Monday, October 22, 2007

How To Lead The Prayers

Here's a helpful little memo from John, our vicar, with some pointers on how to lead the intercessions in Sunday services.

First of all, a big thank you for contributing to this important ministry.

I would like to share with you 4 guidelines, which I trust will enable this ministry to be even more effective.

  1. Intercessions should be intercessions – i.e. prayers for the church and the world, not meditations or mini sermons!

  1. They should last no more than 5 minutes. Time yourself beforehand, saying the prayers in an unhurried fashion – not gabbling through them at a rate of knots, in order to keep within the time limit!

  1. If asked to pray at a Family Service, with children present – make sure the intercessions are even briefer – i.e. less than 5 minutes. Also make them simple and child-friendly, not using long words that would be unintelligible to small children.

  1. Get to the lectern during the previous item (creed / Lord’s Prayer), so that you are ready to pray immediately, without a hiatus in the service.

I hope the above is helpful,

Once again, many thanks

John Cheeseman

(on behalf of the staff team)

3 comments:

Ros said...

Is there a reason for the strict 5 minute time limit? Seems rather brief to me.

Marc Lloyd said...

Mmm. Well, how to put this delicately... The "prayers" sometimes feel a bit long!

I guess if the prayers are not sermony meditations longer might be good.

We also have the Collect for the Day and the Lord's Prayer and the Grace with the intercessions in the morning (as well as Confession, Absolution, sometimes an opening prayer, prayers before and after the sermon, Offertory response and prayer / blessing at the end).

I guess what's also behing this is lets make the intercessions intercessions and not confuse them with other elements of the service.

Ros said...

Yes, that's true. I've grown so accustomed to the Presbyterian service where we really only pray during the intercessions - and briefly at the end of the sermon, that I'd forgotten you have so much more prayer by virtue of the liturgy.

And of course, if people don't have things to pray about, lengthy prayers are entirely pointless. You could point people to Mt 6 and the heaping up of words.