Why pay the price for Unity? -- Phil Tiews

A Broken BrideThe wedding march swells as all eyes turn toward the back of the church in anticipation of the Bride’s grand entrance.  The Groom’s heart swells, too, as He eagerly awaits His love’s coming forth to be joined together forever.  There is a scuffling sound and down the aisle scurry two feet beautifully adorned in white satin shoes.  They are followed by a pair of legs, but before they can make it to the front, they are overtaken by arms, each with hands waving for attention.  The torso comes next, hopping and rolling forward awkwardly, but forcing a place in the middle of the appendages due to its greater size.  Lastly the head processes, chin held high in a sense of dignity and beauty, at least as high as it can be given the absence of a neck which refused to take a subordinate position and is up first, glad to be ahead for once.  As the various members of the body of the Bride jockey for position closest to the Groom, the look of pain and grief on His face, still mingled with undying love, can only be imagined.

The Bible tells us that all God’s work in history is moving toward the great wedding feast of the Lamb when Jesus will have His heart’s desire, to be married eternally to the Bride the Father promised and He purchased by His own blood.  If the wedding were to take place today, I am afraid that it would be more like the one pictured above than the glorious feast of Revelations.  Jesus’ Beloved is divided along theological, racial, ethnic, and cultural lines.  She is further broken by disputes, prejudices, and damaged relationships.  What cause we have for mourning and humiliation over her state!

In our shame and consternation, though, there is great reason for rejoicing.  God promises that

…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.  Eph 5:25-27

Jesus will complete the work He began on the cross, removing stain, wrinkle, blemish – to say nothing of brokenness and division – so that on the great wedding day, the Bride will be radiant.  We live in trust in His power and love to bring this transformation about.  And in the meantime we cooperate with every movement of the Spirit in our lives to prepare us for that day. 

This is the first reason that we are an ecumenical community.  We are looking for the day when the Bride will reflect in her wholeness, devotion and radiance the love which flows from Jesus to us.  Only God can resolve the divisions and heal the brokenness, but we can cooperate with the grace He has extended to us to walk out in a limited way that Bridal radiance by loving and serving each other across lines of church, tradition, culture and more.  Christian unity is not an exercise in tolerance; it is the heart response of the Bride as she is being prepared to be presented to her Groom.

A Team Divided on Itself There is a second motivation for our investment in unity.  Imagine an all-star football team, something like the NFL Pro-Bowl.  Representatives from many teams have assembled, a few from the Patriots, several from the Eagles, only one from some teams, but each gifted and accomplished in their own way.  The whistle blows and the ball is kicked off, the game begins.  But there is something wrong here.  The Colt quarterback will only throw to the tight end because he is also a Colt, ignoring all the other receivers.  Meanwhile the right tackle decides he won’t block for the running back because his team was beaten badly by the back’s team earlier in the year.  So it goes, players working with those from their own teams or a few others who they like for one reason or another, but without any overall unity or cohesion.  You know what the result will be, a shellacking of the All-Pros by the All-Foes.

We are in a contest far more serious than any Pro-Bowl – a war for the souls of men and the revelation of the kingdom of God on the earth.  Our spiritual enemies take advantage of the gaps in our lines and those who we hope to reach pull back because the message of the Gospel is marred by the rancor of the messengers toward one another.  Jesus said

 I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me? John 17:20-21

The world looks at us to see what they can learn about Jesus.  When they see a unity rooted in the love for one another such as the Father and Son have for each other, Jesus says it will be a sign testifying to Him. 

A Family Discovered We find ourselves in the back of a van on a long trip.  Around us are all these other kids who look different and act different than we do, and who frankly are beginning to get on each other’s nerves.  We cry out to the Driver, ‘Dad, these kids are bothering us!’, only to hear, to our shock, all the other kids crying the same thing!  Something is wrong here.  Where did Dad pick up all these others and why are they on the family trip with us and who do they think they are addressing our Father as ‘Dad’.  Just then Dad turns around and shouts “Don’t make me stop this car and come back there!!!” – no just kidding!  Dad actually turns around and addressing all of the kids at once says (adjusting the pronouns just a bit):

