{"id":10870,"date":"2015-01-19T09:14:09","date_gmt":"2015-01-19T09:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archive.richardlittledale.co.uk\/?p=10870"},"modified":"2015-01-19T09:27:23","modified_gmt":"2015-01-19T09:27:23","slug":"lego-and-lights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/2015\/01\/19\/lego-and-lights\/","title":{"rendered":"Lego and lights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Engaging with prayer<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Last Autumn I was away preaching one Sunday and found myself being interviewed live before the church during the worship. This was not a surprise, as I had suggested it to the church in advance. It can help to avoid a guest preacher ‘coming in cold’. However, what did take me by surprise was the nature of the questions. One of them was about the biggest single threat to the church in the United Kingdom and the other was this: what is the secret of church life?<\/em> What would you have said? My answer to this unexpected question was:<\/p>\n

Engagement<\/em><\/p>\n

I truly believe this to be the case. If we are to harness churches for growth then we have to find a way to engage people, even with those elements of their Christian life from which they feel most disengaged. For most churches one of these is corporate prayer. Even where it does happen, it is often beset with problems of boredom, intimidation and uncertainty. We have to find ways we can help people to pray.<\/p>\n

Last December in my own church we took the decision to replace every evening service in January with a prayer night. Numbers have held up, and people have shown great enthusiasm both in their prayers and their comments afterwards. Recognizing that people are slightly ‘out of the habit’ of praying together, certain techniques have been followed:<\/p>\n