Two years ago at Youthworks we started pursuing a strategy to build prayer support for children and young people in church and school based ministries across the Diocese. The strategy was in pursuit of the goal to strengthen the connections between ministries in schools with ministries in churches.

I distinctly remember when we came up with the idea. It was one of those moments where I was confident that we were pursuing the right things. Here was a strategy that wasn't going to make any money and wasn't focusing on what we could do to advance this goal.  Instead, like the first and foundational strategy of the Diocesan mission, it was a strategy grounded in the conviction that God is at work to build his church.

Two years on we haven't achieved the strategy. Our plan had been to connect the prayer centres in Mothers' Union and Anglican Retirement Villages with the children's ministry programs in local churches across the Diocese. The hope was that an MU group would have a list of names of the children involved in the kids club at a local church. The leaders and children would know that a group of women, sisters in Christ were pleading for them before God's throne.

In the end the legitimate concerns for Safe Ministry put an end to the plan"”we could only use first names for the children and the Region for the church location. It seemed to become so generic that we may as well have just made up lists of children's names instead! Perhaps it was all too elaborate a scheme?

Here are my thoughts for a new scheme.

Perhaps we go back to the fundamental principle of children's ministry: that the primary responsibility for the spiritual nurture of children belongs to their parents.

So instead of relying on the church to arrange for people to pray for the children involved in church parents, the church should encourage and enable parents to ask others to pray for their own children.

Perhaps churches could print a bookmark with a space for a photo or a first name and a reminder to pray and give them to all the parents in the church. The parents' job is to personalise the bookmark and give it to a trusted Christian friend to put in their Bible as a reminder to pray.

And I wonder whether this would even work for the parents of children in our programs who don't themselves come to church. There's no problem sending a note home to parents letting them know that as a church we want to encourage parents to have others praying for their children. It would probably be helpful to outline the sort of things that people will be praying for; mentioning social and physical concerns as well as spiritual ones. Many non-church goers will know someone who's a Christian - perhaps a neighbour, work colleague or relative; maybe they'll pass the prayer bookmark on to them? And for those who don't know anyone they could ask to pray, perhaps they could ask the leaders of the children's ministry to find someone in the church who would take on that responsibility.

I'm still convinced that getting people to pray for the children in our school and church ministries is a good strategy to pursue. 

Do you think this could be an effective way to achieve it?