¹⁹You love because I first loved you. ²⁰Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. ²¹The commandment you have from Me is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. 1 John 4:19-21

A third reason that we are an ecumenical community is that those who have known the love of God and love Him in response, also must love what He loves.  And it turns out that what He loves are all those other folks who are alive in His Son, Jesus, but are not like us!  We have discovered that in Jesus we are all brothers and sisters, children in the same family and we can’t do a thing about it.  Now, like it or not, we need to love one another!  But actually, the more we are conformed to the image of Jesus, the more we like it!  We might not agree, but we don’t need to agree in order to love.  If we did, marriage would never work!  We just need to lay our lives down for one another as Jesus did for us.

A Costly Calling It is costly to be an ecumenical community.  It is simpler and more efficient to work with those who agree with us theologically, organizationally, culturally.  And God loves and blesses the different expressions of his Church on the earth who share these traits in common.  But he has blessed and honored us with a costly call – to try to express in our limited way that unity which we shall all someday have in fullness at the wedding feast of the Lamb.  Living this call is inconvenient, it makes extra demands on our schedules, at times we hurt or aggravate one another – but it is worth it!  We get to experience imperfectly, in humility, but prophetically the oneness for which Jesus prayed, hopefully as an encouragement and a testimony to the whole Body of Christ. 

Bless One Another -- Martha Balmer

Blessing and the Call to UnityI don’t remember when I first developed my passion for ecumenism. I suspect the seed of it was planted when I was conceived. But at some point, when I was perhaps in my late teens, I think God touched it and it burst into bloom. I felt I was made to reconcile and bridge. When I put my hand to the cause of unity, it fit me like my own skin. It is a part of God’s heart that he has shared with me, a facet of his image that he made me to reflect.

As I suppose any of us do with regard to our personal passions, I experience things that affect unity or division very deeply. Setbacks can inspire painful levels of grief, and victories provoke joy and gratitude that is nearly inexpressible. It seems to me that my spirit is always on the alert for signs of reconciliation, because whenever I witness or hear about one, whether as small as a personal conversation or as large as a Pope’s act of repentance, I cannot observe it passively.  My heart leaps and all my faculties fix on it. It’s personal. It has happened to me. I have to rejoice; I have to praise God; I have to bless it.

I believe that this nearly visceral need I have to touch moments of unity by blessing them has its origin in the Holy Spirit. I am convinced that there is a profound connection between blessing and the healing of the Body of Christ.

Learning about the Power of Blessing It’s tempting to think that ‘blessing’ seems pretty passive, just a well-meaning word that has no more power to bridge centuries of denominational mistrust than a chorus of ‘It’s a Small World’ has to reverse continental drift. But I’m not talking about just saying ‘God bless you’ to someone. Like real loving, real blessing is not so much something you feel or say as something you do, probably in as many ways as there are people to bless. And it is the acts of blessing that do the work of dismantling walls, building bridges, healing wounds, and reconciling hearts.

At some point a few years ago, I heard God tell me to start encouraging my fellow Christians to bless one another. Looking back, I think the Lord tilled my heart for this word, preparing me to understand it by exposing me to acts of blessing that showed me their powerful reconciling potential. He primed me to appreciate them.

The first and most important such exposure happened when I was serving on the prayer ministry team at the Catholic renewal weekend in Sarnia, Ontario several years ago. As a Protestant with an ecumenical itch, I’ve always loved serving in Catholic contexts, but at this one, I had a seminal experience of the kind of blessing I believe God intends for us to practice.

During a talk that afternoon, a young priest told the story of his meeting with a Protestant minister in his city. The minister had requested the lunch appointment, and while they were eating together, he disclosed to the priest that he had been brought up in a Catholic family. He went on to confess that when he was very young he had had a profound sense that God was calling him to the priesthood. He had responded to this sense with a promise to the Lord to become a priest. As a young adult, however, he wandered away from his relationship with the Lord. Eventually, he recommitted his life to Christ through the evangelistic efforts of Protestants, married, entered seminary and finally became ordained as a pastor. But now he was eaten up with guilt. Unable to forget his early promise, he was now nagged by the thought that he had broken his vow and that God could never really be pleased with his ministry or his marriage. The priest responded with a compassion that the minister may have hoped for, but the words he spoke had a more powerful affect than mere sympathy could ever have achieved. He reached out to the minister and said, ‘You have fulfilled your vocation.’

