Why do we do that?

When I first went to Mauritania I was briefed on the quarterly reports.   These were huge pieces of deep number crunching and narrative that our overstretched volunteer staff were sending to USAID.  And we were behind with them, and it was a stress.  And when's the deadline?  I asked.   Well, there wasn't one, technically.   We weren't obliged to send them in.   We never sent another quarterly report.

Janice and I have been reading Francis Chan's 'Letters to the Church'.   Here's really radical about asking 'what do we do on Sunday?'.   Read scripture aloud.   Spend as much time praying as you do preaching. Break bread more often.    It sounds like the Bible!


When we first went to TCC, we reviewed everything, including Sunday, with the team there.  We looked at the aims, and came up with something like: to teach the word of God,  to express the vision of who we are as a community,  to pray, to worship, to be a point of invitation.  TCC had borrowed patterns from Platt and we tried to think how we needed to be a little different.

We in Hope Church have maybe been borrowing patterns from TCC.   We've had great worship leading.  Good teaching.   People have grown in their gifts.   But how can we reach those aims in the paragraph above.   Are we missing something?   Or am I being too restless?  How can we tweak things to speak of the kingdom?

I know y'all don't comment too much on this, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this...............

Teach us to pray

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

What does it take for someone to go from unbelief into maturity, how do we go about helping them?

In a big church, you'll have a group of programmes, or a programme of groups, and you hope that people will connect with those groups and programmes and learn. Fair enough.

We're not a big church.   The disadvantages of this can be obvious.   But the advantage is that we can look out for one another, invest time into people, getting to know them and building friendships.  Our programmes won't be as good, but our relationships can be stronger.

Those relationships can, and often should, have an intention: to help our friends grow closer to God. And prayer is a key component of that.  In fact, if we don't put prayer into that friendship, we can accidentally end up communicating a Kingdom of talk without power.

It's really challenging, because most of think that our own prayer lives couldn't teach anyone anything.   So ask other people to help you pray, as this disciple did. And help others to pray, with whatever you've got, as Jesus (who admittedly had a LOT) did.

Ask yourself the question: who can help me pray?  And who can I help to pray?

Ends with famous Charles Spurgeon quote........."I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach."