Faith Stories

’Pray One For Me’ – yes we will

Tuesday 14th February 2012 1:03 PM

Prayer is in the news; banned from council agendas and, according to one opinion poll, ignored by many of those calling themselves 'Christian'.

Yet in time of trouble, crisis, and thanksgiving many of us do 'say a prayer'. Research conducted for the charity Tearfund in 2007 concluded that as many as 20 million adults in the UK (42% of the population) pray.

But for those who find it difficult, the Church of England launches a new website, www.prayoneforme.org, where anyone can post their prayer requests an d know that they will be prayed.

'You can pray about anything,' says the Revd Alison Roche, vicar of St Christopher's parish in Leicester. 'Some people think God's only concerned with the really big things in life. But some people pray for car parking spaces. God is concerned about the big things in life like disasters and relationships breaking up and the very small things. In a relationship with a human being you would communicate on different levels. It's the same with God. So go for it'.



Prayoneforme.org, launching on Ash Wednesday (22nd February), will be supported by church groups and prayer communities across the Church of England. They will pray the prayers. The site will be open throughout the year

The site builds on the success of a similar one the Church of England has run during Lent for the last two years. Family and friends, healing, guidance, thanksgiving and world events where topics for which people regularly asked for prayers.

The new site and its supporting page on Facebook (www.facebook.com/prayoneforme) will also have short profiles about some of the people and groups who will be praying the prayers. It will also link to information for those wanting to know more about praying for themselves.

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School for Uganda

Monday 13th February 2012 11:30 AM

Bishop Robert has recently become patron of School for Uganda, a Manx registered charity which originally began with a link between Foxdale Primary School on the Island and the Good Hope Primary and Nursery School, Namungoona, north west of Kampala in Uganda.

It all began in 2005 with a joint project, linking two schools in different countries, in distant locations.

Elizabeth Bankes-Jones (Chairman) says on the charity's website:
'During this project children got to know each other by sending letters, pictures, music and information about each other's cultures. The children in Foxdale school recognised that the children in Uganda needed school uniforms and they were the same colours as ours. We decided to send a box of school uniforms out to our friends in Uganda.

Children and parents began to bring in uniforms to package up, and soon the box was full. Things changed, however, when Mr Chris Astley, a parent at school, offered to take out rather more cargo than we had collected. He worked for an airline which offered charitable concessions for cargo, and to cut a long story short, we ended up sending out over one and a half tons of consumable aid to the children Uganda. Chris travelled out with the cargo to hand it over to David and Linda, who run good Hope School. He stayed with them for a week and was treated to a celebration of music and dance by the children at the school.

As friendships grew so did the desire to help. In 2006, Foxdale school produced an hour-long programme with Manx radio called Manx radio Uganda. It was broadcast on Good Friday morning and we were honoured in being granted an interview with the Archbishop of York, who is from Uganda.

It is very difficult to resist helping when one sees an obvious need, and this is what took the project to the next stage. I suggested to David and Linda that I could raise funds with which to build another school for the children who would otherwise have no school to go to. It was in the cool light of dawn that I realised this type of project could not be run from a very small primary school whose children and community had already given so much. This then, is the background to why I formed the charity School for Uganda.'

The charity's website with full details of this exciting story of international support and the encouraging work that has been completed and is ongoing can be found by following the link here.

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