Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31110 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-15
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

Synopsis
A collection of ideas to help young people to meet God in prayers. It includes innovative new techniques, meditations and rituals borrowed from across the Christian tradition.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful
So ok you are down on the rota to lead the intercessions on Sunday and want to do something different. This is the book for you. Packed with great ideas. Most suitable for all age worship.

A practical book of activities to use and adapt
This is not a book to sit and read; this is a practical book of activities to use and adapt. This book has 64 ideas for activities - to use in prayer - which fan out into many variations. All these ideas have tried and tested by Sue Wallace and others co-ordinating an alternative worship gathering called Visions in York. Most of the ideas are borrowed from across Christian traditions but Sue Wallace and the people at Visions have put their own slant on them.

The aim of this book is to provide resources for people who want to do more in prayer than just talk. And this aim is excellently achieved. The activities in this book involve all our senses: we may listen to readings, look at pictures, touch meaningful items and even in a few of the activities smell and taste some of these items such as fruit or herbs. These activities link in with many Bible passages and can be used in conjunction with Bible readings. Unfortunately, Multi-Sensory Prayer doesn't really include much biblical justification for praying in this way. Although it does comment on it's usefulness in prayer and how people find it stimulating. To be fair such a discussion is probably outside its scope. The best biblical argument I have found for this so far is in Dan Kimball's book The Emerging Church.

I found many ideas to provoke my thinking and challenge the way that I prayed. These ideas sometimes hit at the heart of things that I took for granted. I saw things from new angles. I discovered ideas to try out and experiment with rather than a book that was telling me how to do things. Now, you can just lift ideas piecemeal out of this book but I think that if this is all you do you'll be missing an important element of how this book can be used. Similarly you may be tempted to reject ideas because they contain elements with which you are uncomfortable or because they are just unworkable in your setting. Like we have done, I would suggest that you take elements and adapt them for your purposes and assemble whatever type of prayer time that you want with them: one that suits your own needs and priorities.

Having visited a few `alternative worship' services I can imagine this being a valuable resource for anyone wanting to organise alternative worship gatherings. But I would also point out that for several months now, my wife and I have been working through many of the ideas in this book adapting them for our own prayer times as a couple. If you are looking for something to stimulate your prayer life whether it is in a small group, a church or just, as we have done so far, in your family then I would recommend this book as a great resource to get you started.

Enjoy.

A great resource
This book has an excellent mix of original and inspiring ideas for prayer in the context of small groups, youth groups or church services (or any combination!). There's a good `open-ended' feel to things - as if the material presented here is intended as a starting point for future thought. Well worthwhile!