The Lord’s Prayer for your city

These prayer studies began as a workshop on Praying for Canberra in 2021. They have been adapted for you to contextualise for your city. If you don’t live in a metropolitan area, I hope that this will still be useful for you – you could pray it for your town, region, local government area, or whatever seems to you a suitable group of people to pray for.

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There are two ‘introductory’ sessions that take you through how the New Testament talks about praying for our wider social settings, and how and why the Lord’s Prayer gives us a framework for praying for and with those around us (especially holding in prayer those who don’t know God yet). These are followed by six reflections and prayer points on the Lord’s Prayer.

Each of the introductory sessions has been structured to take around an hour (but feel free to take longer!). Leaders notes for these sessions are found in italics.

For each petition of the Lord’s Prayer, you might spend 10 to 15 minutes reflecting on the material as a group, and then (at least) 10 to 15 minutes praying together using the bullet points provided as a guide. As you work through the petitions, please take at least as much time to pray as you do in discussion. The whole point of this material is to draw us into prayer together with God!

You might use the material over five meetings together:

1. background session 1
2. background session 2
3. petitions 1 and 2
4. petitions 3 and 4
5. petitions 5 and 6.

Or you might like to skip the background sessions and just get on with prayer. Or you might spend an evening praying through each of the petitions. In other words, use this material however you like!

If your group are struggling to think of things to pray for, you might find these resources helpful:

• Helen Thorne and Pete Nicholas, 5 Things to Pray for Your City
• Global Faith and Work Initiative, Prayers for Work

Finally, the Bible Study ‘Mission-shaped prayer’ (The Lutheran, August 2023) has some concepts that this study series builds upon. You might find it helpful to read and reflect on that study as part of this series. It can be accessed at www.staging.lca.org.au/dwelling-in-gods-word-mission-shaped-prayer

I pray that these resources will be a blessing to you and your city!

Jacob Traeger leads a church plant in Canberra’s Molonglo Valley and serves as Mission Facilitator at the Immanuel Woden Valley sending church.