Bust Out Those Neighborhood Maps!

I know we’re now in the Share portion of the 1more Friend series, but prayer is the foundation of our caring and sharing, and is a primary way we can be alert to opportunities to relate to our neighbors. Recently the Church in East Madison has started doing two things I want to share with you.

First, in our lifeGroup times, we ask each other this question as a check-in: What have you been praying for? Since we’ve done this a little bit already, I can personally highly recommend it. Rather than asking how your week was, or what you’ve been up to, try asking this question sometime, because it leads to deeper sharing of what’s on your heart. Sharing the answer to this question invites another person into your cares and concerns, and allows you to pray for each other.

The next thing we’ve started doing is prayer-walking as a church group, in the neighborhood we are meeting in. Have you done a neighborhood prayer-walk with someone from your lifeGroup who actually lives in the neighborhood? It really changes a prayer-walk when someone in the group knows the people you are praying for and some specific ways to pray for them. Because of that, we’ve started making the neighborhood maps that the Stranges introduced to the church a few years back. So now when we split up into smaller groups that wouldn’t necessarily contain someone who lives in the neighborhood, we can still prayer-walk with a map that gives the names of the people in the houses that we encounter, and sometimes a specific way we can pray for them. This is one way we’re trying to be attentive to our neighbors and alert to what’s going on in their lives.

Do you have a neighborhood map, labeled with the names of your neighbors and how you can pray for them?

If so, have you used it for prayer-walking? How did it go?

If you don’t yet have one, would you consider making one this week?