Interested in outdoor worship? Check out our Worship in the Woods book of 10 outdoor gatherings.

Here are eight prayer stations we put together as a team for the PrayerHouse prayer room at Spring Harvest 2017 (Minehead). We had an "outdoors-indoors" theme, making the room look like a forest. However, you could easily actually use these stations outdoors. You could also choose to use just one or two stations as appropriate for your theme or service, rather than using all eight.

Download the Station Posters PDF for full instructions of each station, or preview at the bottom of this page.
 

BEARING FRUIT

You will need:

  • Small plant pots
  • Bag of compost
  • Seeds
  • Trowel


DEEP DARK WOODS

You will need:

  • Fabric that has holes so people can stitch through
  • Plastic needles
  • Coloured yarns

(Thanks to Luiza Chandy for developing this idea.)


DISAGREEING WELL

You will need:

  • A real well, or an ornamental garden well/planter (we made our own!)
  • Stones


GROWING BACK TOGETHER

You will need:

  • Pile of natural materials (leaves, pine cones, sticks, seeds, fallen bark etc)
  • White sheet

(Thanks to Chloe Axford for developing this idea, and overseeing the whole room.)


PRAYER LEAVES

You will need:

  • Tree painted on large piece of paper (or an actual tree?)
  • Magazines (if using a real tree, you would probably need string to hang the leaves on)
  • Scissors


THE WORLD

You will need:

  • Large world map
  • Pens
  • Paper to place around the map


TONGUES

This requires an audio file to be played (perhaps from an iPad, or on a loop from a computer). You can download the file above/right.

(Thanks to Sunil Chandy for this idea. He also set up a "Whispering Tree" which would not be so easy to reproduce, but you can read about it and see a video here.)


TREE RINGS

You will need:

  • Tree ring sheets (download from above/right)
  • Pens

(We set this idea around a fake camp-fire, but you don't need to do that unless you want to!)

We would also like to say a huge thank you to Richard Lyall (www.richardlyall.co.uk), who created all the posters and other graphics for the room.