We’ve hearing some exciting stories from the growing number of prayer rooms/spaces in schools, both primary and secondary. The Holy Spirit seems to be up to something… and we’re feeling the call/pull to join in.

One of the first stories we heard was from a prayer room in a URC church in Ryton, near Gateshead. The church was next to a large comprehensive school, and during their 24-7 week, whole classes were visiting the prayer room to learn about ‘Christian prayer’ and to experience the prayer room. Tom, the vicar who organised the prayer week, was surprised to find 20 pairs of shoes piled in the entrance to the prayer room one lunchtime… 20 mostly unchurched students had come for a visit, and many were writing prayers on Post-it notes or asking their Christian friends about prayer and faith. The following week, one of Tom’s friends – a History teacher in the school – abandoned her year 10 lesson plan to answer the barrage of questions that her class were asking about knowing God.

Around the same time, in Chichester, some 24-7 ers were asked to organise a kind of ‘prayer room taster experience’ as part of a R.S. day in a C of E comprehensive. They set up a wonderfully creative prayer space in one of the classrooms, with simple interactive prayer stations, and invited the students to come and explore. They split classes in half – one group exploring the prayer room for half the lesson, while one of them taught the other half of the class in another classroom – and then swapped over.

And since then, we’ve discovered that many others have run whole week-long prayer spaces in schools… in Gloucester, Joe and a team of friends hosted a prayer room in a struggling school where 50% of the students were considered to be below the poverty line. Joe’s reports of the positive responses that some students (and almost all of the teachers) showed towards the prayer room are amazing.

In Colchester, Tim, an experienced CYO youth/schools worker and friend of the Colchester Boiler Room community, began to experiment with taking the prayer room idea into schools. It developed quickly into a popular project, Sanctum – sacred space in schools. Tim and the Sanctum team designed a series of creative/reflective prayer stations that take participants on a bit of a spiritual journey, whatever their starting point. In the past year they’ve run at least four prayer rooms in schools – one in a 2700-student sixth form college!

Phil and others in Romford ‘borrowed’ Tim’s prayer station ideas for a prayer room they’d been invited to run in a local all-girls secondary school. The response from the students was overwhelming… some began to weep as they ‘felt God’s presence’. One sixth form girl who had been adamant about “not being religious” wrote this feedback at the end of the week; “I have to be honest and say I never know what I believed in God, if I did or not, but I feel a enlightenment at acceptance in myself. It’s nice to feel that there will always be someone to turn to, always offering unconditional love.” Since that first prayer room, the team in Romford have run two further prayer rooms in secondary schools, and are planning for more in the coming year.

A Surrey based project, Orison has been running creative prayer spaces in schools for the past couple of years, both primary and secondary. They’ve developed some beautiful resources, videos and publicity, and are regularly being invited into more schools.

Here’s a few of the things that students have said after experiencing a prayer room in their school;
“I love the prayer room, because it gives me a chance to connect with God, unlike home.”
“I’ve never seen prayer displayed or experienced like this before. It’s made me realise how many different ways prayer can be appreciated. it’s opened up religion into my life again. Thank you!”
“It has really helped me understand more about God and how to pray and how to express my feelings in all different ways!”

“It has helped me to realise that I don’t have to be in church to worship God. It has helped me to be calm and silent. I don’t have to be loud to tell God that I am praying. Because he knows that I am communicating with him. I know that he loves me now matter what I look like, no matter what I do. Well done. It has changed my emotionally well being and physically as well. Thank you 24-7 prayer.”

Our vision, over the coming year, is to see 100 prayer spaces in schools all over the UK. And the following year, who knows… 1000? Maybe 10000?

And why not? What if this thing really takes off? A lot of the people we’ve spoken with already seem to think that it could spread very quickly. The creation of a prayer space, a ‘sacred space’ in school, seems to have caught a lot of people’s imagination… which is a great place to start.

Getting Practical

You can run a prayer space in schools that’s just open during break times and lunch times, or one that welcomes R.S. (or other?) classes in during lesson-time for a more structured prayer room experience. It doesn’t have to be open 24 hours. Essentially a prayer room in a school is a creative space, that allows pupils to engage with God/spirituality. You can structure the prayer stations so that they run in a particular order, or open it up for students to explore wherever they want to. You can go all hi-tech (and high-budget!) with MP3-players and laptops and visual projections, or you can make it work with Post-it notes, Christmas lights and torn-up bits of cardboard. You can run a prayer space like this in a primary or secondary school, or even a sixth form college – we’ve tried all of the above and they work!

If you’d like to run prayer spaces in schools, please get in touch. We have a resource pack full of vision, prayer station ideas, different ways to run a prayer space in schools, practical things to consider, plus a bunch of extraordinary stories… of confession and forgiveness, new hope, physical healings – all from prayer rooms in schools.

If you’ve already been running prayer spaces in schools in some way, shape or form, we’d love to talk with you, learn from you, conspire with you. We’re trying to help people connect up all over the UK, so that we can support and encourage one another more locally. And we’d love to hear your stories, so that we can encourage others with them!

The Holy Spirit is definitely up to something within schools in the UK… and we really want to encourage you to think and pray about setting up a prayer room in school where you are. Talk with your friends, your church… And we can help you get started…
Email us on: schools@24-7prayer.com for more information.