The Prayer Room
 This week of citywide 24-7 prayer in Southampton is going to run from Orchard Lane Church, which is on Orchard Lane (surprise surprise!), just off East Street in the city centre. Click here for a map.
What is a Prayer Room?
A prayer room is somewhere you can come either on your own or in a group and pray without the usual distractions you might find elsewhere. In fact there are lots of things in a prayer room that help you to pray: music, candles and other prompts to help you concentrate on God. The concept is inspired by the 24-7 prayer movement.
There should be resources in the prayer room (bibles, music, art materials, inspiration for prayer) but feel free to bring stuff down yourself. We just ask that you respect the people allowing us to use the building by tidying up after yourself.
Why Do We Have a Prayer Room?
"A Prayer Room is to the church what the heart is to the body."
(The Praying Church Source Book)
Locating the prayer season in a specific location seems to be one of the keys to the effectiveness of 24-7. Why?
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The Holy Spirit can fill a place as well as a person (Acts 2:2, 16:16). There's often a strong sense of God's presence in such a place of prayer, even experienced by non-Christians.
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Time often goes quicker! Many have reported that 'in the prayer room 1 hour feels like 10 minutes'
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Evangelistically the prayer room is excellent. Non-Christians have often sat in such places to pray, some have said that they can feel God's presence. People who don't want to be preached at still like to be prayed for.
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The prayer-room enables people to pray non-verbally, by posting artwork, poetry and graffiti on the wall. The environment can be artistically designed to stimulate and direct prayer.
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The room provides accountability - a place where people have to turn up, and this ensures a constant flow as one prayer-shift hands the baton onto the next. Visiting the room is like a mini-pilgrimage.
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A shared location provides a strong sense of being part of a community carrying each others' burdens, celebrating the breakthroughs together and ministering to one another. You are more than a link in a prayer chain.
Prayer rooms have been opened in all kinds of weird and wonderful locations:
- a barn in the English countryside
- a skate park in Switzerland
- a bus in the slums of Delhi
- a police station in London
- an office in Tulsa Oklahoma
- the U.S. Naval Academy
- a brewery in Missouri
- in tents
- in student basements
- campus chaplaincies and...
- Oh yes church buildings
"A Prayer Room helps a church look beyond itself, motivating it to unleash prayer power for the unsaved, the community, the nation, the church's missionaries, and the world." (The Praying Church Source Book)
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