Praying for each other during the week

Please see the important note at the bottom of this page.

I've been thinking of a way we can keep up with prayer requests during the week, and encourage one another to join in prayer requests.

One way would be to just add comments to the prayer article each time it's posted ... another way is twitter.

Twitter is basically a way that people keep track of each other - what they're doing, thoughts, some conversations. What's typical in twitter, though, is people having 90 people they are "following" - so they get lots and lots and lots of updates.

I'd like something we can use that's really concentrated just on our prayer requests.

Would you like to give this a run? Go to http://www.twitter.com

Make an account that is for prayer only. If you already have an account, make a new one (well, you don't have too - you can get your feet wet by just "following" us if you want) - or the page of your current account won't just be our prayers, but all the other stuff too. Mine is called WilfriedPrays ... something like that might work for you.

What we really want to avoid is ... that we're "talking to everyone and no one" - what is sometimes said of twitterers. Here ... we are praying for each other ... and with each other ... audience is just us, and were not distracted by zillions of others.

If you don't want the whole internet to be able to see your prayer requests, be sure that when you sign up, you select "protect my updates."

Then ... go to http://www.twitter.com/WilfriedPrays
Click on "follow." I'll approve your request ... and then ask if I can follow you as well. You will get my prayer requests ... I'll get yours. All the people you allow to "follow" you will be able to see your "updates" - your prayer requests, or the prayers you type for other people while you pray for them.

Other people to add immediately:
http://twitter.com/AblePrays
http://twitter.com/HelenePrays
I'll "twitter along" people as they add themselves, so I'll be informing everyone to add you so they can pray for you.

Some extra info: Twitter only allows you to type 140 chars or so in an update. If you want to type a longer prayer than 140 characters when praying for someone ... just put a comment in the prayer thread at the Bible study site. You can link it in your "tweet" (your status update) - go to http://tinyurl.com and create a "tiny" url for the link, and use that url - otherwise the link will probably be too long.

This may or may not work well for us. But we won't know if we don't try! We might also want to just use the comments in the prayer threads ... disadvantage here is that they are "public" - everyone sees them. Big advantage of Twitter is you get your prayers all in one place, so you don't have to go looking for the thread on the site.

When you sign up, consider putting http://anglicanecumenicalbiblestudy.blogspot.com in your profile url so you can get easily back to the bible study site from Twitter, and remember to look at it every now & then & leave comments on the stuff we're reading / we read!

Important note: This will only really work effictively if you have an account that is ONLY for following other people who pray, and ONLY use twitter for that purpose. It won't work if you also sign up other people ... and make "tweets" like others, "I'm having a boring day / I'm back at the office" etc. etc.. The purpose of this is for your twitter account to be a virtual sacred space, a space set apart from prayer - and if you send out promotional tweets, or just about what you are doing, these will also be tweeted out to all the people who are following you in the context of prayer.