Vineyard Church of Knox County
Bathing the Church Plant in Prayer
(Most of this Cornerstone appeared in an earlier entry, but I think this message especially applies to us today.) Many of you know that my ministry life began just after graduating from college when I volunteered as a leader in a youth outreach called Young Life. Young Life began in 1939 by a seminary student named Jim Rayburn who had a great desire to share the good news of Jesus Christ with those kids who weren't showing up at his church youth group. This desire led him to do something radical: instead of trying to lure kids to his church, he would go where the kids were - to the High School.
As he thought about which high school to approach, he “randomly” decided to begin at Gainesville High School, a school over 60 miles from his seminary, a school farther away than several other schools in Texas. Why Gainesville?
Listening to Rayburn’s explanation, we learn why: “Across the street from the high school a group of elderly women had been meeting for six years, every Monday morning, getting down on their knees in the living room of dear old Mrs. Frazier’s. They prayed every Monday morning for six years, long before I ever heard of Gainesville, Texas, for the high-school kids across the street. I was there a year before I heard of that prayer meeting. That was the thing the Lord used to start it.”
“It” became the Young Life campaign, a ministry that today is active in all 50 states and in over 40 countries worldwide. I had the privilege of watching hundreds of teenagers move from death to life during my tenure in the ministry. Though Young Life officially began in 1939, few would argue against the fact that it was originally birthed six years earlier in Mrs. Frazier’s living room.
Rayburn went to Gainesville because six elderly women prayed. Tennyson wrote, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of”. for so the whole round earth is every way bound by gold chains about the feet of God.”
I understand that God is sovereign, but I also know that, “He is sovereign in chains,” as Ken Gire writes. “God has ordained His kingdom to come, but He has ordained it to come on the links of our prayers. Maybe that’s how every good thing from heaven comes: a chain of events forged from the seemingly inconsequential links of our prayers. A collective pull.”
As we transition to Sunday Morning Celebrations on a weekly basis (beginning September 21st), our preparation must be bathed in a “collective pull” of prayer from all of us. That is why we will be planning strategic prayer opportunities for us to engage in over the coming month, including home group prayer, prayer request bookmarks, email requests, and a prayer gathering on September 20th.
Please join is in prayer, because that’s the thing God will use to birth this church.
