What we need in the church is not merely more prayer activities, but a “culture of prayer.” The goal should be for the entire church to embrace prayer as the norm![1] Here are numerous ways to enrich the corporate prayer experience: Make prayer a prominent feature in your Sunday Morning Worship service. Include a pastoral…
DetailsThere are three kinds of churches. Some churches pray when there is a crisis. Other churches have a prayer ministry among other ministries. Finally, there are churches that seek to bring prayer to the center of every ministry, to everything the church strives to do and be. They want to become a house of prayer…
DetailsWe learn to pray by praying. It is more caught than taught. Nothing can replace being in the middle of a passionate prayer meeting. Listening to others pray, blending our voices with theirs, being infected with their passion, sharing their burden for the lost – we catch the spirit of prayer. Like taking coals of…
DetailsOver the past several weeks we have discussed the marks of an effective personal prayer life. This is the first of ‘four dimensions’ of prayer ministry. There are four critical components that, like cogwheels, interact with one another, yet each is separate and distinct. These four prayer concentrations of your prayer effort are: Personal, home-based,…
Details6. Prayer – As a Means of Filtering Toxic Thoughts Prayer is a soul filter. Alone with God in prayer, I am safe in pouring out my deepest feelings. Here, a therapy takes place. A cleansing comes. The Psalms give us blunt prayer language, full of despair and sometimes loaded with less than noble motives.…
Details1. Prayer and the Secret Place The practice of personal, at-home, daily prayer has reached an abysmal low. Prayer at church can’t replace prayer at home. When Christians do pray during the week, they pray on the run. No quality relationship can be sustained with such a low investment of time and priority. 2. Prayer…
DetailsI had been involved in ministry for over 25 years when I admitted to God that I didn’t understand prayer. Involved in the prayer summit movement, I spent days at retreat centers with pastors of almost every denomination. We prayed morning, noon and night. We encountered God. I was immeasurably enriched and forever changed. I…
DetailsA 300 year old church in Massachusetts faced a major challenge. Its ‘young people’ were in their ‘60’s. Their annual budget was $15,000. Most neighbors who passed the drab building with a drive-in congregation thought the church was closed. The neighborhood was now an Italian and Jewish enclave unlike the congregation of forty people with…
DetailsMost of us are trapped in what Paul Hiebert calls “cultural frames.” Doctors live in hospitals and medical settings, teachers in schools, bankers in banks, business people in shops, pastors in churches. These social enclaves create their own sub-languages. They give birth to membered associations, networks, anticipated roles and hierarchies, and economic-power structures. They share…
DetailsThe priests in the Old Testament were assigned, as were the Levites, to cities. They were required to live there. Priestly ministry was never confined exclusively to the temple. Priests were not to become other worldly. Ray Bakke, sociologist and missiologist, says that twenty-five types of urban ministry can be found in the historical books…
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