Around the UK prayer walking is on the rise and the OIKOS app is equipping local groups to get involved. Sammy Jordan (inset, above) explains how.
“We’re seeing a move of God linked to prayer,” says Sammy Jordan. “The Lord is stirring people to pray around the UK.”
Sammy, director of Hope Together’s Hope For Every Home, is excited about the rising levels of local prayer she is seeing through her role heading up the organisation’s OIKOS app.
OIKOS, she explains, is a tool that has been designed to help mobilise Christians to gather to pray for and in communities.
“It’s an app that helps you pin streets and places where you’ve prayed or had conversations that involved faith,” she says.
In order to develop it, a big focus over the past couple of years – and indeed for the year ahead – has been forming partnerships that help people to pray.
“OIKOS’ vision is linked to a strategy of ‘prayer, care and share’, where you begin by praying for a place then are intentional about relationships, acts of care and conversations. But there are other Christian organisations which are better placed to help with some aspects of that journey and if we work together the impact can be massive,” she says.
With this in mind, OIKOS has added Discovery Bible Study, Try Praying, Cinnamon and UCB Prayerline recently.
“We’re trying to make it easier for people to pray or have faith conversations. Imagine that during a conversation someone discloses something they need prayer for, for example – I can direct them to UCB. Or maybe a neighbour is interested in learning about the Bible. I can tap a link in the app and we can look at Discovery Bible together.”
Two other partnerships have been especially important for resourcing local prayer in the past year.
In time for Thy Kingdom Come and the launch of Hope Together’s 23-24 prayer initiative, OIKOS added resources to help people who had never prayer-walked before.
“We linked the Lord’s Prayer and prayer walking with resources that use the Lord’s Prayer to pray for streets and non-Christian friends.” Last March, OIKOS also partnered with the Cinnamon Network to pilot a prayer scheme.
“Cinnamon is brilliant at social action and has its own hyper-local online maps where people can journey and document together.
“We’ve pooled resources to bring the words and action of evangelism together, so when people have conversations they can log and share them with their prayer groups.”
GROWING
Partnerships and initiatives like these are especially important as OIKOS is noting a growing number of local prayer groups.
“There are more people coming together to pray and walk who haven’t done that before, so we’re resourcing them as God is prompting them to pray.”
Over the past 18 months, subgroups have been created on OIKOS that allow local groups to track their activities.
Data shows their popularity is growing, says Sammy.
“It’s interesting because a group will start, then you suddenly see pins appearing on the app. We could see people using it during Festival Manchester last year, and after people were encouraged to pray for university campuses we saw pins popping up everywhere during Freshers Week too.”
This links back to the bigger picture of what God is doing throughout the UK, she says.
“I believe there is a reformation taking place which started as God called his church out of the building during Covid. He rooted people back into their communities, and the daily walks allowed during lockdown became significant.
“We launched OIKOS soon afterwards when it was easy to turn a daily walk into a prayer walk.”
