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S P I R I T U A L L I N K S
Walking on Water 1997 Christina Saj
Spiritual Links is a program of prayer services sponsored, organized and produced by The Alethia Foundation. Each service targets the specific needs of a particular social or cultural agency. Those needs are then made the intense focus of intercessory prayer. We choose organizations in the Philadelphia area whose mission or advocacy has to do with important progressive social issues, or has to do with the fine arts. Each group then becomes the single focus of intense meditation and prayer in a brief worship service dedicated to its particular needs and mission. We ask the group about its current priorities and needs, and invite those involved with it to tell us what they would like us to pray for on their behalf. They are invited to attend and participate in the prayer service if they are so inclined. Churches are selected on the basis of their openness to diversity, their commitment to progressive socio-political ideals, their respect for the arts, their desire for outreach, their convictions about and practice of intercessory prayer, and the quality of their worship life. The organizations, groups or agencies chosen for prayer are local to the Philadelphia region. Some are neighborhood organizations, some are city or regional, some are local chapters of national organizations. Each of these prayer services provides a way to connect local congregations who are hospitable to liberal causes, with some of the people working for those causes here in our area. In terms of outreach, it is important to us that this program addresses the experience of those who frequently assume that Christianity is the enemy rather than the ally of enlightened social action. Our prayer services are a way of correcting those misconceptions, and linking those outside the church with sympathetic people inside the church. The Alethia Foundation staffs each prayer service with a small (as few as five or six) group of persons, laity and clergy, carefully selected for the vitality of their spirituality and prayer life. Usually, members of the host church also participate. Philadelphia area artists provide music of the first quality on a generous volunteer basis, as an offering to God and a vehicle of prayer.
GOALS of the S P I R I T U A L L I N K S program
1. To meet specific, expressed needs of social and cultural organizations through intercessory prayer.
2. To bear witness to living faith and the power of prayer; to bear witness to the power of the Gospel to enable the transformation that it mandates.
3. To bear witness to the logical entailments of Christian doctrine for moral action, and of the Gospel for radical reform -– as a practical expression of the theological synthesis to which The Alethia Foundation is dedicated.
4. To link Church and community, sacred and secular:
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