Keeping up!

Things are moving fast.

This week we find ourselves setting up not one but two text-a-prayer services. Read on!

We had an online meeting on zoom with 16 community members from 11 locations. The technology works well. To make it easy for everyone to speak we were more proactive about asking people directly to do things like pray, share a story, and taking it in turns. This seemed to work well and it was good to have heard everyone speak at least once. 

Focus - keeping watch

1 Keep watch on our own prayer life 

We shared a few stories about how we are developing or maintaining rhythms of prayer. We saw a video from Sally about how she uses Lectio 365. We are looking for other peole to make short videos to share how they are managing their prayer times.

2 Keep watch for the city wide Church

We shared some prayer requests that have been sent through by some church leaders. These have come from members of the community asking leaders they know. 

We will send more through via email (community@sohop.org) when they come through. 

Prayer points for Chris and Catherine Knights, ministers of Lordshill church, and Alison, leader of James Street Church will be sent out in a separate email. Please pray for them. 

At the request of city church leaders through Love Southampton we are also setting up a prayer line text service (Southampton Prayer Line) that anyone in the city can text their requests to.  Prayer requests will be collated and sent out once a day to a WhatsApp broadcast group (i.e. only the admin can send messages). Anyone can text their wish to be part of the whatsapp group doing the praying. The phone holder will collate all requests by end of day and send out to the WhatsApp group. This was requested by Love Southampton and will be advertised by them and wider also.

We prayed for Basics Bank, an integral part of the city wide church, that they will have enough food and volunteers, and will continue to do so.

3 Keep watch for the City

Christopher shared about how staff at Tescos are getting on with the increased pressure on them, and we prayed for supermarkets and our shopping demands.

We are setting up an NHS worker prayer text service similar to the Southampton Prayer Line. Any NHS worker can text their requests and these will be sent out to WhatsApp group at the end of each day by the phone holder. People who want to be part of the WhatsApp group praying for NHS workers can text this prayer line in the same way as the other one.

Phones should be set up by the end of this week, and we will start to publicise it.

Prayer walks were mentioned as a great way of using exercise time. Also the priestly blessing from Numbers 6 - "So they will put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them."

Easter

Kathy and Richard have decided there is not enough time to organise an online version of what we were going to do for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We will promote links to the Easter conference Chris Hardwick sent through recently, and other online activity over Easter instead. 

Prompted by a thought from Christopher Land, we have agreed to do a prayer walk as our once a day outing all at the same time in our different locations around the city at dawn on Easter Sunday. This is to acknowledge the resurrected Jesus and to declare prophetically that salvation and breakthrough are coming. Ali and Chris have this on their hearts to do and will be writing words down which we will form into a prayer we can all pray together during that walk. Any contributions to this prayer please send by email to us before Good Friday so we can write it into a prayer.

Communion

Richard completely forgot about breaking bread together, but Ken reminded him and everyone then revealed their cups of wine/juice they they had prepared!! We were led in prayer by Siobhan and Carolyn and agreed to meet up again next Wednesday for an update on how the 2 prayer lines are progressing.