A Praying Church is A Joyful Church

It is Wednesday and time for Joyful News on Ministry.

My joyful news story is about a colleague of mine down the road in Erwin, Tennessee who is featured in this month's Presbyterians Today.

Steve Rembert and his congregation, the Erwin Presbyterian Church, found a simple, inexpensive, and compassionate way to reach out to the community.


They have a prayer box outside the church so people in community can submit their prayers and the Erwin congregation will pray for these folks. What a cool thing.

Many churches have prayer request boxes inside the building for members to make known their needs for supplication. But at Erwin Presbyterian Church in Tennessee, there’s a box for prayer requests outside the church.

Noting that the inside box was primarily used by members only, pastor Steve Rembert asked, “Why shouldn’t we put up a prayer request box outside for anyone in the community to use?”

Now he and the group of women who gather Thursday afternoons to pray can respond to requests from the entire community. The outdoor prayer box even earned the church some publicity as the local newspaper did a story that featured a photo of Rembert with the box in front of the sanctuary.

“You can’t be better than to be known as a praying church,” he says.

Amen to that, Steve!

Erwin Presbyterian is also mission oriented. They support seven missionary families located in Thailand, Philippines, Austria, Turkey, Congo, Zimbabwe, and Haiti. Here are some of the other mission projects they support:

• Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship
• Living Waters for the World
• Presbyterian Outreach Foundation
• Heifer Project
• Presbyterian Disaster Assistance
• Somali Outreach
• Puentes de Cristo border mission




Thank you, Erwin Presbyterian Church! You just got Jesus dancin'!


John Shuck is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Elizabethton Tennessee and he blogs at Shuck and Jive. Contact him with your joyful news at this E-mail.