Concordia Lutheran Church in Kirkwood, MO will hand out 1,000 Thanksgiving meals on November 20th. This is an annual tradition of the congregation, as they seek to serve the families in their community. Each meal is designed to feed a family of five; a modern-day “feeding of the 5,000”. Prayer has always been an important part of this community service. Staff and members lift up this outreach in prayer as the day draws closer and on the day itself, members of the church will ask the people driving onto the church, “How can we pray for you?”
In the past, these prayer requests were recorded on prayer cards, prayed for and then set aside.
This year, Concordia will use PrayerCares to gather the prayer requests and make them available to the Prayer Partners and ministry leaders in the church to access 24/7, pray for and choose who and how they want to reach out with mercy, turning prayer into care. Prayer Partners will be able to enter their care notes in Concordia’s PrayerCares app so that all the members can see the follow up which is being done and best know how to help those who are taking lead in following up.
In addition to using PrayerCares to gather the prayer requests on November 20th. The members of Concordia will invite those coming onto their church to download PrayerCares for themselves; this way in the future these families will be able to enter their own prayer requests into a local church’s prayer ministry app.
After the prayers are gathered, the leadership of Concordia hopes to sit down and analyze the nature of the prayer requests from these 1,000 families in their community. It is believed that by looking at what people are asking the Church to pray for that Concordia will be better informed about what ministry those who live closest to the church actually want. In this way, the ministry of Concordia is prayer based not program-based.
Yesterday I had the blessing of spending two hours with some of the staff at Concordia (picture above) sharing PrayerCares training and just talking through how this ministry outreach would happen. Please pray for Concordia Lutheran Church and their prayer ministry which will feed thousands; not just with meals but with the life-giving Word of God.
