Liturgical Evening Prayer - Day 2

Evening prayers (online only) will be at 20:45 (check for your local time):
Zoom Link
Meeting ID: 856 1374 5423
Passcode: 556492

If you missed the Zoom call you can still follow the recorded audio version

Welcome to evening prayers

God is Jehovah Nissi, ‘the Lord is my banner’. We approach God tonight remembering he is our banner, a symbol of victory. It is the Lord who wins our battles. He leads and protects; we know the victory is won.

Together we pray

Calm me, O Lord, as You stilled the storm.
Still me, O Lord, keep me from harm.
Let all the tumult within me cease.
Enfold me, Lord, in Your peace.

Pause

Look over the day, asking God to bring clarity and understanding. Review the day through the lens of gratitude. Think of every detail for which you can be thankful; for the things that bring you joy, thank him. For the things that bring sadness or have been challenging, thank him that you had that opportunity to trust him.

Pause to pray

Together we pray

God, we thank you that you have won the victory over sin and death. You are the one who helps us live victorious lives and you have led and protected us today.

Now we have the opportunity to become aware of how we are feeling. Try to name that emotion and give it to the LORD.

Pause to pray

Together we pray

God thank you that you made us with the ability to feel a complex range of emotions. We praise you that we can feel many emotions but that they do not rule us and with your help, we can have godly responses regardless of how we feel.

Now choose a feature of today, maybe it’s a joy or it could be a burden or something that he has provoked in you due to the things we have been discussing today. Talk to the Lord about it.

Pause to pray

Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16 (NIV)

Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
     will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

2 I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
     my God, in whom I trust.”

9 If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,”
     and you make the Most High your dwelling,

10 no harm will overtake you,
     no disaster will come near your tent.

11 For he will command his angels concerning you
     to guard you in all your ways;

12 they will lift you up in their hands,
     so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

13 You will tread on the lion and the cobra;
     you will trample the great lion and the serpent.

14 “Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him;
     I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.

15 He will call on me, and I will answer him;
     I will be with him in trouble,
     I will deliver him and honour him.

16 With long life I will satisfy him
     and show him my salvation.”

Finally, as we look towards tomorrow, consider what is coming up. Through the lens of hope, trust and expectation, offer up all you will do, trusting him to be involved and for his will to be done.

Pause to pray

Together we pray

May God shield me;
may God fill me;
may God keep me;
may God watch me;
may God bring me this night
to the nearness of His love.

The peace of the Father of joy,
the peace of the Christ of hope,
the peace of the Spirit of grace,
the peace of all peace
be mine this night.

Amen.

Acknowledgements: 

The opening prayer is taken from the Northumbria Community Wednesday Compline: https://www.northumbriacommunity.org/offices/wednesday-the-felgild-compline/

The final prayer is taken from the Northumbria Community Saturday Compline: https://www.northumbriacommunity.org/offices/saturday-the-patrick-compline/

05/2025 Global

Special Report - May 2025

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05/2025 Global

‘We’ve come very far, very fast’

