About Guided Prayer
Why Guided Prayer?
Guided prayers are resources that you can use in every season of life to reconnect and restore union with God. These tools are specifically designed to focus our hearts and minds on intentional time with our Heavenly Father. As we have studied the spiritual disciplines, Early Church texts, and Christianity’s Jewish roots, we have found that guided prayer was recognized as a foundational piece to living an abiding life with God throughout our days. In short, guided prayer has been present throughout the lifespan of the Church and is very much alive today.
As followers of Christ, we belong to an ancient tradition, a long priesthood of believers that meditated on the Word of God day and night and responded to it in prayer as they abided in the Way of Jesus. Guided prayers are not scripts to recite each day, but building blocks meant to help you enter into times of worship and rest with the Father—every day of the year.
So if you’re looking for a deeper way to connect with Jesus and long to better recognize His living presence in your life, then we strongly recommend giving guided prayer an earnest try. The language may not be the most natural to you at first and it may feel too “liturgical” if you’re coming from Evangelical roots like us. But we promise you, there is so much life to be found in the intentionality of structured prayer that highlights the freedom we have in Christ to live as He perfectly modeled for us. The goal is simply to show up each day at the feet of Jesus so that we can abide with Him and become more like Him.
Intentional practice of guided prayer not only helps us keep our hearts and minds on the Father, but it also helps us surrender more of our days to Him, yielding more and more of our lives to the Holy Spirit to move and work in us as He guides us, hand-in-hand, in living an abiding life with Jesus.
Where do I start?
The best first step is beginning with the eGuides found under Spiritual Formation 101. Here, you’ll find three resources:
1) What is the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Tracing God’s Love from the Garden to Eternity
3) How Did the Early Church Live? Walking in the Footsteps of Those Who Followed Christ
These resources are a great place to start, even if you’re familiar with guided prayer or abiding in the Way of Jesus. It’s important to have a foundational knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that we remind ourselves of regularly and are prepared to share with the world; it’s just as imperative to live out our faith as followers of Jesus like the apostles and Early Church did nearly two millennia ago. In light of the stark divisions we see today within the Church, it’s so crucial that we return to practicing our faith as the first generation of believers did because these were the women and men taught by Jesus, Himself, and His apostles who walked with Him. This will bring about unity in Christ—just as Jesus prayed in His High Priestly Prayer in John 17—as well as generational change that will bring about restoration, healing, and revival to any community where the hands and feet of Christ are present (just as if He were there, Himself!).
An Overview of Daily Guided Prayers
Here, you’ll find a few helpful eGuides to use on a regular basis, including:
1) The Eucharistic Thanksgiving: Adoring the Miraculous Presence of Jesus Each Day — This is an eGuide for practicing Holy Communion at home daily with your family or on your own. Since the time of Jesus walking this earth in the very first century A.D., the holy sacrament of the Eucharist (meaning thanksgiving in Koine Greek) or Communion, has been an irreplaceable part of the life of those walking with Him.
Today, there are many disagreements and denominational divisions over what this beautiful act of worship is meant to be—is it simply an act of remembrance or is Christ really present body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Eucharist? Is it something that should be practiced every Sunday? Once a month? Once a year? The debates go on.
There are many scholarly arguments that are much better researched and posed more eloquently than anything that we could articulate, so rather than throwing in our opinion, we start this eGuide simply with the words of Jesus and some accounts from Scripture so they can speak for themselves.
2) Orders for Daily Worship — The Orders for Daily Worship are guided prayers that you can use throughout your days, weeks, months, and years to reconnect with God. These guided prayers are specifically designed to reflect the Lord’s Prayer, guiding readers through times of adoration, confession, intercession and petition, gratitude, and moments of Scripture meditation. With the help of this eGuide, you will find a new yet familiar richness in your worship throughout the day that is rooted in some of the earliest practices of those who followed Jesus and meditated on His Word day and night.
3) Sabbath Orders for Worship — This eGuide follows the same structure as the Orders for Daily Worship but are totally structured around the spiritual discipline of Sabbath rest. In addition to a unique take on these guided times of worship and prayer, you’ll also find a quick-start guide on how to go about practicing a weekly Sabbath. Dedicating an entire day to intentional rest, worship, and delight in Jesus is a pillar for our walks with God.
An Overview of Holiday Guided Prayers
Does your soul light up at the thought of picking out the perfect pumpkin from the patch this fall? Do dreams of softly driven snow and the quiet glow of Christmas lights warm your soul? Do Easter lilies and the newness of spring excite you for the season ahead, reminding you that renewal and revival are on the horizon?
This admiration of living in seasonal rhythms is in our hearts because it’s been thoughtfully planted there by God. Why is it, then, that these sacred holiday seasons feel so fleeting in the face of commercialism and busyness? What if there was a way to take them back and live in the full richness of what they were supposed to be? Holiday Guided Prayers come around this very idea, providing clarity and intentional formation around the Christmas Season, Epiphany, Holy Week, Ascension Day, Pentecost, and Thanksgiving. With the help of these eGuides, you will find a new yet familiar richness in your celebration of these holidays helping to ground your soul and worship of God during these special times of the year.
Included are:
1) Christmas Season Orders for Worship: From Advent Eve to Epiphany
2) The Jesse Tree Tradition: Tracing God’s Love from the Garden to the Manger
3) Easter Season Orders for Worship: From Palm Sunday to Pentecost
4) Thanksgiving Orders for Worship: A Day of Remembrance and Gratitude
An Overview of Home Church & Small Group Resources
Have you ever wondered about the rhythms that Jesus and the Early Church abided in millennia ago? Have you ever desired to draw closer to God by incorporating more spiritual disciplines into your life but you didn’t know where to start? The aspects of spiritual formation are woven all throughout Scripture, but how do we realistically and consistently incorporate them into our lives within our modern-day context?
In this section, you’ll find:
1) Prayers of Dedication and Consecration: Guided Prayers for a New Home or Starting a Home Church
2) Home Church Liturgy for Worship: Morning Edition
3) Home Church Liturgy for Worship: Evening Edition
These specific resources provide a toolkit for beginning a home church or small group and the practical steps to implement the very same disciplines that Jesus lived out while He walked this earth. With the help of these eGuides, you can begin to incorporate these beautiful, formative practices into your walk with God as you draw closer to Him and become more like Jesus, ultimately reuniting you to a heritage of believers that spans thousands of generations. These resources provide a great foundation for both new believers and those who have been walking with God for years. We don’t want to walk out our faith alone. It’s important to be rooted in a community of believers who love Jesus and encourage one another to be His hands and feet; the Body of Christ is meant to work in unity!
An Overview of More Guided Prayers & Resources
Finally, we wanted to provide a catch-all section that includes more specific, situational guided prayers. Maybe these are based on certain passages of Scripture or topics that are relevant to our walks with Jesus. Here, you’ll also find a narrative introduction to the Orders for Worship—an original selection of writing authored by Kait which previously served as the first part of the eBook Hand-In-Hand: Rediscovering an Abiding Life in Jesus.
So far, you’ll be able to find:
1) Hand-in-Hand: A Narrative Introduction to the Orders for Worship
2) Praying Through An Abiding Life: A Scripture-Based Prayer to Help Us Live More Like Jesus
3) Sweet Hour of Prayer: Inspired by the Teachings of the Didache
4) Prayers of the Beloved: 10 Days of Guided Prayer
5) More to come… Check back regularly or sign-up for our monthly newsletter below!