Cracking The Shell Of Prayer: A Look At Our Next Series

Tonight we begin a new series for the students that we are calling “Chicken and Egg: Discovering What Comes First”.  It’s all about helping them discover that a relationship with God should be their number one priority in life.  And while it’s easy to explain to them why we need to pray, getting them to feel that burden to do so is another story.  Prayer can be one of those tangible and intangible.  It’s tangible because of the many different prayer postures, written prayers, prayer formats, etc. but intangible when it comes to describing the feelings and emotions prayer can and can’t bring.  On top of prayer we’ll be covering tithing as well, basically our goal is to help these student understand that when they go to God first, everything else will fall in it’s place.  Prayer is the important element to making that happen.  Here are two ways we plan on driving the concept of prayer home:

• Pray 10:  That’s the challenge that we will be passing out to the students.  We want them to pray 10 minutes a day 6 days of the week (7th day they’ll be at church) for a total of 60 minutes in the week.  To remind them we are going to pass out wristbands that say Pray 10 (like the Livestrong bracelets) and send out daily txt to their phones.
• Small Groups: On top of having the accountability of their peers we are going to take the time in small groups just to pray.  There will be some discussion time, but we want them to really feel the tensions, the frustrations, the joys and the benefits of prayer and when we can go through that with others, we’ll have a little more success.

We want to keep it simple for our students, we want them to know that establishing a prayer life isn’t always the easiest thing in the world.  We will let them know that many of them will fail first and even second go around; however, that it’s something to be persistent and have perseverance in doing.  I’m not sure how this will strike the students, for some reason I feel like this is the first time we are even mentioning prayer.  It’s just another one of those essential habits we want them to embrace, so I’ll let you know how it goes.