We have recently had a big push on corporate prayer as a church at Woodgreen. As part of this we have re-worked our prayer programmes and tried to flex a little more to the increased pressures and time-demands of what has become much more of a 24-7 culture in the last decade.
Corporate prayer as a church is important because it's one of the ways in which individual Christians in a church unite together to seek God around a common vision and calling. Corporate prayer is much more than gathering with people from church in order to pray for church needs. It is uniting as a whole church to pray for the same church needs.
That difference is subtle but important when you start thinking about how to reshape a church corporate prayer programme so that it's fit for purpose in todays culture - because it means that with good communication, we don't all have to be in the same room.
For many years the traditional mid-week church prayer meeting has been the almost exclusive expression of corporate prayer in free churches. However the increased demands of work and family life have made this more and more difficult for many to attend. Whether we agree with this or not - this is a fact of life in most churches.
As a Pastor I have a choice faced with this fact: I can either decide to bang the prayer meeting drum harder (and motivate people to be there primarily out of guilt) OR I can work harder to clarify the principles behind my conviction that corporate prayer is important and motivate creative alternative ways for people to plug into it.
We've come up with a raft of new ideas at Woodgreen to help raise the profile of corporate prayer in the church and make it easier for people to plug into it. However one of the central planks to our new strategy is a monthly 'Together in Prayer' sheet, which contains two, three or at the most four foci for prayer each month, one of which is always one of our church missionaries.
A crude analogy I sometimes use for corporate prayer is a tug of war. Corporate prayer is when the whole church unites in prayer to all pull in the same direction. That's how tug of wars are won!
Whether we're on our own, or in a prayer triplet, or in a prayer group, or in a central midweek prayer meeting, we pray corporately when we pull together with our brothers and sisters in the 'same directions' in prayer.
This is what makes our 'Together in Prayer' sheet so powerful: it releases corporate prayer from the constraints of a midweek prayer meeting (which it was never possible for everyone in church to be at anyway) and frees people to pray corporately in a whole variety of contexts. Incidentally, we've also found it has significantly increased the numbers at our midweek prayer meeting.
One of the tools I've come across that I've found a real help in prayer is the PrayerMate App. It's available in all it's glory for iphone and ipad, and with slightly lesser functionality for Android phones and tablets (the aim is to have equal functionality across both platforms very soon). It's basically taken the concept of a prayer diary and made it digital. It's a great simple idea and incredibly useful.
The iphone and ipad version also allows you to subscribe to online prayer feeds from various Christian organisations and missionary agencies. Want to pray for Barnabus Fund or Open Doors? Subscribe to their online prayer feed and you will get a fresh prayer point from them every day within PrayerMate. You can also customise your own lists and categories and pray for family, friends, church, work etc etc. You can even link it up with dropbox and download prayer letters from the Christian workers you support. It's a brilliant app.
And now - TRUMPET FANFARE - you can also subscribe to a prayer feed from Woodgreen Church as well, which is basically our Together in Prayer sheet split up over 7 days. Go to the online prayer feeds page, click on UK churches and there we are.
So there you go. Even if you're a technology addict there's now no excuse NOT to pray!
You can get the PrayerMate app from the itunes or Play store and it's currently FREE.
