This, about Mike—a radically-converted Kenyan street orphan, who was later radically healed from a fatal condition:
Mike’s instinctive approach to church planting had been simple. He gathered a dozen friends in a room, and they prayed nonstop for forty days. The two who didn’t have jobs had to cover most of the night shifts by themselves, as well as ferry the others to their prayer slots in a beaten up old car. But they did it. They just assumed that this was the way you should plant a church.
After forty days they went out and began to preach. On the first day, “absolutely nothing happened.” … But where we might have found this discouraging, especially after so much prayer, that was not in Mike’s mindset. “We knew that we had broken through after all that prayer,” he recalled with a typically African outlook, “we just had to keep going until it happened.”
… Mike’s church, planted through prayer, grew quickly and now had several hundred members, including a local politician.
The lesson? Less committees, more prayer.
And this, Greig quotes from Billy Graham’s autobiography Just As I Am:
The evangelistic harvest is always urgent. The destiny of men and of nations is always being decided. Every generation is crucial; every generation is strategic. But we cannot be held responsible for the past generation and we cannot bear full responsibility for the next one. However, we do have our generation! God will hold us responsible at the judgment seat of Christ for how well we fulfilled our responsibilities and took advantage of our opportunities.
Greig goes on to comment on it:
The opportunities presenting themselves to us at the dawn of the third millennium are no longer those of the great, post-war stadium rallies. Our opportunities are those of the World Wide Web, budget travel, the rise of tribalism, and the postmodern desire for community, authentic spirituality and social justice.
Next, think about your local congregation and then consider this statement:
I’m convinced that some churches would cease to exist if they were to cancel the Sunday service.
You may think, “Well… duh… Of course it wouldn’t exist… we wouldn’t be having church anymore!” Churches are losing member’s in hoards because of that very fact. Church was never meant to take place once or twice a week in a building. Those desiring “community and authentic spirituality” don’t find it in the context of attending weekly productions, complete with a cast and program. That’s called BROADWAY!
Isaiah 62:6-7, 10-12:
I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem;
They shall never hold their peace day or night.
You who make mention of the LORD, do not keep silent,
And give Him no rest till He establishes
And till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.Go through,
Go through the gates!
Prepare the way for the people;
Build up,
Build up the highway!
Take out the stones,
Lift up a banner for the peoples!
Indeed the LORD has proclaimed
To the end of the world:
“Say to the daughter of Zion,
‘Surely your salvation is coming;
Behold, His reward is with Him,
And His work before Him.'”
And they shall call them The Holy People,
The Redeemed of the LORD;
And you shall be called Sought Out,
A City Not Forsaken.
