40 Days of Prayer for United Methodist Campus Ministries

My friends Ashlee Alley and Creighton Alexander are excited about the fall. They are excited to know that as the colleges where they minister begin the fall semester there will be many who are praying for the students, faculty, and campus ministries at their institutions. They are encouraged to know that so many have expressed their enthusiasm by virtue of their Facebook group and through other conversations, and anticipate how God will move in the coming year.

Creighton and Ashlee understand that campus ministry is important. They also have recognized that many United Methodist leaders received their call to ministry during this crucial and formative time. Campus ministry is important. It serves as a link between the local church and the broader family of Methodism during a time where young people are discerning their identity, asking serious questions about the Christian faith, definitely thinking about career and perhaps thinking about family, and dreaming about where their life is headed. Solid campus ministries have the opportunity to encourage and equip college students for life in college and beyond, and are vital for the moral formation of our students during this season of life change. Campus ministry is important, and even if nobody cares about campus ministry, they should.

I would encourage you to check out the 40 Days of Prayer for Campus Ministry effort and lift your voice with other leaders. This initiative is a way to support and undergird the United Methodist Church’s effort to raise up and equip principled Christian leaders. Visit their Facebook page and sign up. Download the prayer guide here on August 10, or visit this web site for more information.

Join God’s people as we lift our voice.

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“I do not counsel people. I teach them to pray.”

Counseling is a responsibility of pastors.  Or so many would say. I have talked with friends who commonly meet with parishioners to listen to their struggles, whether they be emotional, spiritual, physical, relational, financial, or otherwise, and after listening they strive to then offer a word of wisdom, a bit of encouragement, or glimmer of hope.  Maybe they just offer presence.  One of my friends, Nicole, has sought to ask herself how she offers Christ to each person with whom she meets.  There is much to be commended in this posture.

This week, during my time away at the Renvoare’ Conference, I heard from Chris Webb.  Chris relayed a story of his time as an Anglican parish priest, in which a woman came to him to discuss the horrible end to her marriage–a terrible, ugly divorce.  She described how the relationship had deteriorated, how she had been destroyed by the actions of her husband, and how she was angry.  Before Chris could speak, she told him that she already knew what he was going to tell her to do.  She surmised that he was going to tell her to forgive.  She told him that she could not.

His reply surprised her.  He said, “I wasn’t going to tell you that, though I can see why that might have been your supposition.”  He continued, “I cannot help you to forgive,” he told her, “but as an Anglican priest I took vows to help you to pray.”  He explained to his hearers, “I did not take vows to offer counseling, but to teach people to pray.”

His next word of pastoral advice took her further by surprise.  He said, “Do you wish that your husband would die?”  She said, “Yes.”  He said, “pray that.”  She said, “What?”  He said, “Yes, I want you to pray that he should die.”

Chris then pointed to Psalm 55, a Psalm of David, a man after God’s own heart.  Beginning in verse 12, the Psalm reads, “If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it; if a foe were raising himself against me, I could hide from him.  But it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend, with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship as we walked with the throng at the house of my God.  Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the grave, for evil finds their lodging among them.”

This surprises us, of course.  But Chris challenged his hearers by saying that David was radically honest with God.  He told the truth about himself.  And God could handle it.  After seeing the woman who had suffered so greatly at the hands of another once some time had passed, Chris asked her how things were going.  She said she was still in prayer, but she doesn’t pray Psalm 55 anymore.  God had been working on her heart.  Those words no longer fit her emotions.  God had been at work healing her in the midst of her honesty.

There is a lesson for us there, for our own prayer lives and for our ministries.  Do we offer people counsel, or do we teach them to pray?  May we be those, like David, who are radically honest in our conversations with God, even when what we find there is unattractive, ugly, repulsive.  May we face our heartache, our pain, our hurt, our shortcomings, our sufferings, and be truthful to the one who is the Truth.

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Celebration and Reflection :: 40 Days of Prayer for The United Methodist Church

On the morning of March 14 God gave me a vision.  This was not a dream sequence or a moment I was taken up into the third heaven.  It was a moment where I was deeply impressed by a need for action–an action as simple as acknowledging through prayer that God is God and that Christians are called to be patient people.  I was impressed with the need to engage with God and with one another in the language of the church–prayer–and trust that if a new day were to dawn for Christianity within my neighborhood, my small town, my state, my nation, or my world, it would be because the Holy Spirit has already been at work in and around me.  It would be because the Kingdom of God is to be received.  It would be because God’s people had turned their hearts anew toward the one who had given them life, hope, love, faith, and salvation through Jesus Christ.  It would not be because of clever strategy or keen rhetoric.  God does not need us to accomplish his work, but we are wanted, and, indeed, invited to join in the work of the new creation.  

Being called to be part of the community called church, I wanted to invite others to engage God in prayer with and alongside me.  It so happens that at this time that community is called The United Methodist Church.

Thanks to all those who have given of themselves to bring together what is now a prayer effort uniting hundreds of people.  Thank you to Amy Forbus at the United Methodist Reporter, who mentioned us here, and to Interpreter Magazine, who has expressed interest in the UMYC website and the 40 day prayer effort.  Thanks to all the contributors, as well as the extended network of lay people and other ministerial leaders, including older clergy colleagues, who put up with my numerous email messages chronicling the progress of the work.  Thanks to those who have blogged about this effort, including those listed here.

