prayer at christ church

Our vision for prayer development at Christ Church is to release the power of the Holy Spirit in our church, as on the Day of Pentecost. We read in Acts 1 that after Jesus gave the order to the Apostles to stay in Jerusalem until they were baptized in the Holy Spirit, they joined together constantly in prayer.

As in any other Christian church, we pray as a congregation in worship and intercession during our services and also promote praying as individuals and praying in small groups.

But we also provide different kinds of prayer support:

1. We offer Prayer Ministry after morning and evening services on Sundays, and this is also available at other times, as required.
    
2. We have a Prayer Chain, that is, a group of people from within the church who offer frequent prayers for specific needs requested by people in the congregation.
    
3. Then we have a Prayer Meeting every Saturday morning at 9 o’clock for less than an hour. All are welcome to attend when we pray for the needs of our church and community.
    
4. There are occasional Healing Services.
    
5. We are now introducing a Central Prayer Meeting every two months at 8 pm in the church where everyone is welcome to attend. This allows those who can’t come on the Saturday mornings to come and pray together in the evening. This meeting is advertised in advance.
    
6. We also have various other praying groups which meet together to pray for specific themes, such as the young people’s prayer meeting or like the loyal band of prayers who for many years have met together once a month to pray for Missions. This group is coordinated by Doreen Turvey.
    
7. Generally, we encourage everyone the importance of individual prayer life to advance in our relationship with God.
    

To reach our vision we must carry on developing our ministry and be ready to make changes when God asks us to do so, according to His guidance and plans for us.

Our ministry of intercession should be built up so that the whole congregation, including our young people, will actively participate and pray all together in a more dynamic way. Praying for our children, our families, our community, our workplaces, our church, our leaders, our country, the current world situation, and so on.

In order to move on in our development, we had a series of sermons on prayer during June - July 2009 called Pray Like Jesus (you can listen to them on our sermons page). We also have attended training days or day away for the purpose of building up our Prayer Ministry. In September a Training Day called "Dynamic Prayer", was put on here at Christ Church as well.

Christ Church also supports "Churches Together in Orpington" prayer meetings on the first Saturday of the month. This is publicised by Nelson Pallister and we are all welcome to attend.

We would love more people to come and join us in praying together. When we pray together things happen; as we have all witnessed in different ways at different times.