Some of you may wonder what exactly we do on a prayer walk. The clue (as Dave so often says!) is in the name: we walk and we pray. But prayer can, of course, take many forms. Mark has written a prayer for us to read out at the end of each street. That asks God to bless the people who live there and their homes and to release His Holy Spirit to work in these streets and to bring people to a knowledge of Christ as Saviour as well as to guard and protect us and local people.
We often pray silently, asking God to move and to show us exactly how He wants us to pray. Sometimes we may pray outloud, just talking to God about what we see and what we long to see. I often sing as I pray, but then that’s just me!
Jesus sent His disciples out in pairs, so we often walk with other people:
Malachi 3:16 says “Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other, and the Lord listened and heard.” Sometimes our prayers consist partly of our talking with each other as we walk and lifting up the things we share to God.
To help with this blog, we also take photographs during the prayer walks. We are planning to put up many of these photos in church as a visual stimulus and aid to prayer for the streets of Goldthorpe long after the prayer walks are completed. God is able to use many different forms of prayer and we believe that people respond to different things when praying, so we want to use everything we can to inspire and encourage people to seek God.
Yesterday we finished the walk on High Street. The intersection of High Street and Barnburgh Lane houses the Dearne Enterprise Centre and the local Job Centre is situated on High Street:
We prayed for economic regeneration and for local people to benfit from training and find jobs, for the unemployment rate in Goldthorpe is much higher than the national average and can be a major cause of poverty and deprivation.
Because JJ’s Chippy were celebrating, some of us also joined in their celebrations!
(You can tell we weren’t fasting yesterday!)
All you need to do these prayer walks is a heart for God, a longing to see Him work in our village and an hour to spare from 12 noon until 1 p.m. (or thereabouts) on Saturdays. Come along and join us next week!