Those words lifted a burden of guilt in a way that I suppose any Catholic might expect priestly words of absolution to do. But because of the denominational gap, and because they did not come with any conditions, they were an act of blessing with more reconciling power than the priest who spoke them may have imagined.

Certainly he didn’t suspect the affect they had on me. I wept. I was overcome with a personal gratitude to this priest. I felt as though I myself had been unburdened, as though my own ministry had been declared valid and valuable. I felt that a subtle but solid barrier that had stood between this Catholic and me, a barrier that had gone all but unnoticed because it had been accepted and taken for granted, had suddenly crumbled.

I had been blessed.

The Call to Bless One Another As I look back on that moment, it amazes me that I knew I was experiencing a blessing. I don’t remember anyone actually using that word at the time. But the experience was so profound, so tangibly of the Spirit, that I can literally call it a defining moment. Through that experience, the Holy Spirit provided me with a definition of blessing far beyond any of the hollow impressions I had had up to that point.

But I got a lot more than a definition; I got a foretaste of my heart’s desire. That blessing had the power to unite far more than two individual men. I know this because it carried an anointing of reconciliation that touched me and is still reverberating in my life. It left me with an increasingly tender heart toward my Catholic brethren and a reasonable hope for the unity of all Christians. It left me with an irrepressible desire to emulate it. And it left me with a mandate from the Lord to tell all my brothers and sisters in Christ to bless one another.

Interdenominational Blessing -- Martha Balmer

I am absolutely confident that the Lord is calling Christians of all denominations to bless one another across the denominational lines that separate them. I believe that this mandate has a glorious purpose beyond anything we have imagined possible for the Church as we know it. Doctrinal arguments, cultural biases and historical resentments all have a very real hold on the Church’s throat, but in our lifetime we have seen an outpouring of grace for unity across denominational lines that as far as I can tell is unprecedented. I believe that the exhortation to mutual blessing is not only authentically prophetic, but that it is being delivered on a tidal wave of this timely grace. If we obey and bless one another, we will see a greater harvest than we can plant—a restoration of the Body of Christ that our imaginations are too limited to picture. If we hope to be obedient to this word, we need to make a decision to turn our current church-view over to God for a possible overhaul.

Implications of being the Body The Apostle Paul loved to liken the Church to a human body. In I Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4, and Romans 12, he used this image to illustrate both our variety and our unity because the metaphor worked on so many levels. We are a single body, made up of many distinct organs that perform essential and interdependent functions for the health of the whole. None of us can survive alone, and each of us is necessary to the others.

It is a fairly simple thing, and quite correct, to apply these passages to the local church body, since the gifts Paul lists are all ministries that may belong to individuals or to small groups of believers in a single congregation. It is also easy to apply them to an entire denomination, with its governing body, delegated ministries, and missionary efforts. But in order to bless one another interdenominationally, we need to apply these passages interdenominationally. I don’t believe that Paul intended to exclude their application to the worldwide Church in all its diversity.

Such an application is not far-fetched, because Paul himself uses the body illustration in a greater sense. We are not just any old body. We are the Body of Christ— male, female, Jew and Greek, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free. Since our Lord’s ascension, we together are His incarnation to the world. A lot rests on our health and well being. Christ himself prayed for our unity (John 17), and Paul’s pastoral letters are full of exhortations and instruction specifically aimed at encouraging or restoring the unity of the body.

Unity under attack So much rests on our unity, in fact, that our Enemy has been waging an intense battle against it since the Church’s earliest days. Satan has attempted to tear the Bride limb from limb and has had great success, as any perusal of Church history will prove. The first century Christians were repeatedly harassed by division (see for instance I Corinthians 1:10-12, Acts 15, Philippians 4:2-3, and I Corinthians 11:17-22). Doctrinal arguments rose over the ensuing centuries, along with geographical and political divisions that finally did split the church into East and West. Infighting and corruption within the western church even resulted in the short-lived embarrassment of having three simultaneous popes in the early 15^th century. Eventually, with the Reformation—like a man who allowed himself to commit a sin for the first time and then never again enjoyed his former level of self-control—the Church began to splinter into its current, multi-denominational form.

