Exploring Faith At Home
The following resources are aimed to help develop a regular prayer life for you and your family at home. When we come together to pray and worship on Sunday, this should reflect our prayers from throughout the week. Unfortunately, in our busy lives, and with various personality types, there is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach to prayer. So here are some suggestions to explore. Try them out and see what works for you.
Each of these resources, in their own way, draws on a long history of Christian Prayer grounded in the Monastic Tradition. ‘Praying the Hours’ was a practice of regular prayer and recitation of the Psalms kept throughout the day in Monasteries right up until the modern time. In many traditions this has been simplified into a pattern of daily ‘Morning Prayer’ and ‘Evening Prayer.’ In our modern times, some people have found it helpful to be able to ‘Pray on the Go’ via their phone while driving our out and about.
Whatever the pattern of prayer, the point is the same – to keep our eyes fixed on God as we live out our discipleship each and every day.
Resources
A Short Guide for Daily Prayer (2009), Uniting Church in Australia
[DOWNLOAD FROM WEB]
A simple 7 day pattern for daily prayer based on Uniting in Worship 2. Available to download and print in its current format.
With Love to the World, Various Uniting Churches in the NSW.ACT Synod
[HARD COPY BY POST]
With Love To The World is a much loved devotional resource by many in the Uniting Church. It contains the week’s lectionary readings with daily reflections and hymn suggestions. Follow the link to order a hard copy by mail.
Daily Prayer, Presbyterian Church (USA)
[SMARTPHONE APP]
Click the link to find out how to download the App to your phone. Alternatively, just search for it in the app store on your phone. Offers Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer & Prayer at the End of the Day with a good rotation of Psalms and Bible Readings.
Pray As You Go, Jesuit Ministries
[SMARTPHONE APP & WEB-BASED]
Pray As You Go is a daily prayer session, designed to go with you wherever you go, to help you pray whenever you find time, but particularly whilst travelling to and from work, study, etc. Lasting between ten and thirteen minutes, it combines music, scripture and some questions for reflection in one audio file. Available through a web browser on the computer, or by downloading the app from the app store on your phone.
A Simple Daily Examen: What are you thankful for? What are you concerned about?
[FAMILY FRIENDLY]
A simple pattern of prayer used by the Grace Community. At the end of each day, perhaps while sitting down to dinner or writing in a journal before bed, take the time to ask yourself and the members of your household the following questions: What are you thankful for today? What are you concerned/worried about today? Then offer these to God with a simple Amen. If you have kids, you might also like to think about lighting a ‘Christ Candle’ at the dinner table to reflect on how Jesus, the light of the world, is present with us.