Global Week of Prayer
24-7, the global prayer initiative, has called for a Global Week of 24-7 Prayer.
Running from the 1st to 7th September, there are thousands of prayer rooms across hundreds of countries - you can see the map of all the nations and prayer rooms here.
The aim is for non-stop prayer for a week. Many churches, organisations and communities are setting up spaces to host a prayer room.
As we don’t have a building or room we can use, we’re going to have a virtual prayer room. And as this is our first attempt, we’re going to be fairly relaxed about trying to achieve non-stop prayer.
Exeter Vineyard Virtual Prayer Week
We’re asking people to sign up for a one-hour slot (or several) where you will commit to praying for an hour. This way we can pass the baton of prayer across the week.
You can sign up for a slot here: https://pray.24-7prayer.com/signup/36e8f8
Click the slot you want to do (note, the page opens at midnight, so you may need to scroll down) and then you can click ‘Proceed as guest’. You just need to fill your name and email to register the slot.
How Do I Pray For An Hour?!?
It can feel really intimidating to have an hour to fill with prayer, but in reality, committing an hour to be available for prayer is probably the hardest bit!
One thing we need to overcome is a narrow and stale idea of what prayer is. If we think prayer is only speaking words out loud to God - perhaps on our knees with hands together - then we’re really going to struggle. We need to think of prayer as connection with God - which involves attention and being together, with silence and listening, as well as speaking.
24-7 recommend variety, stimulation and focus to help your prayer time. If we had a space for a prayer room, usually you set up themed areas to help focus our prayer.
As we are doing this virtually, you can think about how you can consider changing your location throughout the hour to help you stay connected and focused on God. You may want to go for a walk for some or all of the hour. There might be a place in your home, away from distractions where you can spend some time awake to God’s presence. You might want to go to places that link to what you’re praying - like a prayer walk. You might want to look at a map if you’re praying for parts of the world.
Five Themes for the Hour
24-7 highlight these five themes to help you in your hour:
Worship: lifting your eyes to God
Forgiveness: allowing the Holy Spirit to convict us and lead us in repenting and
receiving forgiveness
Contemplation: being still and allowing God to speak
Thankfulness: practicing gratitude
Intercession: contending in prayer for God’s Kingdom to come in our communities and our world
You could use this to break up your hour - even cycling back through the themes a couple of times.
Intercession Ideas
This week you can pray for:
Our church
For Exeter and the surrounding areas
For our nation
For areas of war and conflict
For humanitarian disasters
For the world
The missions organisation, OM, have produced a guide to pray for unreached people groups, focusing on a different global region for each day. You can access this here.
Collecting What God Is Saying
If, while you’re praying, you get a sense that God is talking about something that might be relevant for the rest of Exeter Vineyard, then please let us know by messaging Dave or using the contact form.