But for those who love God and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for good, even things our enemy meant for our destruction.

Looking back at our history, it is possible to see that many times our conflicts and alienation chastised us, eventually producing the very reforms that we had so vehemently resisted. (Catholic clergy no longer sell indulgences, and Methodist churches no longer charge a fee for the use of a pew, for instance.) And though sometimes we seem to have become so different that we can no longer see any family resemblance, isn’t it the gaps between us that have brought our varied gifts into sharper focus and often made us painfully—and fruitfully—aware of our insufficiency? Could it be irrelevant, for instance, that during the last century so many liturgically conservative denominations had an influx of Pentecostal experience?

Together reflecting His glory We are not meant to function on our own. At the very least, none of us is attractive to the whole pool of the unconverted. Some of us excel in scholarship, others in evangelism, others in prophecy and still others in ministry to the poor. Some of us are liturgical, some spontaneous, some mystical, some pragmatic. Some of us lean into tradition and others tend toward innovation. Some of us are pacifists. Some of us are militant. Some of us love simplicity and others delight in lavish expressions of praise.

I guarantee that if we are meant to reflect the complete image of Christ, none of us can possibly imagine the richness of variety we will have to contain. God is greater than we think, and more than any of us can represent alone. Our personal experience, tradition, culture or taste cannot possibly encompass his attributes, and yet he has called us to reflect his glory.

I suspect we can pretty much take for granted that none of us will be comfortable with all of it. I doubt that any of us is currently capable of complete fearlessness at the prospect of genuine unity. Our opinions are strong and have centuries of history behind them. In my experience, for example, the average Protestant can’t tolerate the idea (I’m putting this mildly) that the Body of Christ is ultimately meant to look Roman Catholic. Likewise, no devout Catholic can envision the solution otherwise. Pentecostals may be unable to imagine that our restoration could possibly include “dead ritual,” and Lutherans might shudder at the possibility of unfettered “disorder.”

Gaining through giving I believe that the essential function of the acts of blessing God has prepared for us is to restore the mutual benefit of each part to the whole. The prospect before us is not one of loss, as though we were being asked to give up the very distinction that we love about ourselves. It is rather a prospect of riches unimaginable, as we receive from one another out of our storehouses and find ourselves able to do all things in the One who strengthens us.

I believe that as we contemplate the restoration that mutual blessing will bring, our greatest temptation will be fear. But if we entrust the results to God, we know we are committing ourselves to someone who is absolutely trustworthy—and whose ultimate plan for us is not only utterly good, but also simply right. What greater aspiration could we have as a people than to reflect His image purely at last? As the Apostle John wrote, “Dear friends… what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when it is made known, we shall be like Him.” (I John 3:2)

Ecumenical Vision

A Broken BrideThe wedding march swells as all eyes turn toward the back of the church in anticipation of the Bride’s grand entrance.  The Groom’s heart swells, too, as He eagerly awaits His love’s coming forth to be joined together forever.  There is a scuffling sound and down the aisle scurry two feet beautifully adorned in white satin shoes.  They are followed by a pair of legs, but before they can make it to the front, they are overtaken by arms, each with hands waving for attention.  The torso comes next, hopping and rolling forward awkwardly, but forcing a place in the middle of the appendages due to its greater size.  Lastly the head processes, chin held high in a sense of dignity and beauty, at least as high as it can be given the absence of a neck which refused to take a subordinate position and is up first, glad to be ahead for once.  As the various members of the body of the Bride jockey for position closest to the Groom, the look of pain and grief on His face, still mingled with undying love, can only be imagined.

The Bible tells us that all God’s work in history is moving toward the great wedding feast of the Lamb when Jesus will have His heart’s desire, to be married eternally to the Bride the Father promised and He purchased by His own blood.  If the wedding were to take place today, I am afraid that it would be more like the one pictured above than the glorious feast of Revelations.  Jesus’ Beloved is divided along theological, racial, ethnic, and cultural lines.  She is further broken by disputes, prejudices, and damaged relationships.  What cause we have for mourning and humiliation over her state!

