This is a selection of reflections and pictures by Heather Whyte - Evangelism and Communications Enabler for the South Western Synod. Each reflection is a separate pdf.
During Bible Year we described an activity called Bible Scrapbooking. This is still available on the Bible Year part of the menu above. Scrapbooking is generally a very popular craft. If you have not tried this before you might want to look at the Bible Scrapbooking first. However, you can do this activity without having done Bible Scrapbooking. It is suitable for individuals or small groups.
This bible study for prayer year, written by John Campbell, examines Jesus and the church at prayer and invites a conversation about prayer. It draws on everyone’s own experience of prayer (whatever it may be) to help with a shared investigation of stories about praying in Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.
This conversation invites a fresh exploration of the Lord’s Prayer. The writer provides three points of reflection and discussion about the Lord’s Prayer that could be used for a discussion group, a reflective service of worship or by individuals who may want to note their thoughts and reactions in their prayer journal.
Helps us think about making use of a daily pattern of prayer. The accompanying document, "A Simple Pattern" provides an easily printed leaflet giving 2 leaflets per A4 sheet which can then be folded into 3, a useful bookmark size.
This includes resources and ideas to encourage you in your prayer life and offers suggestions to help you in personal, group or church prayer. The toolkit will be added to as the year goes on.
Various ideas are directly on this page, but pages for specific prayer themes are on a sub-menu above, or you can go direct to them from here.
Here you will find some useful links to help stimulate your prayer activities. Vision4Life does not necessarily endorse all these external links. All links will open in a new window or tab.
24/7 Prayer https://www.24-7prayer.com/ This website of the 24/7 moment gives a lot of information about 24/7 world-wide. It also has a series of 'Frequently asked questions' that might help you if you are planning to join in the URC 24/7 prayer event. https://www.24-7prayer.com/prayer/faq
Seven Weeks for Water 2010: Holy Water Make Lent a time to promote water justice and water as a human right. The weekly meditations for the seven weeks of Lent are a way of trying to raise awareness of water and justice around World Water Day on 22 March. Each week during Lent a short biblical meditation will be posted here along with some campaigning links and ideas. https://www.oikoumene.org/en/what-we-do/ecumenical-water-network
The Campus Church movement (a US initiative) has a 24/7 prayer ministry as part of its work. It can help you see one way of understanding and organising 24/7 prayer, particularly for students. https://campuschurch.net/equip/equip.php?go=chop
Pray as you go This award winning website run by Jesuit Media Initiatives, based in London, offers a daily MP3 file with meditation, prayer and music including Gregorian Chant. You can either play on your computer or subscribe to a podcast. (Warning - watch how you pass your mouse over some of the icons as they automatically open a small window which blocks the page until you close it.) http://www.pray-as-you-go.org/index.htm
International Prayer Council This organisation, based in South Africa, brings together a number of different prayer organisations and some may find their materials and links helpful. https://www.ipcprayer.org/about-ipc.html
Here are an expanding variety of resources which have not been produced by Vision4Life but which link into the year and are offered to enable further prayer activities through the year.
Prayer - the Walk of Encounter
These resources have been produced by Paul Stokes who is an ERA (Evangelism and Renewal Advocate) for GEAR (Group for Evangelism And Renewal in the URC) and who also directs the Dunamis Project in the UK. He is a URC minister based in Plymouth. Prayer - the Walk of Encounter takes you on a short 'journey' using a handful of Scripture passages as focal points for prayer and reflection. The first is particularly linked with Advent.
This booklet has prayers to be used in each week of the year. The prayers are for people at work (or not working), and have a spread of different occupations. These prayers are from South Yorkshire Workplace Chaplaincy.
Extra Resources submitted by URC members This section of materials contains items written by members of local United Reformed Churches. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please email it to the Vision4Life Coordinator, Janet Lees, at admin@urc.org.uk
Welcome to the Prayer Year of Vision4Life, the second of three years that we hope will start to transform the United Reformed Church, and our partners, for mission. We began with the Bible Year, and hope you enjoyed making some discoveries to refresh how you see the Bible and your life together.