A tech observer outlines what AI will mean soon for workplaces and ministry

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Global

Tech pioneer: Christians ‘have to show up’ for AI

Silicon Valley pioneer Pat Gelsinger was CEO of Intel Corporation until December 2024. Quickly realising his career in technology was not finished, he joined the faith/tech platform Gloo in early 2025 as the executive chair and head of technology. He is also a general partner at the venture capital firm Playground Global. Gelsinger was instrumental in the development of cloud computing, Wi-Fi, USB and many other everyday technologies. He estimates his work has touched 60 to 70 percent of humanity. Here are highlights of his keynote talk at the 2025 Missional AI Summit. You can watch his entire talk here. Pat Gelsinger (left) is interviewed onstage by Steele Billings. Both are with Gloo. Watch the full interview here. Is technology good or bad? Technology is neither good nor bad. It’s neutral. It can be used for good. It can be used for bad. … If you think back to the Roman roads, why did Christ come when he came? I’ll argue the Pax Romana and the Roman roads. … The greatest technology of the day was the Roman road system. It was used so the Word could go out. Historical example I will argue Martin Luther was the most significant figure of the last thousand years. And what did he do? He used the greatest piece of technology available at the day, the Gutenberg printing press. He created Bibles. … He broke, essentially, the monopoly on the Bible translations …. He ushered in education. He created the systems that led to the Renaissance. That’s a little punk monk who only wanted to get an audience with the pope because he thought he had a few theological errors. I’ll argue (Luther was) the most significant figure of the last thousand years, using technology to improve the lives of every human that he touched at the time. How today compares to the dawn of the internet AI is more important. AI will be more significant. AI will be more dramatic. … This is now incredibly useful, and we’re going to see AI become just like the internet, where every single interaction will be infused with AI capabilities.  In the 75-year-or-so history of computing, we humans have been adapting to the computer. … With AI, computers adapt to us. We talk to them. They hear us. They see us for the first time. And now they are becoming a user interface that fits with humanity. And for this and so many other reasons that every technology has been building on the prior technology, AI will unquestionably be the biggest of these waves, more impactful even than the internet was. On the need for AI development to be open-source It is so critical because we’re embedding knowledge, embedding values, embedding understanding into those underlying models, large language models and every aspect that happens. It must be open, and this is part of what I think is critical about us being together here today. We need to be creating trusted, open, useful AI that we can build humanity on.  On the need for Christians to help build AI systems We have to show up as the faith community to be influencing those outcomes, because remember what happened in the social media. We didn’t show up, and look at what we got. So are we going to miss this opportunity for something that’s far more important than social networking with AI? Where it truly in the models embeds every aspect of human history and values into it? We have to show up, team. What we do with large language models is far more important because truly we are choosing how we embody knowledge of all time into those underlying models. They need to be open. They need to be trusted. What Christians must bring to the process If we’re going to show up to influence AI broadly, we have to show up with good engineering, good data, good understanding, good frameworks. How do you measure things like ‘Is that leading to better character? Is that leading to better relationships? Is that creating better vocational outcomes? Is that a valid view of a spiritual perspective?’ We need good underlying data associated with each one of these. And for that we’re actively involved. We’re driving to create that underlying data set. Because we need to show up with good data if we’re going to influence how AI is created. How should this work? For the AI systems we need to create good benchmarks. If I ask about God, does it give me a good answer or not? If I ask about relationships with my children, does it give me good answers? We need to create the corpus of data to give good answers to those questions. And, armed with that good data, we need to show up to influence the total landscape of AI. We want to benchmark OpenAI. We’re going to benchmark Gemini. We’re going to benchmark Claude. We’re going to benchmark Copilot.  This is what we’re going to do at Gloo, but we want to be part of a broader community in that discussion so that we’re influential in creating flourishing AI. Technology is a force for good. AI that truly embeds the values that we care about, that we want to honour, that we want to be representing into the future and benchmarking across all of them.   Oh his role with Gloo We are going to change the landscape of the faith community and its role in shaping this most critical technology, AI, for faith and flourishing. That’s what we’re going to do at Gloo and we need all of your help and partnership to do so because if we don’t hang together, we’re not going to influence the outcome, right? ‘Here am I, Lord’ I don’t think I’m done. … You and I both need to come to the same position like Isaiah did. Here am I, Lord. Send me. Send me. Send us. That we can be shaping technology as a force for good. That we could grab this moment in time. This is the greatest time to live in human history. We’re going to solve diseases. We’re going to improve lives. We’re going to educate every person in poverty. We are going to solve climate issues. We are going to be using these technologies to improve the lives of every human on the planet. We are going to shape technology as a force for good. Here am I, Lord. Send me. ••• Story: Jim Killam, Wycliffe Global Alliance Translated with ChatGPT. How was the translation accuracy? Let us know at info@wycliffe.net. Alliance organisations are welcome to download and use images from this series.  

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