An Email Prayer Chain for Central

By Julie Schuetz

"Out of the church flows the work of the Spirit on earth... When a church is truly connected to the Spirit of God, His Spirit flows in ministry---first through the church and then out the doors into the surrounding community, bringing life and fruit wherever it flows. How does a church become filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit of God? There is only one way: through prayer... The transforming, life-giving work of the Holy Spirit only comes through powerful prayer."
(Jonathon Graf, in The Prayer Saturated Church by Cheryl Sacks).

Currently at Central, a number of ways exist to share our prayer needs: through the pew cards that are prayed over by two weekly prayer teams, through the telephone prayer chain, through prayer concerns shared during Sunday School classes and Youth Group, as well as those shared by individuals with one another and through small groups. These are excellent and effective, but how can we take the next step? Central is a large church that is continuing to grow. This means more and more people with needs, but also, more and more people to pray! Praying for one another helps form us into a community and allows us to love and encourage one another in a powerful and meaningful way.

To that end, we have created an email prayer chain. Prayer requests, praise and progress reports for the people of Central Presbyterian, their friends and families will be distributed weekly via email to subscribers. Our goal is to get prayer needs out to a large number of believers (especially in urgent situations), but also enable us to share updates, praise and progress reports in a timely fashion.

The realities of this world mean that certain precautions must be taken in order to ensure confidentiality, avoid propagating spam, hoaxes and viruses and to avoid inundating recipients' mailboxes with mail. A considerable amount of time, effort and expertise has been put into this project to address these issues. Please visit the Prayer page on our website (http://centralpc.org/prayer/prayerchain.htm) for details and guidelines.

We hope that you'll consider participating in this opportunity to care for one another through prayer.