In our shame and consternation, though, there is great reason for rejoicing.  God promises that

…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.  Eph 5:25-27

Jesus will complete the work He began on the cross, removing stain, wrinkle, blemish – to say nothing of brokenness and division – so that on the great wedding day, the Bride will be radiant.  We live in trust in His power and love to bring this transformation about.  And in the meantime we cooperate with every movement of the Spirit in our lives to prepare us for that day. 

This is the first reason that we are an ecumenical community.  We are looking for the day when the Bride will reflect in her wholeness, devotion and radiance the love which flows from Jesus to us.  Only God can resolve the divisions and heal the brokenness, but we can cooperate with the grace He has extended to us to walk out in a limited way that Bridal radiance by loving and serving each other across lines of church, tradition, culture and more.  Christian unity is not an exercise in tolerance; it is the heart response of the Bride as she is being prepared to be presented to her Groom.

A Team Divided on Itself There is a second motivation for our investment in unity.  Imagine an all-star football team, something like the NFL Pro-Bowl.  Representatives from many teams have assembled, a few from the Patriots, several from the Eagles, only one from some teams, but each gifted and accomplished in their own way.  The whistle blows and the ball is kicked off, the game begins.  But there is something wrong here.  The Colt quarterback will only throw to the tight end because he is also a Colt, ignoring all the other receivers.  Meanwhile the right tackle decides he won’t block for the running back because his team was beaten badly by the back’s team earlier in the year.  So it goes, players working with those from their own teams or a few others who they like for one reason or another, but without any overall unity or cohesion.  You know what the result will be, a shellacking of the All-Pros by the All-Foes.

We are in a contest far more serious than any Pro-Bowl – a war for the souls of men and the revelation of the kingdom of God on the earth.  Our spiritual enemies take advantage of the gaps in our lines and those who we hope to reach pull back because the message of the Gospel is marred by the rancor of the messengers toward one another.  Jesus said

 I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me? John 17:20-21

The world looks at us to see what they can learn about Jesus.  When they see a unity rooted in the love for one another such as the Father and Son have for each other, Jesus says it will be a sign testifying to Him. 

A Family Discovered We find ourselves in the back of a van on a long trip.  Around us are all these other kids who look different and act different than we do, and who frankly are beginning to get on each other’s nerves.  We cry out to the Driver, ‘Dad, these kids are bothering us!’, only to hear, to our shock, all the other kids crying the same thing!  Something is wrong here.  Where did Dad pick up all these others and why are they on the family trip with us and who do they think they are addressing our Father as ‘Dad’.  Just then Dad turns around and shouts “Don’t make me stop this car and come back there!!!” – no just kidding!  Dad actually turns around and addressing all of the kids at once says (adjusting the pronouns just a bit):

¹⁹You love because I first loved you. ²⁰Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. ²¹The commandment you have from Me is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. 1 John 4:19-21

A third reason that we are an ecumenical community is that those who have known the love of God and love Him in response, also must love what He loves.  And it turns out that what He loves are all those other folks who are alive in His Son, Jesus, but are not like us!  We have discovered that in Jesus we are all brothers and sisters, children in the same family and we can’t do a thing about it.  Now, like it or not, we need to love one another!  But actually, the more we are conformed to the image of Jesus, the more we like it!  We might not agree, but we don’t need to agree in order to love.  If we did, marriage would never work!  We just need to lay our lives down for one another as Jesus did for us.

A Costly Calling It is costly to be an ecumenical community.  It is simpler and more efficient to work with those who agree with us theologically, organizationally, culturally.  And God loves and blesses the different expressions of his Church on the earth who share these traits in common.  But he has blessed and honored us with a costly call – to try to express in our limited way that unity which we shall all someday have in fullness at the wedding feast of the Lamb.  Living this call is inconvenient, it makes extra demands on our schedules, at times we hurt or aggravate one another – but it is worth it!  We get to experience imperfectly, in humility, but prophetically the oneness for which Jesus prayed, hopefully as an encouragement and a testimony to the whole Body of Christ. 

