Prayer

Prayer is the bedrock of our life as a community. Without talking to and hearing from God in every aspect of our lives our community would be no more than a social club. Through prayer we can know our God more intimately and find out from Him how he wants us to go about things. Prayer enables God to turn us into a community with Him at the centre rather than ourselves. Which in turn allows his power, insight, forgiveness and holiness to be the driving forces behind everything that we set our hands to.

Prayer begins in the quiet place of the soul when we are alone with God, but it also sparks out of our time together: we often ask God to come through for us and the city and the nation when we’re together as a group. We ask him to change us to be more like Him, and to change our society so that His justice, peace and healing would come to characterise the brokenness and hurt around us. Here are some of the ways we go about it!

• Prayer together forms part of our weekly Sunday gatherings, often with someone from the community bringing an issue of concern to our attention, to fuel our prayer.  Also, there is often a group of people who pray before our Sunday gatherings.

• A Sunday gathering may include as part of a series a string of meditations such as at easter or Christams, using images, scripture relextion and poetry.  Click here for a sample of Meditations.

• We also encourage prayer within the small groups in CCE: perhaps prayer for each other, prayer for the church, or prayer for wider issues in our nation or around the world.

• There is a dedicated prayer room in the Kings Hall where members of the church can come and pray during office hours. There are inspirational scriptures and pictures and requests plastered all over the walls.  Our links with Wellsprings also provide a large, dedicated prayer room, that many member of CCE utilise.

• Roughly once a year, we designate a week of prayer, to focus us on our prayer individually, for the church, and for Edinburgh.

• Retreats may play a  stirring and sometimes surprising role in informing our view on our lives and also God himself.  Roughly every quarter we run a retreat, frequently at the Bield Retreat Centre near Perth, which ranges form led and themed to mereey offering a date and space for personal removed reflection.  A retreat in daily life was run during Advent in 2008 with retreatants meeting as a group at the start and end of the 6 week period and weekly with personal guides whose numbers were added to by the city wide Epiphany Group http://www.epiphanygroup.org.uk/.

• Finally, informal prayer seems to happen regularly in the church.  Friends, in groups of two or three, often get together to meet and pray.