A Prayer Map

We have a prayer board in our church that hangs in the hallway near the bathrooms, where people can write the names of people they love and are concerned about. Then we put the names in the Sunday bulletin for a few weeks and we have a special prayer group that prays over the names every day.

We often get requests to pray for a place – maybe a town struck by tornado, or countries hit by a hurricane, or a place where war is raging. Other times, we’ve prayed for a town right down the interstate or for the violence in Chicago, but often we pray for faraway places that some folks may not have heard of. We also have families in our congregation from other countries, who sometimes will ask us to remember an event or tragedy in their homeland or hometown.

For all these reasons, I wondered if a world map might be a good addition to our prayer ministries?

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People can take a little post-it, write the name of a concern, and stick it on the map over the place where it’s happening.

Here, one of our Canadian families places a note over the town where five Royal Mounted Police where shot in June.

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Or, maybe we’ve prayed for peace in South Sudan and someone is not sure where that is. They can take a peek at the map and find it. In this way, the people and our prayer are more connected!

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If you ask me, every church should have a world map prominently displayed. We may be a divided Church, but we’re one world. And every church is a kind of home for the world – the world that God made.

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
   the world, and those who live in it. (Psalm 24:1) 

We are all neighbors. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We are called to pray for one another and to have awareness of one another. We can’t save the world – as Christians, we believe that Someone Else already did that. But we can strive to know the world and to help in the ways that we can.

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If you want to do this in your church, a few tips:

1.originally, we also used push pins – but that seems to be too many moving parts.

2. I purchased a map that’s a giant wall decal and mounted it on cork board squares (for the pushpins). Now that the push pins are clearly overkill, I notice the map is slowly pulling away from the cork, and the cork is slowly pulling away from the wall. Just use the wall decall!

3. If you don’t have a convenient surface for folks to write on, stash pencils instead of pens – they’re easier to write on the vertical.

4. Make sure you get a political map instead of a topographical map.

Comments

  1. Prayer For the Second Coming of Jesus –

    I pray that Jesus Christ returns to Earth soon, to bring the eternal love and peace of the Kingdom of God to all who believe in Him, and for every knee to bow to Him, and for every tongue to confess that Jesus is Lord at His return. Amen.
    __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
    Dear fellow Christians, please pray for this prayer request above, and please share it with everyone,
    everywhere! Until it comes true, and Jesus returns to save His people – which hopefully, by then, will include all of us! Thank You! God bless you!
    🙂
    Love,
    Leo Sourisseau
    Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
    worldpeacenow4all@gmail.com