God's Kingdom On Earth -- Phil Tiews

For three decades I have been part of a group of pastors and ministry leaders praying together for our County.  Initially our focus was on Christian unity and we met once a month.  But as important as that need is, the Spirit would not let us contain Him and He expanded our hearts to include all the County, and all the people in the County and all the concerns of Jesus, the King of Washtenaw County.  This is what I think of when I talk about ‘transformation’ —  that our County would come to express the life of the Kingdom of God, not only in every church, but in every home, and business, and school, and neighborhood.  That early group of praying pastors had our hearts ignited by seeing the videos about transformation taking place in cities and regions and even nations around the world.  Most recently we have been encouraged by seeing what God is doing in the island nation of Fiji.

Is it too much to ask for?  Are we being ‘unrealistic’ or ‘spiritually greedy’ or delusional?  I don’t think so.  Jesus taught us to pray ‘your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven’.  What else can this mean except a complete transformation of human life as we live it in the society of the United States to be the society of the King of Kings?

It is a huge prayer.  It is hard to have faith for it to be answered.  I find the Spirit encouraging me to remember that Jesus told me to pray this way, that the God to whom we pray is the maker of heaven and earth, and that people in places around the world are experiencing substantial, miraculous answers to this very prayer for their areas.

The Word of God was birthed out of a movement of renewal.  The Lord gave us a vision for the renewal of the church.  That in itself is a gigantic prayer—and one with a long way to go before it is fulfilled.

Over the last number of years, I believe the Lord has been inviting us as a community to refocus our attention on this particular County in which He has placed us.  Without losing a concern for the renewal of the church, He has been giving us a heart to ask for the full transformation not only of the church, but also of the society of Washtenaw County. 

This is why we have invested in Pastors Alliance for County Transformation, in Hosanna and the 40 Days of Prayer, in IMPACT and Operation Jumpstart.  This is why the Lord has us planted in jail ministry and Hope Clinic, in Family Life Services and 12 step groups.

We are under no illusion that we are the only ones God is using to lead to transformation.  He is the one who passionately longs to thoroughly save.  He is organizing and empowering and bringing His Kingdom.  I think that all we can do is follow a simple strategy: surrender ourselves, join with all those who have a heart for transformation, pray, and obey. 

It doesn’t sound like a great strategy for organizational advancement, but I believe it is the way to Kingdom advancement in our midst.

Below you will find some thoughts on transformation by George Otis, Jr. who is the man behind the ‘Transformation’ videos.  I think they help to give vision for what we are praying for.

In Matthew chapter six Jesus declared to his disciples, “This is how you should pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done,  on earth as it is in heaven.”

With these brief words we are reminded that God’s presence and purposes are to be the central focus of human society. They are to be realized and promoted not in some limited, religious manner, but as they are in heaven. In the words of the prophet Isaiah we are to “give (ourselves] no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem (or Chicago, Richmond, London or Singapore) and makes her the praise of the earth” (Isaiah 62:6-7). We are to “renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations” (Isaiah 61:4). If we do this, Ezekiel promises, “the name of the city from that time on will be: THE LORD IS THERE” (Ezekiel 48:35). While many Christians assume transforming revival is about growing congregations, it is actually a matter of renaming or re-identifying our cities!

Because transforming revival is a principle-based enterprise we can anticipate what God will respond to—namely humility, holiness, repentance, prayer, worship, compassion, faith (II Chronicles 7:14, Isaiah 58:9-12, Isaiah 62:6-7, Hosea 6:3). This allows us to prepare the way of the Lord with confidence: “If my people will..” then “I will heal their land” There is no presumption here, only obedience. He has removed all mystery from the discussion. We can also safely predict what the fruit of transformation will look like—because, again, God’s Word describes it for us (Psalm 144:14, Isaiah 1:26, Acts 11:20-24, Acts 19:18-20) and because we have seen it in microcosm in the lives of redeemed individuals. What we cannot be certain of are the means by which God will accomplish his purposes. These are as unique as snowflakes, fingerprints, and... cities.