Special thanks to Dustin Petz, Pastor of Goodland United Methodist Church in Goodland, Kansas, who’s request for advanced access to these materials for use on a radio spot led to this project being coalesced into booklet format.  Thanks to Victoria Hatterman as well for requesting use of some of these materials for her work in the Nebraska Annual conference.  Thank you to Jenny Smith for her tireless efforts in networking with her peers and friends to bring attention to this project on a larger scale, and for working closely with Chris Smith in developing the website and the prayer feed.  Thanks to Andrew Conard, a dear friend, who has encouraged me during this project, and who suggested the idea of publishing the work in book format.

Here are four ways you can join with us in prayer as we seek God’s direction for the people called Methodists:

 

• Join the Facebook Event.
• Download or buy a paperback copy of the Prayer Guide.  All profits will benefits NothingButNets (thus far we’ve sold 21 copies and raised enough money for 11 bed nets).  If you don’t want to buy a copy, go to their website and donate directly.
• Subscribe to the 40 Days RSS feed.
• Visit the UMYC website each day and pray with us.

 

I am not the first theologian to acknowledge that it is God who accomplishes all things in and through us by sheer, divine grace.  This work is evidence of this fact.  Thanks again to all who have helped make this project happen, and thanks and praise be to God for using me in this work.

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40 Days of Prayer :: Book Now Available!

Pick up a copy of the 40 Days of Prayer guide here.  I’ve been writing about this for a while now, and I’ll include more details in a few days.  I’m at a conference now, and I don’t have much time to write.  Paperbacks are available for $16.50, or you can download the book for $10.00.  All profits benefit NothingButNets.

The prayer effort goes live at the UMC Young Clergy website on Monday, May 18, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Thanks to all who have made this possible!  I’ll write more later, but wanted to put this out there tonight!

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40 Days of Prayer for The United Methodist Church

The past few months a network of young leaders within The United Methodist Church has formed around a common vision.  

Before we derive a strategy for the future, we must engage in the language of prayer.

Beginning May 18 a 40 day prayer campaign for The United Methodist Church will launch at the new United Methodist Young Clergy website.  Check it out.  Visit the prayer page and subscribe to the RSS feed so that you can join with us as we pray for God’s leading and direction.  Together, we will ask that God would strengthen our witness to Jesus Christ, help us to share the good news with friends, neighbors, and strangers, birth among us new communities of faith, and spur us on to good works of mercy, justice, and compassion.  We are praying that God would accomplish a mighty work among us, and that along the way we might be joined by others whom God calls into the service of ministry.

Thus far the campaign has gathered names of 88 people who are committed to pray alongside us during the campaign.  We are striving to add more.  If you are willing to pray with us, please add your name to the comment string below.

Here are some young United Methodist leaders who are contributing to the campaign that you can follow on Twitter:

• Ashlee Alley
• Julie Yoder Elmore
• Joseph Yoo
• Molly Simpson
• Chris Bennett
• Chad Foster
• David Camphouse
• Mike Holly
• Stephanie Gottschalk
• Josh Hale
• Jack Hinnen
• Jenny Smith
• Jim Morrow
• Justin Halbersma
• Jeff Slater
• Chris Henson
• Melissa Yosua-Davis
• Paul Gravely
• Nicole Conard
• Jeff Clinger
• Andrew Conard
• Ryan Davis

You can connect with me on Twitter here.  I will be managing the content for the campaign at the website and compiling the written prayers submitted by our group of leaders into an eBook.  This is exciting.  

My initial post from March 14 has had over 1,000 page views after circulating through Twitter and Facebook, and was also greatly helped by exposure at the Wesley Report and the Methoblog.  Thanks to Shane Raynor and Gavin Richardson for helping to spread the word.

Visit the new UMC Young Clergy website.  Subscribe to the RSS feed.  And pray with us.

All things are being made new.

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“Lord, May it Be Your Will to Give the Big Three a Handout!”

I woke up to this FoxNews headline today: “Detroit Church Prays for Bailout with SUVs at the Altar.”  Here is a portion:

With auto workers in the pews and sport-utility vehicles at the altar, one of Detroit’s largest churches on Sunday offered up prayers for Congress to bail out the struggling auto industry, Reuters reported.

“We have never seen as midnight an hour as we face this week,” the Rev. Charles Ellis told several thousand congregants at a rousing service at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple. “This week, lives are hanging above an abyss of uncertainty as both houses of Congress decide whether to extend a helping hand.”

Local car dealerships donated three hybrid SUVs to be displayed during the service, one from each of the Big Three. A Ford Escape, Chevy Tahoe from GM and a Chrysler Aspen were parked just in front of the choir and behind the pulpit.

I’m not quite sure what to think of this.

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Pray for your Quarterback.

For those that don’t know, Tim Tebow is the quarterback for the University of Florida Gators.

