Prayer, Visiting, and Healing Ministry
Here you’ll find information about our prayer ministry, and the care available for our congregation and community. Please click the buttons below to navigate the page.
Prayer & Home Visits
Prayer is an important part of our Christian life. In prayer, we offer our joys, thanksgivings, concerns, and pains to God, though Jesus Christ. In prayer, we speak and listen to God, inviting him to help us in whatever situations we find ourselves in, and bring before him those whom we love.
By praying, our hearts become more and more like God’s heart, and we listen for his voice and look for his presence in our lives.
You don’t need to do anything special to pray. All you have to do is direct your mind towards God. Speak out loud or pray in your heart, alone or with other people. Offer to God all that’s on your mind, good and bad.
If you would like some resources to help with prayer, click here.
If you’d like a member of clergy, or our lay pastoral minister, to visit you at home to chat and pray with you, please do contact us.
Praying at St John's
You are very welcome to come to St John’s to pray.
You can join us for a 45-minute service of Morning Prayer on Mondays and Wednesdays, at 9 a.m., and our Parish Eucharist on Sundays at 10:30 a.m.
We have a prayer corner in church where you can light a candle as part of your prayer. We also offer prayer cards that you can take away with you, and prayers and reflections for different times of the year.
We also have a prayer requests box that you can leave written – named or anonymous – prayer requests, and our clergy team will offer those requests in prayer at our services of Morning Prayer.
Ministries of Healing & Reconciliation
Two of the key ministries of the Christian Church are the ministries of healing, and reconciliation.
What do we mean by a ministry of healing? From time to time in our lives, we all go through some kind of pain. This could be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. God invites us to offer all of these pains to him in prayer, and when we do, we allow our pain to be transformed by God. Sometimes that involves physical healing, and sometimes it involves a coming to terms with our suffering. Jesus knows what it’s like to hurt; he endured pain and even death at the Crucifixion. We know that God is present with us in our suffering – that even in the darkest times of our lives, God shines with a light that the darkness cannot overcome. When we offer our pain to God, we ask God to help us, those who care for us, and also for God to transform our pain, that the light of God might shine more brightly in and through us.
When we sin, we find ourselves suffering from the guilt and shame of knowing that we have done wrong, and hurt ourselves and others. The Church offers a ministry of reconciliation, sometimes called confession, in which we acknowledge and name our sins before God, and ask for God’s absolution and forgiveness. This is a private ministry of prayer between a person and a priest, and what is said to the priest is never spoken about elsewhere. In confession, we lay aside our guilt and shame as God forgives us, and the priest absolves us of our sins.
