One of our church’s core values is that we believe in and practice conversation with God through prayer. We have all been to those services where a prayer time is added to the list of to-dos in a service and the prayer becomes ‘all inclusive.’

We welcome God’s presence
We give words of adoration
We voice our thanksgiving
We say we are sorry
We ask God to meet our needs

As a worship planning team we are trying to become much more intentional on adding prayers in services. The reason…we need to model prayers so that our people know how to pray. Here are examples of how we used prayer in the last two weeks:

Confession: a time of silence was planned where the words of Psalm 51 were projected on the screens. The congregation was encouraged to read these words as a prayer of confession.
Petition: praying for specific needs of individuals. This prayer time was set up with a brief spoken introduction about the invitation by God to cast our cares on Him; which was then followed by the song “Still.” After singing through this song, the congregation was encouraged to share their requests in the safe environment of the worship center by standing where they were. Then the congregation was asked to pick out one person to pray specifically for. After a brief time of silent prayer, a verbal prayer was spoken by the worship leader who was instructed to keep the prayer specific to the petitions. The prayer was concluded by a reprise of the song “Still” and then we all voiced together words of encouragement through the words of the song “You Never Let Go.” This intentional prayer time was very powerful.

Here is the song list for the entire service.

Songs and Scriptures

Welcome

Songs and Prayer