About Us
Prayer 7s is an Anglican/Episcopal, New Zealand based website.
Anglican's are Trinitarian – we believe that there is One God who exists eternally in three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Furthermore, we believe that Jesus Christ is completely God and is also completely human. If a religious group does not teach these two doctrines, we do not recognize them as Christian.
We believe that the Bible is the 'Word of God' and we follow the Great Commission of Matthew 28:16-20. We believe that God has called us to live our lives together in Christ. We engage in liturgical disciplines of prayer, worship, and repentance. Anglicans embrace a full life of seasons and hours, fasts and feasts. We are called to lives that are both ordered and creative.
Our small team originally formed in All Saints Church, Palmerston North, New Zealand, with the encouragement and guidance of Rev John Marquet. We still work under the umbrella of the Wellington Diocese of the New Zealand Anglican Church. We therefore make extensive use of both the Anglican New Zealand Prayer Book (ANZPB) and Celebrating Common Prayer: A Version for Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia (CCP). We present to you in this website a shortened version of the Daily Office (prayed by all Clergy) spread out across the day. This is a free resource for all ordinary lay people, and regular Christian believers of any denomination.
Readings generally follow the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) which uses a 3-year cycle used in many churches of differing traditions throughout the world. The RCL and Prayer7s takes into account the church season and the character of the day. Where we differ is in the use of the Saints Days, and Jewish festival days. When a commemoration of a saint in the RCL falls on a Sunday or major feast day, it usually lapses and is set aside from the Calendar for that year. We do not set aside saints days - if there is a clash they are moved for the year, either to another significant date for the saint or the nearest day available after the usual date. We also with approval have added a couple of extra saints to the usual New Zealand list.
We provide a Christian version of the Jewish Feasts and celebrations of the year, and the Jewish Sabbath because these were instituted by God himself and celebrated by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We are not legalistic about it, but these holidays have strong prophetic meanings for Christians as well as Jews.
For non-saints days the readings are mostly selected from the RCL and we write or share a devotional based on those readings. Our prayers are a mixture from the ANZPB and the seasonal variation of the CCP to keep things interesting.