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On Relevance and Re-imagining

In recent years it has become increasingly popular to discuss “re-imagining” or “re-imaging” the life of faith, the form of the church, the gospel–the list could go on.  I’ve been an advocate of these conversations.  People are crying out that the church needs renewal, the gospel needs to be clearly preached, the name of Jesus needs to be named, and that his people need to recognize the costs that come with following him and take up their cross accordingly.  In North America, the waning of Christendom has left the church disoriented, yielding these cries, and we are unsure what to do.  Whatever we’ve tried, many of our efforts have focused on being relevant.

In his book Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance, Os Guinness observes that during a time in which the church has sought to become increasingly relevant, it has been relegated to irrelevance.  In the book he examines the pressures which our current understanding of clock-time has placed upon the church, and advocates a form of resistance thinking that “balances the pursuit of relevance on the one hand with a tenacious awareness of those elements of the Christian message that don’t fit in with any contemporary age on the other.”  As Christian people, Guinness claims that true faithfulness will lead to our being an untimely people. In this book, Guinness identifies the focus of his inquiry by saying:

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world that are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance.  Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant.

These words are jarring, not so much to the church (though I might suspect this as well), but to me as a leader.  At one time or another I have contended that we don’t need to make the Bible, the church, Jesus, or the life of discipleship relevant–it already is.  I simply have to live in faithfulness to Jesus, invite others into that life, trust that God will draw others by his grace, and the relevance of the gospel will be made apparent.  At other times I’ve been frustrated with the church and with my own ministry because there are so many obvious things that we must do differently if we are to reach those in our world.  In these moments I’ve talked about the need to re-imagine, re-envision, and re-cast who we are to be as the people of God.  I’ve trumpeted our need for relevance over our need for God.

In light of ongoing conversations concerning how we can re-imagine church this book created a good deal of dis-ease.  Among others, this quote from Guinness provided me with a kick in the gut:

Is the church ours to reinvent, or is it God’s?  Does the head of the church have anything to say, or do the consultants have the last word?  Shouldn’t ‘doing church’ follow from what we believe is the church’s being?  Was the church first invented by a previous generation, so that it is our job to do it again, or is the church’s real need for the revival and reformation that can only come from God?

Guinness then encourages his readers to consider prayer, and the immense importance which this practice has held for all renewal and reform movements.

Though I think such efforts to re-imagine church are needed during our time, Guinness’ words have provided an immense challenge in how such efforts should be undertaken.  First, I am reminded to pray.  Second, I’m reminded how obsessed our culture is with the future–with the next thing–so much so that we cut ourselves off and forget to study and understand our past.  This doesn’t mean that we should cease the task of casting vision, but perhaps it means that we should become intensely focused on rooting ourselves in our past.  The pursuit of such knowledge, I think, would bolster our ability to discern where we now stand.  When church history reflects on our time period, we can only hope that it is said we “understood the times” as did the sons of Issachar (1 Chron. 12:32), who no doubt were perceptive thanks in part to the wisdom they’d gained from their ancestors.

For those out there in pursuit of relevance, who possess a deep desire to see the church live faithfully during our time, I pray that we would first seek God in prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to work through the conversations we have with friends, fellow disciples, and our congregations about being the church today.  I would also recommend a consideration of how we as Christians can become what Guinness describes as “untimely people,” possessing a sense of maladjustment like that of the prophets, who were seen as out of sync with their surrounding culture but clearly in tune with God, and thus able to point their world to renewed faithfulness.

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Taking Matthew 5:44 Seriously

Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.
-Jesus, Matthew 5:44

Today I came across this article in the Baptist Standard which pointed me to an interesting initiative.  Thomas Bruce, an Army Reserve Chaplain, founded “Adopt a Terrorist for Prayer,” a website which encourages and invites followers of Jesus to undertake something quite radical–the practice of his teachings. 

If you read the site, you’ll find that one of the objects of prayer is the conversion of radical Islamic terrorists to Christianity.  Not only is Bruce asking for participants to pray for peace between terrorists and their targets, but for a complete change in religious affiliation by those persons who lead these terrorists networks.

I find this quite interesting.  What do you think?

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Live Fast…and Pray Fast?

Pretty fascinating ad from Diesel.  This reminds me of a quote from The Forgotten Ways.

I was trained as a marketer and advertiser before I came to Christ, and when I look at the power of consumerism and of the market in our lives, I have little doubt that in consumerism we are now dealing with a very significant religious phenomenon.  If the role of religion is to offer a sense of identity, purpose, meaning, and community, then it can be said that consumerism fulfills all these criteria.  Because of the competitive situation of the market, advertisers have become so insidious that they are now deliberately co-opting theological ideas and religious symbols in order to sell their products.  But this co-opting is merely incidental or functional; in so doing it is acting consistently with its own nature, namely that of the official priesthood of a new and all-pervasive religion.  The assimilation of religious symbols and rituals merely serves to bolster its appeal to the spiritual dimension of life.  An advertising executive recently confessed to me that they are now deliberately stepping into the void that was left by the removal of Christianity from Western culture. (Hirsch, 107, emphasis mine)

Interesting stuff, huh?  Your own thoughts?

PS: As a bonus, you can check out more from Alan Hirsch here.

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