Community Prayer Watch . . . Give Me Your Eyes

Yesterday, The Vine experimented.

We "went."

to Starbucks, Bob Evans, Walmart, Target, Klein's, Kohls, etc.

Our mission? To not "love our neighbor" in theory but to see actual faces of the people who live around us, work around us, play around us . . . and to ask God to help us love them like He does. We went out to pray and to begin to develop a heart, after God's own heart, for our neighbors. And yesterday was Sunday, which meant we were praying for many who choose to do something different on their Sunday mornings than go to church.

I took two of my kids to Walmart - to pray aisle by aisle and to be open if God wanted to use us to bless others. At first, it felt weird pushing an empty cart around Walmart - we were there for a higher purpose but I mean everybody else was there to shop! Then when we did put a few things in our cart, it felt weird because I felt like, why would we be shopping while we were praying? (Still have that nasty habit of compartmentalizing my spiritual life - left over from my days as a "Modern.")

After a morning of worship in the market place (yes worship - read Romans 12:1-2), we came back to Bel Air church to share our experiences. Everybody had a different story. All good. Some began to dream of how we could do ministry in the market place. "We need to begin hanging out at Starbucks - being available." Very cool . . . because that is the essence of missional - to go where people are and do worship (yes worship - have you read Romans 12:1-2 yet?) there rather than trying to get people to come to our worship in our building on our terms.

Alan Hirsch, my mentor from afar, says we have this missional DNA inside of us, but it is latent. It needs to be awakened. (a great book - The Forgotten Ways - read the review if nothing else) Yesterday, while everybody else went to worship, we WENT to worship. Go. Going. Matthew 28:19-20. Awakening latent missional DNA.

While in Walmart, without even realizing it, the words to the song below began flooding my heart. What if we prayed this everyday? "God, give me your eyes. . ."

Going shopping today? Tomorrow? Going out to eat? Paul says, "pray without ceasing . . ." I think I get it. And forty plus others get it too.

natural frequency

exponential conference 2008 - the day after

just got back from Orlando, FL at a church planters conference - three intense days of sessions, seminars and networking all geared around connecting church planters and reproducing churches to new ideas (and old ones), techniques, and technologies (plenty of vendors). one of the sessions was on blogging (why i'm here at blogger) but that's not why I write.

the conference was a lot like drinking water from a fire hydrant - ideas and competing ideas and (really) far too much stuff for my ADD brain to handle. one of the first sessions was on the tension between being an attractional church (build it and "they" will come) and an incarnational church ("they" won't come so we must hangout with "them") i wish i could unpack this because of course it is not nearly this simple and tidy and i don't like us-them thinking.

but what i did want to get at was this sense of who i (and my team) resonated with. being a former engineer, i've always been fascinated with the idea of natural frequency - that everything has a frequency at which at which it likes to vibrate (go into a bathroom stall and hum at various pitches until you hit a pitch where the stall starts to join you in song (i wouldn't recommend doing this when others are in the bathroom too)). you get the same affect from plucking a guitar string and having another vibrate or watch the youtube video of the Tacoma Bridge collapse. . .

(remember that video from high school physics? only one small dog was lost in the shooting of this video.)


anyway . . . back to the conference . . . i found myself really resonating with Alan Hirsch, Neil Cole, Andy Stanley, John Burke, Tim Keller, and Larry Osborne (almost forgot - Vince Antonucci.) and really going flat with others (even Rick Warren). i wonder if this had anything to do with personality and preferences, maybe theological bias, or whether just somewhere, deep in my soul, this is who God wired me to be and these speakers speak to the kind of church God is calling me to plant. they "struck a chord" - my natural frequency. we had three members of our core team there as well (a female clergy and lay couple) and they need to share their experiences as well.

so broke the first rule of blogging - keep it short - but hey, it's my first time.