Book of Prayers contain short morning and evening prayers and a bible reading for 30 days.

If anyone was looking for inspiration, a combination of reading Pete Greig’s book and committing to regularly praying from a daily prayer tool would be a very good place to start.
Having sorted out our own prayer lives (I jest, of course, it all remains very much a work in progress for all of us), the group has now begun to work in earnest on the production of prayer resources that might be used by the congregation. Initially, we decided the easiest way to approach this was to force ourselves out of the details of what we might produce – the format, the form, the style – and into the content. Accordingly, we spent the last part of 2023 writing prayers on various topics. Starting with what felt easiest, we began by choosing a topic each and finding our preferred existing prayers and bible verses which reflected the topic in question. We then set about the task of writing our own prayers. Each of us in the group have our own style and approach, and that has been particularly useful, because it has meant that the prayers we have written have had a wonderful variety to them; some are short and direct, some face inward and others outward, some read as poetry as much as prayer. We are hopeful that this variety of style will enable us to create resources which are capable of resonating with individuals in different ways.

Hopefully, you will have seen the first fruition of our endeavours during Lent. During Lent, the PIPs group produced a series of prayer cards on topics which arise in the Lenten season, including prayers for times of solitude and loneliness, prayers for times of trial, prayers for courage, prayers for times of fear, prayers for those who feel betrayed, prayers for acts of betrayal, prayers of repentance, prayers for the broken-hearted and prayers for times of joy. These prayer cards each contained an image, a bible verse, an existing prayer and a new prayer written by a member of the PIPs group. They were available to the congregation through email (via a weekly churchsuite email), in hard copy at the cross-aisles and on the website. We very much hope that the congregation has found them engaging and that they have proved thought-provoking and perhaps encouraged people into (or back into) regular prayer.