The church that prays together…
According to Luke, the early church prayed… alot:
All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer… (Acts 1:14 ESV)
And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Acts 2:42 ESV)
Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour. (Acts 3:1 ESV)
And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, “Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them…” And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. (Acts 4:24, 31 ESV)
How, when, where, and why does your church pray together?
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I’ll let you know when I find out…
Hi Alan,
I posted a reply yesterday, but my dial-up service disconnected and I lost what I’d written. So, here it goes again.
The pastor of our church asked me to help develop the Wednesday night service. We’ve come a long way during this past year. Here is what we do.
Our service is in 4 parts.
We begin with a testimony or sharing time. Everyone is encouraged to tell something they learned about God that week, how they experienced or shared the love of God, or any encouragement they may have for the others. This usually last 15 minutes and doesn’t flow very well without a moderator.
From there we give thanks in prayer and then sing hymns or other spiritual songs. This last anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes.
In our third part of the meeting, we break up into groups of 2 or 3 and pray for one another and with one another. We started this as an exercise in helping church members get to know each other beyond the superficial level. It lasted about 5 minutes. These days this prayer time goes for about 20 minutes. We encourage people to pray with someone different every week.
Sometimes we ask people who have a special need or prayer request to raise their hands, and other church members get up and choose one person to go and sit with and hear their need and pray for that person.
We don’t limit this prayer time, but when the vast majority of the groups look like they have finished praying, we close with a corporate prayer.
The last segment of the worship service is an oral style inductive Bible study. Someone (usually me) tells a passage of scripture and helps the congregation step through it, so that most everyone would be able to tell the story themselves. We then look for a few spiritual observations and applications.
This segment is getting pretty short because of the prayer time. We usually only have time to get the scripture down and make one observation, but sometimes people bring new observations about the passage to the share time the next week.
Last week we started to serve a meal before the service begins. We are still working out the timing and all, but it is nice to have a time to eat together too. I wish we could incorporate some of the sharing into the meal time, but I don’t want to make it artificial, so we will just let it go and see what happens.
Reblogged at http://filippi314.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/korai-pelda/
Thank you, Alan!
Myrtlemyrtus,
Thank you very much for translating and republishing my posts!
-Alan