The original letter in pdf format is available to download.

Are you missing out?

Alongside the joys of keeping up with friends and family on Facebook, it’s increasingly acknowledged that it (and other social media) can make us deeply miserable! It’s not just the pressure of seeing the carefully curated presentation of other people’s “wonderful lives”, but what has been termed “FOMO”: the “fear of missing out”.

FOMO can be toxically debilitating, losing us the ability to enjoy what we already have and experience and simply to long for what others have and get to do.

But perhaps there are parts of life where a little bit more FOMO might actually be a good thing? What, for instance, if there really was something we were missing out on, that should be ours? What if that something was genuinely precious and potentially life-changing? Shouldn’t we drop everything to grab hold of it?

Prayer: Connection with God

The Christian conviction and experience is that prayer, the expression of relationship with the God we know in Jesus, is so often precisely that under-used gift, a little-tasted joy and virtually unexplored adventure for many of us. There may be nothing simpler than prayer (being “just” conversation and connection), but there’s also nothing richer to discover over a lifetime.

Prayer is the gift we’ll be exploring this term in All Souls in our Sunday sermons. We’ll be hearing Bible prayers and seeing how God gives us this astonishing gift of responding personally to his love for us in Jesus.

Becoming Pray-ers

It would, of course, be ridiculous to talk about prayer and then not to practice it! So there will be many ways to be engaged in it ourselves:

  • On Sundays, as well as the “Connecting with God” sermon series, we’ll also see a fresh focus on prayer led from the front, as well as a new team of people offering one-to-one prayer after each service.
  • I’m delighted to say that Debbie Braun and Debbie Cryan have agreed to take on roles as “Prayer Champions” – helping to lead our teams for Prayer Ministry and Sunday Service Prayers respectively.
  • During the week, we will be reviewing and linking to resources to help build up our own lives of prayer – books, podcasts, apps and videos that encourage us not to miss out on walking through each week making connection with Jesus.
  • Life Groups this term, beginning in the second week of October, will also have a prayer theme – from creative Journaling to Bible Studies, from exploring our role as parents to opening up some of the challenges of prayer.
  • One of the things we most often ask God for is to make us, or someone else, better when unwell, so we’re devoting an evening (on October 4th) to a “Healing Service”, with teaching, worship and prayer ministry.

May prayer be increasingly the hallmark of our life together and personally in All Souls as we respond to God’s love for us in Jesus and by the Spirit.