It’s always “funny” the questions you get on the road when you’re training people at Learning Communities.

One of the things people hear, sort of on-the-side of things in Learning Communities, is that as a team, we gather every morning from 8:30-9:00 for Morning Prayers. This seems to intrigue a fair number of people because for all the Kingdom work people are doing as a church, it’s amazing to see how few teams actually spend much consistent time praying together. This fact is often illuminated when we talk about how important and meaningful our daily time is together as a team.

So one of the questions I hear, more than almost any other, is “How do you lead morning prayers? What do they look like?” So I figured why not tackle that in a short blog post.

So literally every week day, this is what our team does for prayers together, lasting about 30 minutes:

1. WORSHIP. We’ll spend the first 12-15 minutes of our time worshipping through song together. We have a couple of people who rotate in and lead, so it has a different flavor with each leader. It’s not fancy or produced. Lyrics are put up on a simple blogging website each day so people can pull them up on their smart phone or ipad. (You can see that website by clicking here.)
2. LISTENING. After we sing together, we’ll usually spend a few minutes listening to what God is saying. If there is a verse or passage of scripture that is weighing on someone’s heart that might be of encouragement, they will share it. If there is a sense that someone is getting about the day that could be from the Lord, they share it for the group to weigh. People will pray for pressing matters like sickness, anxiety, opportunities for Kingdom breakthrough, etc. Everyone participates.
3. SCRIPTURES. Our community is on the same daily reading plan through the Moravian Prayer Texts (which you can subscribe to by clicking here). So the community has already read the daily scriptures coming into morning prayers (each day has an OT reading, Psalm reading and NT reading). Then someone from the team will give a 7-10 minute reflection on the reading. Last year, the daily reflection came from the Psalms. The year before that is was the NT reading. This year, we are working through the OT together. If you’re interested in hearing these short daily reflections, you can listen to them here. The person leading this then closes our time with a prayer for the day.
4. HOUSEKEEPING. While we have the whole team there, we ask if there are any specific things about the day we need to know about as a team that we might be unaware of. Sometimes there are and we’ll talk for a few minutes about them, but often there aren’t and then we enter into our work day!

It’s really quite simple. What it really does is ground us in prayer, worship and the scriptures each day, centering our work day in that reality. It serves as a steady drum beat for our community, whether times are hectic and crazy or quiet and slower. But it also allows us to listen, together, to what God is saying to us as a team and what the work of the day and the season is about.