Momentum is gathering for the UK Christian retail trade Day of Prayer as more and more authors, booksellers and publishers commit themselves to spend time praying for one another this Friday, 4th September 2009.
Several specific areas for prayer have been suggested by GLO Bookshop, Motherwell, on their facebook page:
- Pray that God will help the staff & volunteers in Christian Bookshops. They are often acting as a ‘front-line’ for the church in an increasingly secular society. Each week, many fruitful conversations lead people to Christ, help direct & comfort struggling Christians and provide a great resource for local churches.
- The main product line in these Bookshops is, of course, the Bible. Pray that God will use the free availability of His Word on the High Street as an effective channel of witness.
- Bookshops realise that they work in a competitive retail environment, and seek to provide excellence in all they do. Pray that they will be helped as they seek to serve customers day by day, providing advice, direction and resources in many ways.
- Please pray that Christians will feel led to support their local Christian bookshops in prayer and by their custom. Perhaps we need to recognise that the support of a ‘High Street’ service does result in extra costs to them — but also results in significant benefit to the work & witness of the Church.
- We are also reminded that in other parts of the world, workers in Christian literature suffer serious persecution. In recent years, some have been martyred, and some imprisoned. Please pray for our brothers & sisters who suffer in this way.
Please also continue to pray for all those caught up in the fallout from the collapse of the SPCK/SSG bookshops under the Brewer brothers. Now that the Charity Commission have stepped in, seized control of most of the shops and negotiated a settlement with Usdaw for many of the former employees, there is much to be thankful for; but a number of significant issues remain unresolved: missing pension contributions; unpaid suppliers; the matter of bringing the Brewer brothers to book; and the question of what future, if any, there may be for the shops themselves under the auspices of the Charity Commission.
- Please see the Day of Prayer page for details of when and where prayer meetings are being held.
If there’s a consensus emerging from the discussions here over Keith Danby’s comments about the viability of Christian retail in the UK, it’s this: we need to pray; and last week’s 
