Sunday 1st November 2026 

Uniting our Prayers with the Whole Company of Heaven

This Sunday is All Saints Day and, during the month of November we focus especially on remembrance: remembrance of those saints of the past, people we have loved and who have loved us, and remembrance of those whose lives have been taken from them in the world wars and other conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries. It's a time of year when we become conscious once again of how thin the veil is between time and eternity, when the introduction to the Lord's Prayer in our liturgy includes the words "Uniting our prayers with the whole company of heaven..."

Yes, prayer is how we find communion with God, through Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit. No, we don't need the mediation of saints and other holy people to help us pray. The death and resurrection of Jesus means that the door is open and, whenever and wherever we are, we can enter the presence of our Heavenly Father and pour out our joys, our sorrows, our needs, as well as the needs of those we love and of the wider world.

But the communion of prayer takes us through the veil between time and eternity. When we pray, both heaven and earth are changed! In John's vision of heaven in Revelation, he sees "another angel, who had a golden censer, [who] came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all God’s people, on the golden altar in front of the throne. The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of God’s people, went up before God from the angel’s hand. Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake." (Revelation 8:3-5)

Many of you took part in our 24 hours of non-stop prayer as part of our week of celebrations for our fifth birthday. Many of you commented on how good it was to spend an hour in uninterrupted communion with God, and how encouraging to know that, although we were mostly praying alone at home, we were doing so with others who were also praying that day. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could take that sense of communion, that sense of mutual encouragement in prayer beyond a single special day and into our whole life together? How amazing to know that neither geography nor time are barriers to this: we can pray together in different places, and, simultaneously unite our prayers "with the whole company of heaven!"

With this in mind, I am encouraging you to consider whether you could commit to praying for one hour in the evening of the first Monday of each month. We will continue to gather together in a building (usually HT), for those who want to pray in the company of others. But we'd like to broaden the invitation to those who can't come out but could pray at home. I'm going to invite you to make such a commitment starting in Advent - but, if you'd like to join us praying in the dark this Monday, there is a link to some resources in this week's News & Notices.

Our prayers, however feeble they appear to us, rise as incense before God, causing thunder and lightning, an earthquake. And, as we pray, however feebly, we know that we are being cheered on "by a great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1), united in prayer by those who have gone before us, who themselves have prayed and struggled and endured.