Resources for Prayer

Resources to Help You Pray from Wherever You Are

Many of us are home and looking for ways to enhance our time and spiritual lives. We hope these various resources including the Daily Office, Podcasts, Blogs, Daily Devotionals and more will help you do exactly that. Do you have a favorite we haven’t included? Send us an email and let us know!

 

Library

We have a wonderful library with a wide variety of books.  You can see a pdf catalog of our collection here. You can visit the library any time you are at the church. If you want to check out a book or if you have any questions, please contact Judie Payne.

Daily Devotionals

  • Forward Movement

    • If you like reading the daily devotional by Forward Day by Day, you can request a booklet for May, June and July from the church office or you can read it online every day. Just visit prayer.forwardmovement.org. It will take you to the current day’s readings.

    • You can even follow them on Facebook to get the daily reading delivered right to your news feed if you Click here.

    • You can also pray the Daily Office in a convenient online format. Forward Movement offers the Daily Office here. Just click on the Daily Prayer tab across the top, and it will load that day’s readings and depending on the time of day will load Morning Prayer, Noon Prayer, Evening Prayer, or Compline.

  • Our Daily Bread

    • offers daily devotionals you can read or watch in many different formats. You can download their app from the app store to your smartphone or read it on your computer.

  • d365 for Youth and Young Adults

    • Have you ever wanted a daily devotional for your kids?

    • d365 is a daily devotional resource for youth and young adults. It has Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian sponsorship. It’s an interactive format encouraging the reader to take a moment and prayerfully consider the day’s meditation and prayer. There’s even a button that looks like a musical note, which will play an instrumental guitar song during their meditation. Here is a link to their website, d365

    • While they have a daily devotional all year, watch for special devotionals during Advent, Lent and Back to School.

       

Blogs and Podcasts

  • The Way of Love: Practices for a Jesus-Centered Life: 

    • The Way of Love is a movement from The Episcopal Church. Here is an excerpt from the website “The Way of Love is a way of life. More than a program of curriculum, it is an intentional commitment to a set of practices. It’s a commitment to follow Jesus: Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, Rest.”
    • You can read an invitation from Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry here.
    • On The Way of Love website, you can explore the different tools created to help us all live a Jesus-Centered life. There are many resources and stories to read and hear in the videos and podcasts too.

  • The Living Church

    • offers many resources including the daily Covenant blog, which you can read here. The contributions are written by many different people. You can read the most recent one or search by topic, author, etc by clicking the search icon.

    • The Living Church also offers a podcast on various topics. You can listen using your computer by clicking here or search for The Living Church Podcast in your favorite smartphone podcast app.

  • The Episcopal Café

    • a news source of things going on in the Episcopal Church. There are articles, blogs, podcasts and more. You can peruse past stories or subscribe to get the latest information sent right to your inbox. If you like the articles they produce you can also follow them on Facebook and get the latest stories delivered to your newsfeed.

    • Click here to visit The Episcopal Café website.

  • Grow Christians

    • is a ministry by Forward Movement. They post blogs daily on various topics of Christian life primarily for and by parents. They are written with the view of the ups and downs of the day. It’s nice to read others’ perspectives on things we all face.

    • This is from their site:  “We strive to create an online community of discipleship focused on the practical details of life at home. Gathering reflections, stories, images, and recipes from diverse Episcopalians, this group blog inspires generations to come together as they celebrate the presence of God through the Christian year.”

    • You can read the most recent post or search for a topic that interests you.

    • Click here to visit the Grow Christians website.

  •  Faith @ Home

    • Faith at Home is developed by Forward Movement and Forma. It offers daily and weekly devotionals for the family. The Weekly devotionals are based on the Sunday readings and include a devotional geared to each age group, making this a wonderful for a family. The daily devotional includes reading, videos and audio. Check out Faith @ Home here.

Spiritual Communion

The Daily Office

Haha, no, it’s not your daily slog to work. Office, from Latin officium, basically means duty. In the Church, the daily duty of us all is to pray. So what we call the Daily Office is that round of prayer-offerings that punctuate the day… every day. The Psalmist said, “Seven times a day do I praise you because of your righteous judgments” (Psalm 119:164). So since seven is the biblical number of completion/perfection (see biblical numerology), ancient monastic communities developed the practice of gathering in for prayer seven times a day.  But we secular Christians (= we who aren’t monks) have a different lifestyle. So the Book of Common Prayer provides four daily opportunities for prayer, inviting us to use any or all of them as we can work them into our days (clergy are expected to pray Morning and Evening Prayer at least).

So here are some links, if you’re interested, to more on praying daily with the Church:

  • Pray the Daily Office right now! –

    In the drop-down menu under DAILY OFFICES, click the top one- TODAY’S OFFICE- and it will take you directly to the appropriate service for the time of day. Since we think you should dive right in, we recommend doing this. That menu also lists all the daily prayer offices.

  • The Daily Office Tutorial

    – A how-to, just as the name implies

  • What Are Today’s Readings?

    • If you want to pray the Daily Office on your own using your Book of Common Prayer, the Lectionary printed in the prayer book is no longer current. You can easily find it online though. The Lectionary is available here for every day of the week. If you want an Ordo Calendar which shows the date and seasons, they are available from the church office. 

    • This page is commonly called Satucket. It also has a section titled Feasts, Holy Days, and Commemorations. It is sorted alphabetically and by date. Each entry includes a brief description and prayer. It’s a great way to learn a little about the saints and feast days!

  • An optional set of Daily Readings

    – a schedule of Bible readings is called a lectionary. We follow the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) on Sundays and other Holy Days. RCL Daily Readings is not the same as the one included in the Daily Office linked above (the one in the back of the Book of Common Prayer). The purpose of this one is to aid our understanding of the readings on Sunday, which is the Church’s principal day of worship. The Thursday, Friday and Saturday readings look forward to the coming Sunday, and the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday readings reflect back on the previous Sunday. If you like that idea, you can always open two pages on your device and read these ones instead of the ones included in the Daily Office- or read both.

    • A word of warning though: It’s better to read Scripture in digestible bits, rather than trying to read as much as you can for the sake of, well, reading as much as you can in as little time as possible. Reading the Bible in one year, for example, is a tall order, since you’ve got to read about four chapters every day. If you’re the type of reader who can absorb that much Scripture, go for it. But if you’re an ordinary mortal, it’s probably better to follow a lectionary.

When you click on any of the Sunday readings links on this page, you’ll stay on the same website. But clicking any of the weekday readings links will take you to Bible Gateway  (BG) where you can choose which translation of the Bible to read from. On the BG page you can also subscribe to receive the RCL Daily Readings in your inbox. So that’s a good thing, right?

  • And if all this has got you more confused than enlightened, just contact us