By Cameron Silsbee
Begin with prayer
Gather together as a Community in a comfortable setting. Take a moment in silence, in the presence of Jesus and each other. Have one person read Galatians 5v25-26 over the group and then pray to ask the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together.
Debrief the most recent teaching
- What did you take away from the teaching, and what has God been doing in your life this past week because of it?
Read this overview
After his resurrection, Jesus told the disciples that the Spirit would empower them to be witnesses. Over the coming weeks, you’ll make time and space to connect with God’s Spirit on behalf of those in your Community. As those in your Community go about their day-to-day lives as witnesses, each person will be supported by a whole group praying for them and drawing close to the Spirit on their behalf.
Discuss the following questions and prompts
- How many people do you think pray for you consistently?
- Do you find it easier to feel connected with Jesus when praying for other people or yourself? Why do you think that is?
- What’s been your experience of hearing from God’s Spirit?
Talk over this coming week’s Practice:
Over the next six weeks, you will be praying on your own time for every person in your Community. At the end of the six weeks, you’ll share with each person all the things you’ve felt led by the Spirit to share. These could be prophetic words from the Spirit or simply words of blessing from yourself.
The encouragement this week is to figure out a prayer plan for the next six weeks and how you’d like to keep track of what you’re hearing from the Spirit. A simple way to do this would be to write in a journal the names of each person in your Community, one per page. As you pray for a particular person in the coming weeks, you can write down what you feel the Spirit might want to say to them on their page. Feel free to pray for every person in your group each week or focus on two or three people in particular during a given week.
If there’s time tonight, spend some time as a Community talking through different ideas of what might work best for your group and addressing any confusion that people may have. If there are kids in your Community, discuss whether or how you’d like to incorporate them into this Practice. The group can also consider whether to begin these six weeks with prayer requests for which people may want prayer.
Close in prayer
End by having someone read this prayer over the group:
Grant us, our merciful Father, that your Divine Spirit may enlighten, inflame, and purify us, and make us fruitful in good works, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who with you, in unity with the Spirit, lives and reigns as one God, forever and ever. Amen.