Five ideas for churches to try during Thy Kingdom Come 2024

There’s still plenty of time for your church to take part in this year’s Thy Kingdom Come between 9 and 19 May. It’s a global ecumenical prayer movement that invites Christians around the world to pray for more people to come to know Jesus. What started in 2016 as an invitation from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to the Church of England has grown into an international and ecumenical call to prayer.

Here are 5 simple ideas to help your church get involved:

Prayer stations

Consider setting up prayer stations around your church building, or outside in the church grounds. Prayer stations can help people to pray in a variety of ways – with a different focus at each station.

Continuous prayer

Why not organise a time of continuous prayer for your church/group of churches? This could be 24/1 24/7 or 24/10. If you don’t have enough people to cover 24 hours in prayer, perhaps join forces with a neighbouring church? This can be a great opportunity to build relationships with other local churches. You could even collaborate with a church in a different part of the world, in a different time zone, so all times of day are covered! Here are some tips, including from 24-7 Prayer.

Pray for 5

Praying for 5 friends, family members or colleagues to encounter the life-transforming love of Christ, is at the heart of Thy Kingdom Come. As a church, why not buy some wrist bands or cut pieces of string, and encourage each person to tie 5 knots as a reminder to pray for their 5 during the 11 days? Or perhaps, you could set aside time in your church service to pray this way? There are lots of creative ideas which can be found here.

Prayer walking/pilgrimage

Perhaps your church could create a prayer map of the local area and highlight specific places of interest to pray for, such as schools, hospitals, town centres. Or perhaps you could commit to praying for every road in your neighbourhood and mark them off as you walk and pray for them? Hope For Every Home has a great prayer walking guide that you can download.

Creative prayer outreach ideas

Why not combine a prayer event with a community fun day suitable for all the family? You could make it fun for small children by using Cheeky Pandas resources to set up a trail in the churchyard or community garden, with activities, crafts, stories and songs.

Or perhaps your church could try ‘Say One For Me’ and offer prayer for people in the local town centre.

Or why not deliver ‘prayer postcards’ to homes in the neighbourhood and encourage people to send in their prayer requests, with an invitation to come to church, should they wish to?

Or perhaps you could open the church building at specific times during the day, for people to come in, pray, reflect or explore?