On Saturday 7th Feb Urban Saints descended on the Oasis Café for their annual prayer breakfast. Over 30 people joined us for breakfast and a time of worship and prayer together.
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We opened our meeting together with a look again at Philippians 4:4-9 which highlighted 3 elements to our prayer time together:-
1. Rejoice always (vs4) – we took time to look back over the last year and give thanks for what God has been doing in groups, camps, events and also give thanks for the army of volunteers that make it all happen on a weekly basis.
2. Don’t be anxious (vs6) – we recalled struggles of the last year whether with leadership issues or financial fears as an organisation and presented these thoughts and requests before the Lord, praying the peace that passes all understanding would guard our hearts and minds.
3. Our witness (vs8,9) – we prayed that God would enable us as an organisation and as groups to model this peace, that we would put it into practice and that others would be drawn onto Christ, and that his Kingdom would be extended through our ministry.
After some reflections on the scriptures we took this opportunity to launch ‘Grow’ our new group centric fundraising initiative. This project is based around the parable of the talents and we have given each group £10 each and the challenge is to make this £10 grow between now and 30th May when we will get together for an evening of celebration and hopefully and prayerfully all money raised will be handed in (all money raised will be put straight back in to Urban Saints to allow us to grow and develop).
From this I took an opportunity to outline the vision for the future with regards to Ireland and again it could be summed up with the word Growth. There are a number of key areas we prayed into in terms of growth – in number of groups throughout the whole Island, volunteers, profile, partnerships with churches and organisation and finally and most importantly growth in God’s kingdom.
We followed this with a period of time focusing specifically on our groups and praying for there individual needs. It was great to have groups from the White City, Desertcreate and Gilnahirk come along and share a bit about their ministries and allowed us time to pray for their specific needs. Comments afterwards suggest that most really enjoyed hearing what’s going on in other groups and found it really helpful.
As we are heading towards House party and camp season we heard from Andrew McManus in detail about what has been going on in the last year and points for prayer this year. There is a lot we need to thank God for as this element to our programme has been pivotal in so many young people’s lives. As well as this we prayed into developments in Crusoe and future plans as we look to send young people across the world to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
We closed our time together with a period of worship. I thank God for this vital event in our calendar and pray that it will continue to be a great resource and blessing to our groups, young people and volunteers in the year ahead.
Urban Saints is the operating name of The Crusaders' Union, a company limited by guarantee and registered in England & Wales, company number 07771037, charity number 1144923, and in Scotland, charity number SCO39313.
