Philadelphia Prayer Walk

Independence Hall, Philadelphia, PA, Author Rdsmith4, (CC BY-SA 1.5 Generic)

As those of you familiar with this blog know, I write regularly about Christian Legal Clinics of Philadelphia (CLCP) https://clcphila.org/, a faith based legal clinic whose predecessor I had a hand in founding.  There are now several locations in the city.   The clinics provide free legal services to the poor, while partnering with host organizations which serve their needs for food, clothing, shelter, etc.

Over the summer, CLCP held its fifth prayer walk in the city.  Below is an account of that walk by Brendon Sylvester, CLCP’s Administrator.

“The mission for the prayer walk was straightforward:  start from a location that hosts a clinic, and walk through the surrounding neighborhood while praying for it.

Pastor Tony led my group on our prayer walk, and I’m glad he did – he prayed with more zeal than anyone I’ve ever met.  He would start with enthusiasm, then scale up to a shout, and scale up from there until his voice cracked as he cried out for God to liberate those captive to addiction, or redeem places that, in the past, had seen gang violence.

The location where we walked…was where Pastor Tony had led a Salvation Army for fifteen years.

…About a hundred yards into walking, he [Pastor Tony] stopped us and said, ‘XX years ago, a young man was shot here.’  That was the place we prayed for peace from violence in the city.  About two hundred yards further, he stopped us again.  ‘This corner used to be the most high-traffic drug market in the country,’ he said, ‘we need to pray for the souls of the people.’

And we continued that way for about two hours, covering only about two miles because we stopped so often.  Sometimes we stopped for specific places – he asked me to pray for students and teachers at an elementary school (I teach in my spare time) – and sometimes for people.

One young lady we met was so visibly troubled I think I would have hesitated to approach her had I been by myself.  She wept when we offered to pray for her, and thanked us again and again – we prayed for a long time, and Pastor Tony and Laverna figured out that they knew the pastors of the church her parents attended.  They encouraged her to go the next day, and got her mom’s phone number.

The walk as a whole was a reminder of the difference our physical presence in the city makes to its spiritual landscape.  When it’s possible to work in one state while living in another by online synchronization, or video-call your family from across the country, it’s tempting [simply] to pray from home, too.

But if we had, we wouldn’t have been able to pray for the particular streets and schools we serve, or pray for Marilyn by name.  And the adjoining blocks would have missed on hearing Pastor Tony’s prayers echoing from where we walked.”

Please, add your prayers to these for the poor of Philadelphia, the nation, and the world.

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https://avoicereclaimed.com