Greensburg church members walk streets to pray for city's needs
At LifeSpring Christian Church in downtown Greensburg, Pastor Dale Adams and his congregation are on a journey to develop deeper prayer lives — and to bless the city in the process.
The journey is not just spiritual, it’s also physical. Since May, they’ve taken to the streets of their neighborhoods and the Greensburg business district for weekly prayer walks addressing the needs of people, businesses and institutions.
“Jesus said prayer would be one of the earmarks of his church. There are so many prescriptions about praying for our needs and praying for our city and those in authority,” Adams said. “We said, let’s start walking through our city and praying. So it’s all meshing together this summer as we kicked it off.”
On Thursday evening, Adams and congregation members Annette Kostelnik, Carol Gaffey and Rita Naugle met at the South Pennsylvania Avenue church to plan their routes.
Adams headed for the police station on Main Street. The women went north on the avenue, planning to pray at the Bell Street bus terminal before meeting Adams back at the Westmoreland County Courthouse.
Along their path, the women paused to pray for postal service employees, staff and users of the Greensburg Hempfield Area Library, businesses and residents of nearby apartments.
As serious as the group was in its purpose, they still found levity in the process.
On West Otterman Street, opposite the Seton Hill University Performing Arts Center, Kostelnik prayed for safety and success for the school’s students and faculty, and also that they would spend their money to support local businesses.
“Am I allowed to pray for that?” she asked.
Coming up from behind, Gaffey said, “Are you praying for the liquor store?”
Delighting in prayer
Seeds for the prayer walks began germinating a couple years ago, Adams said.
“I was at a prayer retreat with man named Doug Small, who wrote a book about how to transform your church into a house of prayer,” he said. “One of the things Jesus said his church would be known for is that it would be a place of prayer.
“The book really messed me up, because I began to realize how prayerless the church is overall. So it started me on the journey,” he said.
“(Small) talked about how God created the whales to live in one world, but they breathe the air of another world. They live in the water but they can’t breathe the water. They have to come up to the surface to breathe the air,” Adams said. “He correlated that with prayer. We live in this world but we have to kind of suck the air of heaven in order to live.”
Adams said he and his congregants have been practicing the discipline of prayer.
“You make yourself pray and you will eventually get to the delight of prayer,” he said. “It’s kind of a journey we’re all on. We’re going from this is something I have to do to this is something I enjoy doing.”
‘Are we heartbroken?’
In addition to walking downtown, prayer team members currently travel Vine Street and Glenview Avenue in Greensburg, the Fort Allen area of Hempfield and Bushy Run Battlefield in Penn Township.
Volunteer leaders pick dates, times and locations convenient to where they live, Kostelnik said.
She said that Gaffey, who owns Crossroads Boutique and Cattiva, is well positioned to know the needs of people in the downtown Greensburg area, including people who stop in to ask for bus fare or money for other needs.
Adams and his wife also walk their Fort Allen neighborhood.
“If we see a house that’s kind of dilapidated and run down, we know there’s something going on, so we pray for that,” he said. “We tell people that we see what we’re doing, just low-key. Some people turn around and run away, but we just ask them how we can pray for them. We take notes, so it’s not just a one-and-done thing.
“One of the prayers we pray regularly is that God would give us his view of Greensburg,” Adams said. “Jesus wept over Jerusalem and he was heartbroken about what he saw,” he said. “Are we heartbroken about the drugs and the broken homes and things like that?”
Adams said he meets monthly with five other area pastors to pray for the city. He’s also joining a July 23 gathering called Prayer at the Heart of America, when people will meet in a corn field in Lebanon, Kan., where there’s a brass plaque marking the center of the contiguous 48 states.
“There’s just a spiritual significance of being at the heart of America and praying for God to move in America,” he said.
In Greensburg, he said, prayer team members hope their efforts will inspire other local churches to hit the streets too.
Community members are welcome to join the walks in their neighborhoods, Kostelnik said. They can call LifeSpring at 724-832-7514 for more information.
“Before covid, we talked about getting out of our church and moving to another building,” she said. “Then covid hit, and we were literally out of the church. So now we’re out of the church, going to the people.
“It can be a scary thing, but we do it anyway.”
Shirley McMarlin is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Shirley by email at smcmarlin@triblive.com or via Twitter .
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