Members of the community gather in a circle to pray over Sampson Regional Medical Center last week, one of many community prayer circles being performed as a means of drawing the community together to pray over places like the Sampson County Courthouse and the hospital. For the past few weeks you may have noticed a group of people praying every Tuesday at different places in the community.
Pastor Matt Seals from First Methodist Church said these prayer meetings are a part of 50 Days of Praying and Waiting, and that he had gotten the idea for the community and other pastors from different churches to get together and pray at some of the biggest community-focused buildings.
“It’s not about any one church,” Seals stressed. “I believe that as a community, our churches need to come together more. And so this was just one of the ways to do that.”
So far, these short prayer meetings have happened at the Clinton Police Department, the new 911 building, and at the Clinton City Schools central office.
“We’ve been to the school system’s central office and we pray for all the schools, county, city and private. We’ve been to the police department, where we pray for the police and fire departments,” Seals said. “We did the new 911 building last week.”
And last Tuesday saw the prayer meetings move to the Sampson Regional Medical Center.
Around noon, a group of doctors, nurses, surgeons, people from the community and religious leaders came together at the front pavilion to pray together.
“It’s just to cover these places and the people in them in prayer,” Seals stressed.
To the people gathered last week, he said: “We are praying for God to show up in these places, praying for God to cover you all that work here. For the Holy Spirit to just pour out into your lives and give you what it is you need to do the work that God has called you too.” Pastor Seals said in his opening speech.
“Typically, how this flows is I will start the prayer and kind of get us going, and then we’ll leave an open place in that prayer that anybody that is here may lift up a prayer if they wish,” Seals explained before he began last week.
At least three other people in the community prayed for the hospital, the staff, and the patients inside before the event was over.
Seals said while he hopes the community keeps coming together to support each other, the last planned meeting for prayer will be at the Sampson County Courthouse today.
“We’ll be at the courthouse,” Seals said. “And that’s the organized Tuesday that we’re doing it.”
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