Prayer in action: How corps are getting creative with prayer

A weekly morning prayer meeting is simultaneously attended in person at the corps and online via Facebook live. Our young people have individual wipe-clean laminated prayer lists in the YP room and we have a prayer board with pegs on a line for posting prayers in the main hall. God is faithfully answering prayers with healing and unity in a time of transition and by growing our church through new folk joining and previous connections returning. We are experiencing revival at the corps as people are finding Jesus and getting saved. Hallelujah!

We have a prayer box in our community café. When we close at the end of each day, we pray over each request received that day.

Our weekly evening all-age prayer group is regularly attended by families, with up to eight children present. To enable the children to participate in prayers we invested in many children’s prayer books and children’s Bibles, which we encouraged the parents to take home and use. Most of our growth has been through families and that’s answered prayer right there. Our Sunday school has grown from 5 children, in summer 2022, to 29 children at our first YP prizegiving in years. We also have a weekly prayer list in our corps newsletter.

We hold prayers on Zoom five days per week for the corps, its mission and the community, with requests received via Facebook and through a market stall with a prayer box. We have witnessed God moving in amazing ways and believe it to be a direct result of these prayers being answered. Our church, our programme and God’s Kingdom are growing and it all started with prayer.

Our number one on the roll is unable to get out on Sundays very often due to deteriorating health. However, she faithfully sends out cards as her service and ministry, assisted by her daughter. This is much appreciated by people who receive them – our volunteers, corps members past and present, groups that use our hall, other local churches and care homes, DHQ and more! We often get comments from those who receive them to say thank you.

Often, trying to get people to engage with prayer can be difficult. We decided to put a community postbox for prayers, along with writing paper and envelopes, in our foyer at the hall. Every Sunday we find we have post, and we can then share the prayers in our morning worship. We are overjoyed by how much it is used by the whole community.

We have a prayer tree in the foyer. Folk are encouraged to take a request home and pray over it.

We assemble and provide a themed family-friendly Prayer Room in a Box full of materials, resources and prompts to help people explore and connect with God. We include Scripture, meditations and poems and share these online for folk who are unable to attend in person.

We have a faithful and dedicated corps WhatsApp prayer group and a prayer request box in our foyer. Our band takes the prayer request box out to the monthly makers market in the town, so that we can offer prayers for the community.

Our prodigal washing line has the names of previous attendees hanging from it. They are prayed for and only removed from the line when they return to the fellowship. We have a prayer wall and have had prayers in balloons in our meetings.

Prayer journals were given out at our food bank and we always have prayer resources available, which have proven popular. We took our weekly prayer onto the high street as an opportunity to be active in supporting the town’s Clean Up initiative and to pray on the streets instead of just inside the building. These are all great conversation[1]starters, and we hope our efforts will encourage others to pray and remind people to put their faith into action. We had one big answered prayer from a lady who was praying for a job. She has a job now and credits this to answered prayer.