Our Father Who Art in Heaven...

On Wednesday nights in our Student Ministry we are doing a series called DUST- focusing on the saying "May you be covered in the dust of your Rabbi, Jesus" - the idea that we follow our rabbi so closely that we are covered in his dust- that we don't just know what he knows, or do what he does, but that we become like Him. And so we are looking at the ways Jesus taught His disciples to follow Him- these core spiritual disciplines and this week we focused on prayer. The obvious text was from Matthew 6- the Lord's prayer- but I didn't want this to be overlooked by our students as a "religious prayer"- something that has become meaningless because we have said these words so often- so I taught line by line through the prayer and then had them "practice" each line of the prayer by writing out a prayer at 6 different stations and doing some physical act that represented that

We took some pics from each station that I thought I'd share.

Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be thy name,

(here we had students write a prayer of praise on a sticky note and pray it as they put it on the wall)

Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven

(here students write a prayer for God's will in their life and prayed like they were at the Wailing Wall, wrote a prayer & stuck it in the crack of the "wall"- some pretty awesome prayers written here)

Give us this day our daily bread

(here students wrote a prayer for their needs- and took a piece of BREAD as a sign of God providing for their needs)

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us

(here students wrote a prayer for forgiveness and nailed it to the cross)

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

(here students wrote a prayer of where they are tempted & then burned the paper with a candle to symbolize God getting rid of that temptation. This station won the award for most dangerous station)

For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. AMEN

(We finished the circuit where we started with a prayer of Praise:God we praise you because..)

 It was a pretty great night. I couldn't tell whether the teenagers took it seriously or not- it takes a long time to get 50 Junior Highers and 90 High Schoolers through 6 stations- but in reading some of the things they prayed- our students MET with God that night, and that's exciting.

May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi, Jesus.. as we pray like he taught us to pray.