by Stephen Rodgers

It was kind of a bad week for rounding up articles, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I found ONE article that I wanted to share with you and discuss a little bit.  Over at the Practical Shepherding blog, Brian Croft explained the concept of a membership prayer guide.  I’d encourage you to go check out the article and then swing back here for the discussion.

Alright, you’re back.  Now, slow week notwithstanding, I think this is probably a more important topic than anything else I would have dug up anyhow.  You see, with the new website that Kyle and Crew have implemented, we can actually do this.  We have a members section, and a member’s roster.  Now I’ll be honest, it’s a bit of a hard habit to form, and my memory is so poor that instead of evenly dividing up the church members, I’ve found it easier to just equate letters of the alphabet with days of the month (1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc.).  But even though that might not be the most balanced way to do it, it’s something.

Maybe you’re already a prayer warrior of the first order and you’re doing this already.  God bless you.  But if you’re like me, and you needed a little nudge and a little help to get this going…well, here’s your chance.  Now, it might be a good idea to review a few things about prayer before you rush off, but God knows that we probably don’t pray enough.  And as part of that, we probably don’t pray for each other enough.  Scripture speaks of prayer in the context of the “one another” commands, which means that it is supposed to be happening in the context of the local church.  Once upon a time this wouldn’t have mattered much to me, but these days, having fellow believers pray for me is a powerful argument for why membership is important.  (And yes, there are others as well).

Anyhow, that’s all I had to say.  I realize that this may not have been what you expected when you clicked over today, but I hope that you’ll consider the merit of it.  And regardless of your process, your procedure, and/or your system, I sincerely hope that you make time to daily pray for your brothers and sisters in the church.

ps. And if you haven’t gotten your photo taken for the membership roster yet, I hope that you do so soon, because until then quite a few of my prayers start with “Well, LORD, you know who this person is…”

Pro Rege