I think agnes whiteford, was by far the first and greatest encouragement I had to engage in corporate prayer.  However God used others to do some ground work before I ever met her.

One of those was a man called George Gahagan.  When I was a child, he was the minister of the Church I went to. Looking back, it was a liberal church.  I never heard things like messages of Gods grace, or his love,or his wrath and there were no prayer meetings.  There was a lot of social activity such as Jumble Sales, sales of work the Drama group and the rambling club.  It was as though there was little to no spiritual input at all, except for one thing, George Gahagan was an outstanding story teller and very good at communicating with children

Most of the stories he told were once he had recieved from other ministers.  Occassionaly he would tell a story about his own childhood.  These stories illustrated usually just one point, and all of them were of a spiritual nature and as I look back, I can see that all of the ones I clearly remember, did in fact contain Gospel truth

Later when I was in my teens he told us that he learned how to tell stories to children by telling them to his own children.  They would ask him to tell the same stories over and over again, but they expected him to tell them in the same way every time and if he changed anything they would stop and correct him.  He therefore applied this technique when he told sorties to the Sunday school while we all sat in church.  I think it was possible for an adult to get more out of his childrens addresses than the sermon.

I am not a good childrens speaker, but one of the stories is like this.  There was a boy who built a toy boat.  He love that boat and he loved sailing it in the local river. One day he was sailing it and the flow of the river took it away from him.  Try as he might, he could not find it.  He was sad.  Some time later he was passing by a pawn shop and he saw his boat in the window. He went in and said to the shop Keeper very excitedly, "That is my boat, please may I have it back".  The shop keeper said he could only have it if he bought it.  The boy ran home as fast as he could and opened his piggy bank,  he counted the money and had just enough.  He took the money and ran all the way back to the shop to buy the boat. He handed over the money and the shop keeper gave him the boat.  The boy clung on to the boat and said, "You are mine twice over, You are mine because I made you, and now you are mine because I bought you"  the point is that God has made us, but now we are all sinners and God has bought christians by the death and resurrection of jesus