• Our hope-filled future is bound up in sharing the story of Jesus, in discipling others, in bringing those disciples together into communities of believers, and in developing and releasing those believers to create other communities... till Jesus the King comes again!

Listening to God is just hard

Posted on March 28, 2017 by wtdavid

Have you ever taken an inventory of your prayer life?  I don’t mean an inventory of requests made and answers given.  I’m talking about an accounting of what you say when you pray.

Just doing a quick ‘check’ of the past few days, I came to the following conclusions:

  • I did a fair job of varying praise, thanksgiving, and prayer requests (little prideful thinking there).
  • Many times, I found myself praying: “And I want to ask you to …”hear his voice
  • Basically I talked and God listened.

Listening, as I wrote yesterday, is just plain hard.  It’s hard because listening is not about us, but about others and understanding what is on their mind.  Maybe I could rephrase that in regards to prayer by saying that listening is not about us, but about God and understanding what is on His mind.

At the recent Europe leadership meetings, the main speaker made us to take some significant time to just ‘listen’ to God in prayer.  ‘Significant’ for most of us means about 2-3 minutes.  What I took from that time was how hard it is to listen to God.  In other words, how hard it is to shut off our continual prayer request default mode and ‘hear’ Him speaking to us through His Word and through the time spent listening to Him.

It’s not something I am good at (maybe you feel the same way). It’s not something I can learn quickly.  It’s something I must practice.

I’ve picked up a couple of books to stir my thinking on the subject: Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, Donald S. Whitney; The Life You’ve Always Wanted, John Ortberg, and The Attentive Life, Leighton Ford.

Perhaps you might have others to suggest.  However, the point is for me, for you, to practice listening to God.

Filed under: Community, Listening, Prayer, Silence & Solitude, Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Community prayer snapshot

Posted on February 9, 2017 by wtdavid

I don’t know what you did today, but I spent the morning praying for Asia with the France team.

The room was divided into seven (7) stations.  At each station, we prayed for 15-20 minutes, in small groups, for the prayer points at that station.  We ‘moved around’ the room throughout the morning and prayed with different groups of different people.  At two stations, the group watched a short video from two of our teams in Asia.  Prayers were offered in French. Prayers were offered in English.  Prayers may have been offered in other languages.20170209_105127

One person commented as we were leaving, “I’m really glad I came this morning. It was so encouraging.”  Another said how good it was to be praying for and learning about another area of the world which he had never visited.

We would love h20170209_105153ear about your ‘community prayer snapshot’. Feel free to post those in the comment section.

Prayer leads us to “see the world as God does, to recognize more and more the depth of His grace towards us, and allow our hearts to ‘overflow’ with joy, with passion, with the unstoppable desire to grab that rope cord and join together in a movement.”

Filed under: Community, Movement, Prayer | 4 Comments »

Prayer DOES take planning

Posted on February 7, 2017 by wtdavid

It’s good to hear how others respond to things we talk about in the WT Global community.  I was copied on this note the other day and thought it might ‘stir your minds and hearts’:

prayergroups“To my field mates,

 I am not sure if everyone has been reading some of the emails from David but they are great reminders to why we need to gather to pray as a field, team.

 One quote was from a book by David Bryant that I especially like,  “Years ago, David Bryant wrote the book, Concerts of Prayer, in which he argued for prayer communities and offered a ‘format’ for hosting a concert of prayer.  What I pulled from the book could be simply stated: **** we need to pray together, in community.”

 I remember back in the early days when we were studying language. We were a small team and lived close to each other. We took the whole day off from school and we gathered as a team to pray and worship.

 I know it is not as easy today with us all spread out and we have more ministry going on but the importance of prayer as a large team is still just as important. The Day of Prayer happens only a few times a year so I encourage you all to take some time out as a team to pray. It doesn’t need to be for the whole day but a time in “community” to lift your concert of prayer to God.

 I don’t know how that will look for you but here I will be gathering on the roof of our teammates’ house in the morning. Not sure who else will be able to make it. Will send out specifics when I know.  For all of us, be creative.

 As we serve together,

 S”

I note a couple of important elements in this note: (1) team prayer demonstrates our need for community, and allows us together to lift our voices to God; (2) no specific pattern or agenda is necessarily required; we can be flexible in our community prayer time; and (3) some planning is needed to provide a context, a framework for the community to gather and pray.

Prayer is one of our guiding principles.  Prayer resets our focus ‘to the North’, to the One who is our Father and our God.  As one writer put it: “It is not that we need to pray for the work, prayer is the work!”

