[38] Update with Wider Community

Tonight we gathered together with the wider community - friends from around the churches who have been keeping in touch with SoHOP via email updates.

We outlined where we are up to now - how the Lord has guided us to 'focus on starting'. We don't have everything thought out and done, but we do have some of the jigsaw pieces in our hands. We also said how we had an encouragement from the 24-7 team that once we have launched others will get on board.

It will soon be time for everyone who wants to to be involved to come and pray!!!

• During the day the House of Prayer will be open to everyone. In addition to those who have signed up to pray on the rota, there will be a small team of volunteers to welcome and help visitors.

• During the night it will not be open access, but people will sign up in advance to come for specific times and to join in with the rhythm of intercession for Southampton and beyond.

• Corporate prayer / personal prayer - both are really important, and we need to facilitate both.

• We are working on a rhythm of prayer, to have a bit of organisation around what we pray for as the weeks go by.

Assignment and Invitation

We talked about the assignment that we have for getting SoHOP started and what the invitation is to spread far and wide around the church in Southampton:

• Come and use the house of prayer - it is a gift to you.

• Come and pray.

• Spend more time with God.

• Pray for Southampton. 

• Come and pray with others for Southampton and beyond

And if you are really keen to get more involved...

• Come and join the community serving the house of prayer. Helping to host, be welcoming, do set up, be creative.

Prayers

We were sat around tables cafe-style for this meeting and now we prayed in our table groups for the following topics:

• Project planning - assembly of the jigsaw pieces

  • rhythm of prayer

  • safeguarding and governance

  • website, flyers, social media

• Inviting others from around the Body of Christ. And in this we remembered it is a house of prayer for all nations and we want to express that creatively and have prayers in languages other than English. We encouraged prayers around the tables in languages other than English. On one table there were prayers being sung in Urdu...

• Young People and Students: we don't have contact yet at City College and Solent Uni

• Location - we are exploring all the clues we have and want confirmation….

Finally we prayed in pairs, where one person was from the discernment community and one was from the wider community. 

To send us off, we asked the Urdu singers to sing their song for us all. It was about the blood of Christ, which cleanses us.