Advent Prayer Stations - Gospel Beginnings
These prayer stations have been produced by Dave Coaker, minister at Leyland and Penwortham, and provide a useful link between Prayer and Evangelism Years. There is a document for the text and another for setting up.
Here are some ideas for those wanting to pray for their local community during the 24-7 prayer event.
INTRODUCTION
There are many different ways in which we can pray for our local community. Those suggested here are just a starting point. Please add to and alter them according to your situation.
STRUCTURE
Cut out some good and bad news stories about your area from the local newspaper
Write a list of the buildings around your church – or draw a diagram of your building and your neighbours –and put it on a large sheet of paper in the place where you’ll be praying
Visit the neighbours around your church, or the other people who use your building, and ask them for any prayer requests they may have
Ask if anyone in the congregation with local links in education, health, social services or other ways of helping people can suggest live issues your church could pray about
Invite those in your church to name one worry they have about their community and one hope they have for its future
Collect these on different coloured post-it notes and display them during your 24-7 prayer time so people can pray for these concerns
So you want to take part in 24-7 prayer but are wondering what to do. This short list of suggestions has been written to get you started. You don’t have to do it like these or to do all of these things but hopefully this list will help you to plan you participation in the 24-7 prayer event.
SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR 24-7 PRAYER
Talk to other people in your church and agree together which hour you will sign up for
Make sure you get the Elders, Minister and other key people on board
Get together a small group of other people who are keen on doing this
See if anyone already has any experience of 24-7 prayer to offer
Decide where you’re going to pray - in church (worship area, hall or small room), in someone’s home or another place
Make sure the space is warm and comfortable – with a variety of places to sit
Provide a simple focal point - a cross, a candle, an open Bible, a bowl of water and towel
Bring a CD and player with some gentle background music – instrumental works better than music with words
Reassure people they don’t have to fill every minute with spoken prayer – individual, silent prayer is powerful too
Provide some written prayers for people to pray individually or together – there are plenty on the website, or there’s a Vision4Life prayer in the booklet and reproduced below.
Help people to get through what may seem a long time by suggesting you all pray together at points during the hour – perhaps praying the Lord’s Prayer out loud together
Close the hour by inviting people into a circle, holding hands if it seems appropriate
Ask God together to bless the time you’ve shared and the prayers you’ve offered
Prayer
You may want to end you time together with the Vision4life prayer from the booklet.
A Vision4Life prayer
Life-giving God, creator of all,
you spoke the world into being
and saw that it was good.
Help us to see the world through your eyes –
messy yet full of potential,
incomplete yet perfect in parts.
When our view is distorted
may we refocus it through your lens of love.
Generous God, give us vision for life. Jesus Christ, saviour of all,
you live alongside us and show us
life in all its fullness.
Help us to look with you for hidden possibilities –
tiny mustard seeds of new growth,
grains of yeast that activate change.
As we identify signs of hope give us your energy
to keep searching for more.
Generous God, give us vision for life. God, the Holy Spirit, new life of all,
you blow away our excuses
and overcome our defensiveness.
Help us to keep in tune with your promptings –
glimpses of what could be,
hints of new outcomes we didn’t expect.
Generous God, give us vision for life.
Feedback
We would love to hear of your experiences of being a part of Prayer Year and especially your 24-7 event, whether you are joining in for an hour or a day. Please send your feedback with stories and examples of what happened, how you did it and materials you used, along with perhaps comments from your 24-7 prayer journal. We would also like to receive photos and perhaps short 30 second videos of what happened. We hope to place some of these on the website as encouragement and support for other churches. Email admin@urc.org.uk
TLS gateways into evangelism course is a standalone one year course or a follow on from the TLS foundation course. Starting in September you will be led into exploring biblical and theological insights into evangelism in the context of practical experience and contemporary culture with the aim of equipping people for an evangelistic life-style and ministry. Closing date for applications for all TLS Classic courses was 30th May but you can still find out more details on the HELP page.
