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It’s a spiritual practice as old as time, and remains mysterious, sacred and individual.
Prayer “is our lifeline to God,” the Rev. Neal Mathias recently wrote to parishioners in the First Presbyterian Church newsletter.
Strengthening that lifeline is the focus of a national prayer conference set for Columbia June 11-13.
“Empowered 2008: Seeking Christ’s Glory ... with Passion” is the eighth annual convention of the Indiana-based Church Prayer Leaders Network. The conference will be hosted by Shandon Baptist Church on Forest Drive.
“My main heart for this is the local church,” network president Jonathan Graf told about 300 church leaders who gathered at the Capital City Club recently to learn about the conference. “We want (parishioners) to become vibrant, vital prayer people.”
Graf has served as a consultant to Shandon’s prayer ministry, which operates a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week prayer room, and the Indiana prayer network is well-known to the congregation, said the Rev. Jerry Long, Shandon’s minister of evangelism.
“We would not have agreed to host it if we didn’t have confidence” in the leadership, he said.
While the conference is expected to draw more than 600 paying participants, Long said the nightly worship and prayer events may draw upwards of 1,200. Those nightly services, led by Shandon’s praise team, are free and open to the public.
The conference will offer 30 worship sessions and several mini-conferences, including one led by Graf on “Learning to Pray with Faith and Purpose.”
Other speakers include Jackson Senyonga, founder and senior pastor of Christian Life Church in Kampala, Uganda; the Rev. David Butts, president of Harvest Prayer Ministries; Daniel Henderson, author and president of Strategic Renewal International; and Dana Olsen, director of Pray First, a ministry that provides prayer weekends and encouragement to churches who are seeking to become houses of prayer.
“Based on the efforts to get the word out by our local arrangements committee, we expect it to be of diverse faiths and races,” Long said.
Organizers were buoyed by the attendance at the April lunch, which concluded with ministers and lay persons gathering around each table in spoken prayer.
“This is something we have prayed for, for a long time,” said organizer Susan Hogan, who expects the conference to have a two-fold impact.
“One, that it would impact individuals and their individual prayer lives,” she said. “But secondary, the thrust of the conference is to help energize the prayer life of individual churches.”
Hogan is a member of the Greater Columbia Call to Prayer, which meets at Columbia International University once a month to pray for the city and seek to break down denominational and racial lines.
She also plans to be at the Columbia Convention Center Sunday at 3 p.m. for the Global Day of Prayer, an event that draws Christians together around the globe.
Reach Click at (803) 771-8386.
