In the Coracle
“It’s almost like you’re writing a book one post at a time” - Kedge
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Sunday Times article on the Healing Rooms
It was old-fashioned faith healing with a new twist: no promises, no proselytizing, no pressure for donations. Just simple prayer.
I have friends (and people who have committed to pray for our church) who are part of the prayer team at other Healing Rooms locations, and I blogged here last year about a visit to a local prayer time.
We’re a church who believes in healing prayer - or rather in a God who heals in concert with prayer.
By far our two greatest experiences as a church in the 1.0 version of Mt. Si Vineyard were seeing Terry and Patty come to faith in Jesus and grow with us, and also Lori’s healing from a diagnosis of cancer (still cancer-free another year down the road).
We have also invited area people to training times we’ve sponsored for healing prayer (blog entry 1 and entry 2).
I hope that the Lord blesses us with effectiveness in this area. And I like the Healing Rooms’ approach to this prayer focus.
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No Comments »When You Don’t Know What to Preach
Frequently I have no idea what to preach* about. Usually I have a Biblical text, or an understanding of what our need for spiritual formation is, but every so often I have no idea how a sermon can flow out of it. So in that circumstance usually I give up, bring the text to the group, and we discuss it together.
Last Sunday we did that. We did something of a cross between a group lectio divina with a guiding question.
We looked at Hebrews 10:19-12:3. I introduced it by saying that we wanted to practice, for the first weekend of Lent, the spiritual discipline of Listening. I asked people to practice listening to the text, to the voice of God for you in the text, and the voice of God for us in the text.
We read it three times. Each time was by a different person, and that person read the whole passage (and that’s a LONG passage).
The first time through I asked people to simply listen for a word or phrase that caught their attention. We read the passage, then sat in quiet for a minute or two, then shared what we heard.
The second time through I asked people to listen to what the Word might be saying to you individually, asking you either to do or to be. Again we read the passage, then sat in quiet for a minute or two, then shared what we heard.
The third time through I asked people to listen to what the Word might be saying to us as a church, asking us either to do or to be. Again we read the passage, then sat in quiet for a minute or two, then shared what we heard.
It was incredibly powerful. There were tears. There was also joy as one of our members who has a difficult struggle in his faith chose to read 3rd, and he did a wonderful job. There was encouragement, both for individuals and especially for us as a replanting church. I’m incredibly happy that I didn’t just hammer out a speech to give, but that we just went into this time asking to listen together.
There are really good lectio resources here including a good passage on group lectio. Note that usually, lectio divina considers a much smaller passage of Scripture, but for this weekend we were aiming for a different thing.
* I do the one-way “preaching”, the speech/lecture thing so infrequently it’s silly, but hopefully you get the drift
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2 Comments »Organic Prayer
Kevin Rains writes today about VBCC’s experience yesterday with prayer for healing. I’m happy to say that we continue forward in that realm as well - so I’ll add a mini-story as well.
I’ve written here previously about Lori. She remains cancer-free, > 12 months after her diagnosis. Lou and Lori, charismatic Lutherans for most of their lives, are a core part of our community and wonderful people. Lori’s story is one of our great victories in the past few years’ efforts.
During yesterday’s gathering (moved from 5pm to 1pm so that we could go watch the big football game afterward), we started with a few songs of worship, and afterward before we even enter into our regular time to listen for the voice of God in our midst, Jessica began to pray for Lori - though she is cancer-free, her lungs have been scarred by radiation. Once a lung cell is no longer pliable, it doesn’t recover. We gather around Lori to concentrate our prayer, and find that she’s having back and leg pain as well. This wasn’t strategically planned, and it didn’t even fit into our liturgy (such as it is). It just occurred, organically.
What happened? We don’t know. Lori felt loved, that happened for sure. Perhaps more happened. The Kingdom surrounds us.
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No Comments »Strategic Planning for Missional Churches :: Identify Your Sandbox
This is another part in the Strategic Planning for Missional Churches series. You can find the whole series by viewing this tag.
Part of the strategic planning process, and the one which allows you to scope and scale your effort, is the identification of the “sandbox” you want to play in. The goal in a profit-driven environment is to choose a sandbox (a target market) which is big enough to allow for profitable growth and yet not so large that you get lost in the crowd of competitors. Microsoft, early in its lifespan, chose the personal computer as its sandbox, and then expanded from the desktop to add portable devices when they needed a new challenge.
A missional church identifies the sandbox as the mission field. That’s a nice simple starting point, isn’t it? But here’s where things get a bit more difficult. A friend of mine who is a missionary in the classical sense is working in central Asia teaching in a local university while he also seeks to grow God’s kingdom. But he has to focus beyond that, and he is in a particular country (which I can’t name here because of political concerns). In that country, he works with a specific people group so that he can learn their language, culture and customs - and so that he can, over the long term, build friendship with people of peace among them, and let them see the Jesus in his life.
As our church goes through another iteration (reboot, reformat), we considered the idea of sandbox. We saw sandbox both as having a geographic and a social aspect. Here is what we see as our initial sandbox.
The areas and peoples we feel sent to are:
· North Bend, Snoqualmie and the surrounding semi-rural areas (specifically, not targeting Issaquah). Not people who would commute out, but people who live here.
· People in their 20s to 40s [central target; not inclusive, but implies worldview and stylistic choices] without a strong preconceived notion about what church “ought to beâ€
· Unchurched and churched people without structural and ecclesiological baggage
· People who want a faith that makes a difference in their world
· People with a sense of flexibility and experimentation (entrepreneurial, willing to go on an adventure)
· People who are seeking deep faith and realize that it may not always include simple answers.
· People who are willing to embrace mystery as part of God’s nature, realizing that God cannot be fully captured or described by our thoughts and wordsThis is partly a description of those who we are seeking to join us to grow the core portion of the church, and we will see a different skew in the fall as we focus our efforts reaching out to those with no grid of faith.
Where is God specifically sending you? Where is God sending your community? How do these areas overlap? Is it OK if the first isn’t a pure subset of the second?
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