A new SEASONS section for SUMMER has now been published. It will grow with ideas to use over the summer period to help you plan ahead. Take a look via the top menu.
Easter Greetings from the V4L Steering Group!This is just a short email to ask you about a couple of things.What did you do for Holy Week and Easter?We set a challenge to V4L participant churches to do something evangelistic for Holy Week and Easter. So did you? We would be glad to hear from you with news, pictures, articles, or just a short email outlining anything evangelistic that you did and also how it went. Feedback at any time would be useful to hear, but if you have anything you can send immediately in readiness for the next Vision4Life Steering Group meeting next Tuesday 10th May, that would be especially good and earn you extra Brownie points!! Please email the V4L co-ordinator Janet Lees on admin@urc.org.ukSummer ActivitiesDo you have any summer evangelistic activities planned? It might be a cream tea or barbecue, a holiday club, or absolutely anything at all. If you have ideas or plans, again please email Janet on the email above and we may well share your idea to encourage other churches and inspire them to do something similar. Email Janet at admin@urc.org.ukFinally as always...Check out the website. More resources are accumulating there all the time and beyond the booklet, Exploring Evangelism. It is the place to go to find more ideas, thinking and resources. Click this link www.urc.org.ukWith every blessingThe Vision4Life Steering GroupYou are receiving this email because you have signed up as a church to the Vision4Life process. We hope you will continue to stay on our email list so you can keep in touch with what is going on in Vision4Life. We only email out a few times a year and promise to never reveal your email to a third party outside the United Reformed Church. If you wish to unsubscribe from this email please click the link below or copy and paste it into the address line of your browser. {unsubscription_url}Who are we?The Vision4Life Steering Group is made up of members and ministers of the United Reformed Church who work in a variety of situations from local churches to serving on other URC committees, either in a full time capacity or as volunteers. Some are working in other ministry situations such as chaplaincy, and some are retired. They come from a broad variety of theological backgrounds and traditions. We only have one part time paid employee who works to coordinate the Vision4Life process and all are offering their time to this work alongside other, often very demanding workloads. The materials are produced by a variety of people in different situations. The materials are developed as the process continues and this means that sometimes materials are not available when some churches would like them to be. However we are finding that as God leads us through this exciting process, we are discovering new approaches to prayer, bible study and evangelism which we offer as they become available.
Back to Church Sunday is now the largest single local-church invitational initiative in the world. It is based on the simplest and shortest step in evangelism – that we should invite someone we already know to something we love; invite our friend to our church. If you want to be a part of this September's campaign, you need to have signed up by 30th June. You can download our document about BacktoChurch Sunday here Download back2church sunday.pdf or you can link to the official website here http://www.backtochurch.co.uk/
We have posted a number of ideas to help you with evangelistic activities this autumn ranging from Harvest to Halloween, All Saints, Remembrance and Advent. Take a look here.
Here are some examples of the feedback we have received about the 24-7 prayer event. If you want to share your own experiences, please email Janet Lee the V4L coordinator admin@urc.org.uk
At Homewood Road Church in St Albans we had a 'quiet time' of prayer starting at 12 midday yesterday. About 12 of us reflected on various prayers, which we had put on a table in the shape of a cross.
It seemed a wonderful hour of peace in our busy lives and I thought it was powerful to think of all the other churches that were doing something similar at the same time.
We just completed out hour of vigil at St Andrew's West Kilburn. THANK YOU so much for the invitation to join - a real blessing to us!
