Prayer meetings at work or school

Around 1 in 30 people in the UK go to church and most of us are in workplaces with more than 60 employees so the chances are that you won't be the only Christian in your workplace.

In order to live out your faith in your work community, it is important that you meet up and pray with others for where you work and your colleagues. This means that you will need to let people know that you are a Christian and ask others about their faith. My experience is that colleagues really value knowing that Christians are praying for them and will speak to you about it. Organisations such as Transform Work and LICC provide resources that are useful for setting up prayer groups at work. 

I work in a secondary school that is lucky enough to have a chapel but it wasn't being used for regular Christian worship. In order to test the water, I sent an email to all the staff at work, asking who'd like to meet up for prayer. Four or five people replied and our termly meeting started. We made a decision early on to open up the meeting to students but do not run it as a youth group. It is simply a prayer meeting that students can attend. Recently we moved to a weekly meeting which has changed the dynamic of people attending because when someone asks what you have been doing they only have to wait a week if you invite them.

We meet first thing in the morning, so it is less likely to clash with other meetings and people don't get caught up in the business of the day, but this means that we are strictly limited by time as we must finish at the start of the day.

The 25 minute prayer meeting. 

Before the meeting have a few verses printed out from a canticle or psalm  using a translation that is easy to listen to. You will also need a few verses to reflect on. I normally pick some verses from my own daily reading. 

• Ask everyone to close their eyes, be still and silent and to focus their mind on God.
• Ask someone to read the psalm/canticle.
• Have a minute of silence. It's always good to warn people of this at the start so they know you haven't fallen asleep!
• Ask someone to read the Bible verse.
• Discuss what the verse means to them and what it encourages them to pray for at work.
• Ask if anyone has any personal needs that we can pray for.
• Pray.
• Finish with a blessing.