[41] Focus on Starting

After our opening time of prayer and singing a song of worship together, we committed the time to the Lord and continued with our detailed preparations.

The Holy Spirit has given us the simple word for this season - "Focus on Starting". This was our final week for making preparations, so that is just what we did!!

Final prayerful preparation

We are going to have a morning/evening rhythm of prayer in the week leading up to the first 24-hour prayer. Tonight people signed up for slots. We are looking for at least two in each slot. Please choose when you want to pray and let us know which you are going to do.

Click here for the rota....

God's provision this week

It has been an exciting week so far. We have a short amount of time to pull things together but there has been great encouragement in how things are going.

On Monday morning in one of the "building the momentum in prayer" meetings that we now have, 3 of us prayed very practically about the implementation of the prayer rota. We need an online rota that makes it easy for people to sign up to pray and to see what slots are available. We prayed that this could be done by the end of the week. Well it just so happened that later that day Tracey and Tara were meeting together to have a comms planning time and Tara knew just what to do, registering our prayer room with 24-7 Prayer and the rota was ready by the end of the day!! Wow. You can see it here and sign up to pray! 

Then on Tuesday morning Richard was thinking through how to run the prayer room at night and realised we should have a phone in the prayer room.  He had a meeting with Bev Webb from City Life later, to talk through our plans for operating the prayer room. Well it just so happened that Bev had a phone to give away following a bereavement in the family, and the phone is now sorted.

Progress update

We have most of the operational arrangements coming into place. We will ask everyone who signs up to pray at night for a reference from their church leaders. This will be done via an online sign up form for the volunteer and a short online reference form for the church leader to fill out. These online forms will be created this week.

On Thursday this week Richard will have a site visit with Sam who manages bookings at 286. We should be able to iron out any nitty-gritty details about how we are going to run the prayer room.

Hosts

We had a discussion about how to host the drop in prayer times. We want to have members of the community there at the prayer room to welcome people who are visiting for the first time. This may involve making cups of tea, having a chat about prayer and maybe even praying with visitors who request it.

This week we decided to reduce the times for visitors to drop in. It is now 9am to 6pm. Previously we thought of going on until 9pm, so this gives us 3 hours less to staff. 

We thought about how many people we need on the rota. We agreed hosts should be in pairs and would do a 3 hour slot. This works out at 3 x 2 people each week are needed on the rota. The rota for this will be a simple online spreadsheet that all the hosts will be able to access.

The governance team (Richard and Fran) will produce a clear description of what is expected from the hospitality team and cover safeguarding issues. The induction for hospitality team will be at 7pm at 286, like our usual discernment community meeting, on Wednesday 2 January. We will be at 286 for this and therefore able to see where to make tea and coffee etc. Once all is in place we will open out the hospitality role beyond the Discernment Community to the wider community and to new people who join us. Exciting times!

NYE Plans

We discussed the vision for the night. It is not about being slick, it is about us being a community together, like a family celebration.

Bev and Nicky from City Life will be joining us for the commissioning. Nicky has emailed SCN leaders to ask if any church leaders can attend. Jane Bakker has emailed the Anglican network inviting them. We are also contacting Monsignor Vincent Harvey to invite the Catholic community.

Ingredients

• creative self-led encouragements to pray. Could be for personal prayer, or for intercession. To be used as people wish, mostly in between the corporate worship sections. We need more suggestions, which could come from our hidden treasure work, for example. These are what we have already:

  • Hope scriptures

  • prophetic table

  • saints (the football community)

  • ???

• worship - in 15 minute sections

  • 9pm - 10pm Alun Leppitt and Michael Sumner

  • 10-11 - our own musicians

  • 11-12 - our own musicians

  • just after midnight - our own musicians

• washing station

• prayer for SoHOP - SCN leaders (9.30pm)

• liturgy - Jane

• prayer for the vulnerable - Carolyn

• communion - Jane

• ringing the bell

We are going to make a gift to All Saints towards their costs from our central SoHOP funds. If anyone would like to personally add to this, there will be a collection next week. 

Jobs

These are the things that the leadership team is getting organised before the night:

• name badges / lanyards

• cups, plates, napkins

• words for songs onto powerpoint

• signs??

These jobs we will share out on the night: car parking, welcome, supervision of food and refreshments, candle monitor, clean up.

Timings

We will get to All Saints an hour early (8pm) for setting up on 31st December. If anyone thinks they need more time, we will also go in and set up prayer stations on Sunday 30th December at 3pm.

We will tidy away all food and refreshments before leaving on NYE. If anyone needs to come and remove their prayer station we are suggesting to do that at 2pm on 1st Jan 2pm.

Final preparations - check list

These are the things we all need to think about ready for next week:

• suggest songs about hope.

• invite your church leaders to attend the commissioning from 9.30 to 9.45

• think about a creative prayer station

• make a playlist on your phone - instrumental - for playing in between times.

• bring a contribution to the offering for All Saints. 

Teams!

We are focusing the operation of SoHOP into teams. These are not exclusive - you can be in several, but they are ways of delegating and sharing out the work.

Tonight we split into Hospitality, Prayer Room and Governance and spent time making a list of issues to sort out.

Hospitality - focusing on people 

Prayer Room - focusing on God

Governance - focusing on doing everything safely and properly.

We went though a lot of details that we needed to clarify with the sacred space building management. Richard will take them to his meeting there on Thurs 13 December.

Prayer Room

These are some of the points arising from our discussions tonight:

We will keep a log book for prayers to write in each hour. 

We will provide a different topic for prayer during each of the one hour slots. This means that we need 24 topics. Please can everyone pray about this during the week - what is the Holy Spirit putting on your heart as something that we are going to regularly pray about as we start the house of prayer? You don't have to think of all 24 - they will be covered across the whole group.

What is our rhythm for each hour? We want to give guidance for each hour. This is not final, but we will suggest something like this:

• Begin in worship and adoration. We may have a set of suggested songs - ones that are easy to sing unaccompanied.

• We may create a very simple prayer of blessing, like they use at Ffald y Brenin

• [at some point] focus on the prayer topic for the hour. Listen as well as pray.  Look back in the log book to the last time this topic was prayed for. Write what you prayed for in the log, and any words or insights the Holy Spirit gave you.

• use any of the other stations and activities set up in the prayer room