Mapping Our Prayers
Here is a great idea I learned from our church’s youth group led by my friend and amazing youth group leader, Anne Clift. To help people connect their prayers with place, as part of a youth-led service, a family service, on Sunday morning, or anytime you are praying with a group, try this:
- Before a service, get a wall map or two (the bigger the better) of your state, country, and/or the world.
- Mount the map(s) on a cork board and place in an accessible place in your worship space. (If you have more than one map, consider spreading them out).
- Put a cup filled with push pins near each map.
- When it is time to pray, invite people to move to one of the maps and to place a pushpin in the geographic location related to their prayer. For example, a prayer for a person in Chicago would get a pin in Chicago. A prayer for Syria would get a pin in Syria, and so on.
- For those who find it difficult or uncomfortable to move to a map, make sure you have ushers who can take a prayer request and add a pin to a map for those who request it.
- If the space you are in is one you use regularly for worship, you may want to leave the maps in place for a few weeks or longer, inviting people to add pushpins as they are moved.
© Rev. Kevin Goldenbogen, 2016
