So if your youth group hates church prayer meetings, it might have more to do with the format than the ‘spiritual maturity’ of your young people. It shouldn’t be that hard to convince young people of the value of intercession – that is, the act of praying on behalf of other people. Many young people care passionately about others’ welfare and feel the pain of injustices around the world as if they were directed at them personally.
Last time we wrote about the important link between worship and justice. Praying for people is a natural response to God’s heart for the broken, and if the worship in our setting is becoming self-indulgent and ‘me-focused’ then including times of prayer for situations outside of our immediate youth group or church context is one of the best ways to turn attention outwards.
We like finding ways of making intercession part of our times of sung worship, rather than the more common ‘we’ve now finished the time of worship, please sit down to pray’ way of doing things. We can be passionate when we sing songs to God, yet bored out of our minds as someone rattles off a long list of requests and names of countries in far-flung corners of the world. Tying worship and prayer together helps us connect our passion for God with a passion for his world.
Whether you’re in a more traditional church where intercessions ‘happen’ every Sunday or in a free church where intercession only happens by accident once a year during an open time of prayer, chances are that there are ways that your church or youth group could develop more creative ways of tying prayer in with the rest of the worship. Here are some ideas:
Singing your prayers
Some songs are already prayers of intercession, and can be easily planned into a section of other songs to create a journey; for example, from adoration to intercession. Songs that work well like this would be oldschool ones like ‘Great is the darkness’ (by Noel Richards) and the chorus of ‘He is the Lord’ (by Kevin Prosch), or newer ones like ‘Build your kingdom’ (by Rend Collective Experiment).
Or perhaps try something new: we have changed the words a little to the famous advent hymn ‘O come, o come Emmanuel’ to work as a prayer prayed over situations - a very rich way of asking God to be ‘God with us’ in the darkest circumstances. Another powerful song that we use a lot is ‘When our Songs’ by Matt Osgood. Something we often do with this song (or any of the ones mentioned above) is to intersperse verses with spoken prayer-times. If the music keeps going underneath, and you put a suggestion of what to pray for on a PowerPoint slide (for example, a natural disaster area or war-torn country), the group can have some space to pray out-loud without feeling exposed. These two songs are available in the links section of the Youthwork website.
Going multi-sensory
If you have been involved with something like 24/7 Prayer, you know how useful creative and multi-sensory ideas can be to stir us to pray. Here are two ideas you could try:
• Use photography: every member of your group is probably a photographer, (at least on their phone), so why not pray using their snaps. Young people can take photos of items for prayer (the local area, schools, signs of poverty, ministries etc.) and you can either stick them up on a screen during corporate worship to focus your prayer, or print them to put around the worship space.
• War bowls: our friend Damian made bowls out of plastic toy soldiers to collect prayers for peace. Check it out on the links section of Youthwork website.
Written prayers
Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say when we pray, especially if we are praying about a difficult or painful subject. There is real value in using well-crafted, thought-through words sometimes when we pray (much like when we sing!). There are thousands of prewritten prayers out there for you to pick up and use (have a search in books or online), but not all are immediately suitable for use with a youth group.
Alternatively, you could get your young people to write and lead their own prayers; they are much more likely to own them this way, and the prayers will flow out of your context. They can write them like a poem, with rhymes, or base it on a piece of scripture. Particularly helpful is if the prayer has a responsive part for the rest of the group to join in with. Have a look at this prayer based on Revelation 21 on the links section of Youthwork website for an example congregational prayer and response using the Bible in intercessions.
