One Sunday last year a member of our church, a dear sister who is intentional about her faith, came to me with great joy and shared that over morning tea there had been a deep Christian conversation at her table. It had unfolded quite naturally and everyone on the table was involved. I suspect this may have happened because everyone at that table has been involved in a church-wide project, using a book in the Five Things to Pray series. Praying in deep and considered ways for our church, I think, probably meant that everyone had been thinking a bit harder about what it means to be a part of the body of Christ and a member of his family in our little location in the suburbs.
The Five Things to Pray Series
There are now ten books in the Five Things to Pray series: for a Suffering Friend, in a Global Crisis, for the People You Love, for Your Church, for Your City, for Your Heart, for Your Kids, for Your Parents, for Your Spouse and for Your World. Each of these books explores its theme through a series of twenty-one topics. Each topic is introduced with a short passage of Scripture and followed by five short but substantial prayer points. In Five Things to Pray for Your Church, for example, the topics include praying that my church would love and serve one another, hold to the truth and give generously; that I would use my gifts well and persevere; for people in my church, including leaders, small groups, young people and the elderly; and for the wider church, including churches nearby, missionary partners and the unreached.
Five Things to Pray Series
Various
This series of short books on prayer is designed to boost your prayer life by giving you fresh ideas. Each chapter takes a passage of Scripture and looks at how it can influence how we pray for a specific issue.
The prayer points could be used in a regular pattern of daily prayer. The five prayer points per topic lends themselves to praying through one prayer point for each day of the working week. Alternatively, one could pray all five prayer points related to a topic in a single day, every day of the week: with a total of twenty-one topics that would mean praying through a topic a day for three weeks. These books are useful prompts to broad and diligent prayer. They can be used in personal prayer or as part of a wider church project.
The topics are introduced by a passage of Scripture and the five sets of prayers are then based on those Scriptures, verse by verse. These books provide a master class in how to pray Scripture, and so how to pray prayers that are increasingly aligned to God’s will. I found it useful to also write out the Scripture passages before praying.
Personal Prayer or Church-Wide Project
We recently celebrated our church’s 150th anniversary. One of the ways we marked the occasion was in prayer. Halfway through last year we gave everyone in our church a copy of Five Things to Pray for Your Church and from July through to December we all prayed through this book, one topic per week. During this time we saw love for God and love for one another grow because of the time we took to pray together in deep ways. After Easter we are looking forward to using another book in this series.
In my personal prayers, I’m quite good at praying for other people but I know that I don’t spend much time praying for my own soul. So over the summer I worked through Five Things to Pray for Your Heart. I put aside some time during the first three weeks of the year when I knew I would have head, heart and diary space to attend to this with some care. While short, the prayers provided in all of these books are deep. To genuinely own them requires setting aside sufficient time.
Be Warned!
Be warned! These are deep prayers. There were times during our Pray for Our Church project when I came upon a prayer that felt too hard to pray. I had to take a long, hard look at myself and ask why I was unwilling to pray that prayer. I had to do some serious repenting and work on my hardened heart. To use these books is not for the faint-hearted.
The Five Things to Pray series teaches us how to pray deeply. It goes so much further than, “Please bless my church/friend/spouse/missionary.” It is a joy to explore the needs of others in a more than cursory fashion, and to watch one’s love for God and neighbour blossom through the process.