Thanks for organising yesterday. Although I was not there for the whole session it was lovely to experience the peace of that quiet time praying with the group
Just to say that (although we did not formally sign up as such, but did use the downloadable material from the V4Life website) we did our 2.5 hours on Easter Saturday, from 12 – 2.30pm. We have a monthly community café (called Manna Café) at the Church, which is always on the 1st Sat of the month, and being on Easter Sat this year I/we decided to make use of the 24/7 prayer year, alongside the café part of the day. We used the prayers and pictures from the website, offered the opportunity to light candles, and some anointing oil (which came from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – allegedly [it says it is from there on the small bottle]; at least I know it was bought in Jerusalem anyway because I bought it in 2004..). People came and went, but overall about 40 people took part, from various local URC Churches in the area and other backgrounds. The most encouraging part was the young people, most of whom wanted to light candles and write prayers (I had post-it notes; orange/red if there was something you wanted to give thanks for, Blue (if you were ‘blue’ about something and concerned about)). We used these prayers (on display) as part of our communion prayers on the Sunday. On Saturday this prompted many of the young ones to ask about prayer; why were we lighting candles, do you have to light a candle to pray, what is prayer – and other subjects, we even had a brief discussion about whether there was a difference between Catholics and Christians (one of them [a cousin of one of young people] is being bought up Catholic) and creationism [one had a friend who was atheist at school, who insists that science is the creator, not God; try dealing with that in a hectic 10-15 minutes, when you are trying to keep an eye on Candle lighting hoping they are not going to burn the place down!]. They quite got into the prayer writing, and understood the idea of the different coloured post-it notes prayer themes better than the adults! Out of the mouths of Babes, eh!?Some of the other people took some of Jane Mortimer’s prayers away with them (about worrying and not sleeping etc). The ‘Saturday/absence’ themed prayers were useful as well.So all in all a very useful spiritual exercise; the material was pretty good. We got to do something they have been talking about doing for a long time – having a prayer time, during the monthly café; and also marking Easter Saturday, which most of them don’t really do (they jump straight from Good Friday to Easter Sunday). Re my other Church at Claremont: I put up the prayers for each day of the Holy week on the notice board in the Old Hall we have to use in the Claremont premises. I have had no feedback from anyone as to how much use was made of them, but I do know that many people use the hall during the week – and so hope and pray that someone may have found them useful, or at least been prompted to think about the Christian/Easter message, if they read the board – which I think some people do. Thanks for all the material and work that went into setting this up.May we all be blessed by the answers to prayer that will hopefully result. Peace Tim ClarkeRectory Rd URC, Stoke Newington Claremont URC, Islington. It seemed appropriate in this Prayer Year of the United Reformed Church to be involved as a congregation for one hour on 29th March. Once the planning began it became crystal clear that the word “appropriate” in this context was anything but! The event proved to be challenging, exciting, stimulating, moving and inspiring for the small group of people who took part. Silence predominated, those participating being led into prayer through listening, looking and thinking. With opening and closing hymns the hour was divided into four sections, separated by singing ‘Be still for the presence of the Lord…’ In the first section, Praise,we were guided into prayer by listening to quiet music. Section two, Confession,focused on the seven deadly sins, each briefly explained in turn, followed by silent prayer and the singing of the Taizé song ‘Jesus remember me…’ In the third section, Thanksgiving, ten very different images, each with a biblical text, were projected onto the screen for one minute each; the first Dürer’s picture of hands folded in prayer and the last a painting of the crucifixion. This brought home the many and varied things for which we have cause to be thankful. Finally, our Intercessions: we were invited in turn to place a night light on a black paper cross lying on a white background whilst introducing a topic for prayer with the words “I invite your prayers for…” There were some unexpected but thought-provoking juxtapositions. We said the Grace together, then sat for a while in silence reluctant to break the prayerful atmosphere and the sharpened sense of fellowship. Who can tell what the result of a week of continuous prayer will be? Those of us who took part know only what effect one hour of directed prayer had on each of us as individuals. Dorothy Postle - St Andrew’s Monkseaton - 8/4/2010
