Here's a great way to get some prayer this week! Use the Twitter hashtag #hearourprayer at 11 am EST this Friday where Meg Augustine, Dr. Lester Ruth, and the entire Basic Worship class at Duke University will be praying. You can follow the class @prayingclass on Twitter if are interested in participating or you can just tweet using the #hearourprayer hashtag. Jump below to read the write up from Meg Augustine's blog on the topic. From www.MegAugustine.com:

This semester, I’ve been working with Dr. Lester Ruth (my Introduction to Christian Worship professor) on a special project that would combine our class with Twitter. And we’d love for you to join us!

Our class consists of students who are preparing for vocations in ordained ministry. More than 90% of our class is United Methodist, with a few Presbyterian & AME folks mixed in. We are currently studying prayer in worship, and we’re about to study intercessory prayer.

Intercessory prayers are the type of prayers where a worship leader says something like “We pray for those who are suffering” and the congregation lifts up the names of different people or groups of people who may be suffering. For example, your pastor might say, “We pray for those who are suffering,” and you could respond with “for those battling breast cancer.” At that point, your pastor would say, “Lord, in your mercy,” and the entire congregation would respond with “Hear our prayer.” This is repeated multiple times, with the opportunity for the congregation as a whole to pray to God on behalf of others.

Our goal is to expand the size of our “congregation” (i.e. our class) to reach out to those in our social media network. We will be studying Intercessory Prayer on the next three Fridays (October 26, November 2, and November 9) from 11-11:15am and we want to engage with social media to enhance this learning opportunity. If you are a Twitter user or your church has a Twitter account, we would love for y’all to share your prayer requests with our class beginning this Friday at 11am.

The primary tweets for the class will come from our Twitter account, which is @prayingclass. Please follow us so you can join in from 11-11:15am EST on Friday. I’ll also be retweeting all of the prayer prompts from my own account, @megaug, so if you follow me you’ll also be informed of what’s going on.

As the tweets for prayer requests come in, our class will follow the live tweeting on the projector screen in our classroom. We will be using the hashtag #hearourprayer to keep track of all of the tweets. We ask that as you reply to one of our tweets by lifting up someone in prayer, please include #hearourprayer at the end of your tweet so our class can follow along. If you’ve ever been to a conference that used a particular hashtag on twitter, you may have been able to follow along via a live feed of the tweets using that hashtag throughout the conference. Our goal is for you to be able to do the same thing. Even if you don’t have a twitter account, you can follow along by going to this link or simply going to twitter.com and typing #hearourprayer in the search box.

We would LOVE for you to help spread the word about this project. Feel free to use any of the social media buttons below to let others in your social networks know about our project. I also posted this tweet last night, so please retweet it to spread the word.