 

 

Filed under: Community, Prayer | Leave a comment »

Prayer takes planning

Posted on February 2, 2017 by wtdavid

One of the guiding principles in the World Team Ministry Framework is prayer.  We describe it this way:

“Prayer is real conversation with God and is vital to growing relationship with Him and ministry in His name.  Prayer reflects our belonging and submission to Him, our need for direction and provision, and our acknowledgement that we can do nothing without Him.prayer-in-groups

We believe that personal and corporate prayer manifest obedience and humility, submitting ourselves to God and His agenda, and for His power.  Such dependence nurtures alertness to the spiritual dimensions of our undertakings and equips us with wisdom and knowledge for our calling.  Above all, prayer changes things because it is God’s desire that we ask Him to work.”

 It is a growing dependence that we seek in prayer; a dependence that reminds us of our constant need of the work of the Spirit.  However, prayer takes planning.  When I don’t ‘plan’ prayer into my day, it gets overlooked.  We all know how true that is.  Most of the time, it’s simply a reflection of the fact that prayer is not a priority in our daily lives.  To become more dependent though, prayer must become a reflex.

A week from today, we as a WT Global community will join in prayer for the needs of the ministries God has entrusted us with.  We need to ‘plan’ prayer into our day next Thursday or Friday; to set aside time, however short or long, to be with others to pray.

I received a note from the France team earlier this week and know that they have ‘set aside’ next Thursday to pray.  Is it in your ‘agenda’ already?

Prayer is a real conversation and is vital to growing relationship with Him. 

Filed under: Community, Prayer | 1 Comment »

Prayer in community

Posted on January 26, 2017 by wtdavid

John wrote an excellent comment to my blog post from the other day: “Who is your one? (bis)” in which he stressed the importance of the role of community in spiritual formation.  I just hadn’t applied that idea to prayer.

In most of the articles on prayer and CPM, the emphasis seems to be placed on the church planter’s (singular) life of prayer, and rightly so.  However, because prayer is foundational to church planting movements (CPM), it is vital that we also pray in community, that we hold ‘concerts of prayer’ together.

concertofprayeropenartweb_edited-2Years ago, David Bryant wrote the book, Concerts of Prayer, in which he argued for prayer communities and offered a ‘format’ for hosting a concert of prayer.  What I pulled from the book could be simply stated: we need to pray together, in community.

Yes, it takes effort to pray with others.  It takes time to find the time; it takes time to walk, drive or take the scooter to someone else’s place; it takes time just to pray in a group.  It’s always ‘easier’ to pray by oneself, but because this is God’s mission, given to God’s people, it calls for God’s people together to pray.

The World Team Day of Prayer is coming up in just a few weeks.  I challenge each of us to be thinking of ways to ensure that we will be ‘in community’ that day to pray.  God will certainly enjoy the concert!

Filed under: Community, Prayer | Leave a comment »

Vital prayer

Posted on January 25, 2017 by wtdavid

I remember reading an article, a number of years ago, about the importance of prayer to church planting.  Well, I found that article today in the archives of Mission Frontiers magazine (http://www.missionfrontiers.org/issue/article/the-ten-universal-elements).  This is what the authors wrote in the March/April 2000 issue:

we-pray“1. Prayer: Prayer has been fundamental to every Church Planting Movement we have observed. Prayer typically provides the first pillar in a strategy coordinator’s master plan for reaching his or her people group. However, it is the vitality of prayer in the missionary’s personal life that leads to its imitation in the life of the new church and its leaders. By revealing from the beginning the source of his power in prayer, the missionary effectively gives away the greatest resource he brings to the assignment. This sharing of the power source is critical to the transfer of vision and momentum from the missionary to the new local Christian leadership.”

The authors of this article considered prayer as the ‘first pillar in a strategy coordinator’s master plan’.  Now that statement was written over seventeen years ago.  Yet, David Garrison in his work on church planting movements (CPM), came to the same conclusion just a few years ago when  he observed that prayer was the number one element in church planting movements; where there “was an urgency, passion, and vitality to believers’ prayers.”

This truth is ‘self-evident’, we might say.  However, I wonder if our practice might say otherwise.  Both Mission Frontiers and David Garrison noted the ‘vitality’ of believers’ prayers for churches to be established and multiplied.

Vitality might best be defined as: the power of enduring; and having a lively and animated character.  Prayer that supports and seeks the startup of multiplying communities of believers is prayer that goes the long haul; that regularly pleads for God to call out His own from a people group; and that is full of enthusiasm and hope in the promise that God will build His church.

Prayer is the ‘pillar’ of our work. Figuring out avenues to grow in prayer ‘vitality’ is part of the church planting process.

Filed under: Church planting, Guiding Principles, Prayer | 2 Comments »

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