Saturday 20 October 2007

Simeon Centre.

I was privileged to attend the launch of the Simeon centre for prayer and spiritual life on Wednesday. This is an amazing venture; one that I think has the potential to be a rich and valuable resource both for the church and for the wider world. The Centre’s director, Adrian Chatfield, gave a fantastic inaugural address which sets out the aims of the centre and I recommend taking a look at it. The text and audio are online at http://www.ridley.cam.ac.uk/scnews.html

Its funny isn’t it how sometimes when something comes along you think why has someone not thought of this before? Prayer is so central to all we are and do as Christians and yet it’s something that is on the whole not well resourced or supported. Like money and politics, prayer is something that rarely gets talked about in polite company. This leads to what I believe is an all to common situation, that we feel totally inadequate in our own prayer lives and at the same time think that everyone else has the most amazingly rich and fruitful prayer life.
This has been really highlighted to me in the last few months. When filling in the application form for vicar training there was a question that said “Describe your pattern of individual and corporate prayer” followed by a nice big box that indicated quite clearly that not only were you supposed to have an established pattern but that it was to be a pretty extensive one! More than any other this was the question that my friends were interested in my answer to, it was as if they hoped I had the magic solution. Similarly when I came to college we had a session on prayer and we were encouraged to share our prayer experiences. Interestingly we all had hang ups and areas where we thought we weren’t doing it well enough. So if you are struggling with prayer please feel encouraged that whatever you feel like there is every chance that others around you feel the same. So please join with us in praying for the Simeon centre, that it may become a real source of hope and encouragement to ordinary people like you and me…

Heavenly Father
we give to you the life and work
of The Simeon Centre.
We pray that, by the guiding
of your Holy Spirit
it may become a channel
of your grace,
stirring up the desire to pray,
encouraging, sustaining
and refreshing
all who come to deepen
their love for you
and to follow your Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We never had "the session on prayer" in my training, but I'm sure it would have been just like yours if we had... (did you tell them about The Grid?). You're quite right about the whole guilt and inadequacy thing. Surely that wasn't what Jesus had in mind when he taught the Lord's Prayer.
On a more frivolous note, tell us about the man who fell into the Cam this afternoon...

Anonymous said...

Have you read anything from the "Power of a Praying..." series? I read "Wife" and "Parent" this summer and at the time found them inspiring - although they're the sort of thing you think back on and wonder if it only really works if you're a fully paid-up pentecostal...