The concept of ‘transformation’ has its most relevant and compelling application however as a descriptor of God’s broad spiritual handiwork.  On a personal level He transforms our lives through the renewing of our minds (see Romans 12:2).  On a family level He recasts our relational dysfunction into models of mutual respect and support.  On a church level He replaces forms of godliness with genuine spiritual life and power.  And this is only the beginning.  In many parts of the world God’s transforming grace is now touching entire neighborhoods and villages.  Indeed there are even reports of newly transformed cities, regions and nations.

Although rapid and substantial church growth is an important part of these corporate transformations, it does not fully define them.  For the term transformation to be properly applied to a community, change must be evident not only in the lives of its inhabitants, but also in the fabric of its institutions.  In the end, it is dramatic social, political, and even ecological renewal that sets these cases apart from common experience. For the term transformation to be properly applied to a community, change must be evident not only in the lives of its inhabitants, but also in the fabric of its institutions. In the end, it is dramatic social, political, and even ecological renewal that sets these cases apart from common experience. In short, a transformed community is:

A neighborhood, city or nation whose values and institutions have been overrun by the grace and presence of God. It is a place where divine fire has not merely been summoned, it has fallen.  A society in which natural evolutionary change has been disrupted by invasive supernatural power and a culture that has been impacted comprehensively and undeniably by the Kingdom of God. A location where kingdom values are celebrated publicly and passed on to future generations!

George Otis, Jr. 

OFF THE WALL… Prayers & Passages from the walls at The Word of God 40 Days Prayer Room 3/21-23/09

Lord, in your will is our peace. May your will be done over all our county, our country, the world. Help us to truly see your will and carry it out with your grace and strength. Praise the Lord forever. The Lord is worthy!

Our prayer and God’s mercy are like two buckets in a well. While one ascends, the other descends. – Mary Hopkins

Be willing to help those who are coming to the Lord. Our help is in the Lord who made heaven and earth.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

John 3:17

May your will become for each one of us so impelling and attracting that we think of nothing else all day.

Let your hand be over the poor and needs.

Holy God, may you protect the people of this county. Keep us from harm and provide protection from the plans of destruction that our enemies have plotted. Give wisdom, understanding and discernment to those who provide protection.

How great is our God. How great is his name. How great is our God. Forever the same.

Stand with us in our city/county, oh Lord. You are the source of the living water that refreshes our parched land.

No city, no county is so far away from you that it cannot be brought back to you.

Lord, strengthen and purify your people and their love for you that we would be able to freely offer strength, love, and life to a dying world. Amen

If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us. Jesus said to him “if I can! Everything is possible to the one who has faith”. Then the boy’s father cried out, “I do believe, help my unbelief”.

Isa.61:1 The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.

Come Lord Jesus! Penetrate the darkness around us and in us. Let the light of your Holy Spirit saturate us and everyone in this county with the truth of your love. May truth and beauty and knowledge of your abundant mercy draw all men deeper into a relationship with you. May you be recognized as precious and entirely unique and set apart from every other god in this county.

Gloria in Excelses Deo!!

Our job is to share the gift. Our job is not to worry about what others will do with the gift.

We repent. Send us! We repent for letting fear hold us back. We repent for not fighting for you. We repent for our lack of faith. We repent for our prayerlessness.

We seek your presence -- nothing else will satisfy. The way ahead you must show, for without you, Lord our God, we will not go.

Lord, may your voice rise up in this county and block out all other voices not of you

Isa.40:3-4 A voice of one calling: "In the desert prepare the way for the LORD ; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain.

Arise, Shine. The glory of the Lord has risen on us.

I thirst

Jn.20:21 As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.

Increase our thirst for you, Lord!

Col.3 to be hidden with you in God

Your name is like honey on my lips … oh how sweet, how infinitely desirable are you. Your Spirit like water to my soul. Your word is a lamp to my path. Jesus I love you.

Phil.2:8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-- even death on a cross!

God loves us more than we can imagine. Alleluia! God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

Go into the world and preach the good news to all creation.

Zech.8:6 If it is too difficult in the sight of the remnant of these people in these days, will it also be too difficult in my sight? declares the Lord of Hosts. We are not the measure of what is possible – God is!!