Enabling People with Learning Disabilities to be Active in Prayer

As I have written before…I love praying and cannot see how any Christian can live without it. It is important, therefore that we give our Good News Group people every opportunity to actively engage in prayer.

As in any congregation, we have such a mix of people.

Which – of course – is great.

We cannot be sure how people have responded to the Gospel but we can demonstrate God’s love and acceptance through sharing our faith with them…and through they sharing their faith with us.

And so we want to give everyone the chance to pray. To communicate individually or corporately with the Lord God who made us and get to know him better.

One of the things we have tried recently is putting together PRAYER BAGS.

We split into groups and each group has a bag of cards or pebbles with picture symbols on them.  There is a wide variety of subjects – personal, family and friends, community, church, countrywide, world wide. These came from the members themselves, things they have asked us to pray about. Things they talk about. There are also things that we have talked about to help them extend their thoughts outwards into God’s world.

In our groups we say very little. We have a card to remind us what prayer is and sometimes sing a song called ‘Prayer is like a telephone.’  (I will do a post about the songs we sing soon). Then we give everyone in the group the opportunity to choose a card and then place it on a ‘tree’ or in a ‘bowl’.  The person may speak their prayer or they may just put their picture in the bowl or on the tree. We are trying to encourage everyone, especially those who don’t use words, to take an ACTIVE role in prayer.

So far everyone has been very positive about this activity.  Everyone can join in at the level they understand.  My greatest prayer is that the Lord hears each and every murmur and that they Holy Spirit will do what he promised…and intervene with groans that words cannot express.

We are looking forward to developing our prayer lives in other ways too. I have some ideas to try out next term and would love to hear any ideas from you too.

#accessibility #Christianity #inclusivechurch #prayer