Call to Prayer for a Community on Mission

In the worship service on Sunday, we took time to pray through our mission statement as a discipline of prayer and I wanted to include that prayer exercise in an email to the church. As a church, we have been committed to bringing our mission, community, and witness to prayer. We want to give that over to God and allow God to do the work that is necessary in our hearts and minds to best prepare us to be Christ’s hands and feet for the world.  As Pastor Michel said on Sunday, we cannot do that without regularly “plugging into the source” and recharging.  So, as we go through this prayer exercise, I invite you not to just approach this as a “what can I do” or “what am I not doing right” type of exercise, but one in which you open yourself up to God and allow the Holy Spirit to transform you into your prayer.  Richard Foster writes “In meditative prayer we are creating the emotional and spiritual space that allows God to construct an inner sanctuary in the heart.”  I pray that this exercise helps you partner with God to create that space. I invite you to take time (a few times) this week to pray through our mission statement as a church as we did on Sunday.  Listen to what God is inviting you into it.  If it helps (and it usually does) take some time to write down some thoughts during your intentional, meditative prayer time. Prayer Part One: Cultivate God’s Values in the World In this space we can use our “sanctified imagination” a little bit – imagining what your world would look like if you were able to live and share God’s values at all times with all people.  I invite you to think about your week and your activities. What have you done?  Where have you gone?  Who have you seen? Think about your relationships: your interactions with your family, your dealings with your neighbours and even those people that you just pass or drive by on the street.  As you think about those interactions try imagining them to have played out the way that God would have designed them to be.  If you were able to change those interactions or those situations, what would be different.  If God were going to rewrite them for you, how do you think they would have played out? This imagination can be a way that God can be communicating with you about what we should be striving for. Here are some questions that you could journal about:

• What do you notice about God’s intent for your world as you imagine what it could look like?
• What words come to mind when you think about God’s values appearing in your world?
• Where do you have opportunity to live those words out?
• What is one place you desire to see God’s values in your world today?  What could you do to cultivate that into reality?

Prayer Part Two:  Nurture a Community of Disciples As we prayed on Sunday, there are two components to this – community and discipleship!  Our community, as a people on a mission, is the center of our discipleship efforts.  What we do together in our community is done to nurture disciples and what disciples do is create community!  As we engage in community, we engage in nurturing our faith and the faith of others.  We give each other opportunity to love and be loved and that is at the heart of our walk with God.  Dallas Willard describes discipleship as being an apprentice of Jesus – of learning from him how he would live his life if he were you.  Our nurturing community wants to create room for that nurture to happen.  We need to be open to that nurture, that call to discipleship and that commitment to community.

• Who has discipled you?  Or phrased differently: Who has helped you to become more like Jesus?  Where do you see Jesus in their life and how do you see that growing in yours?
• How are you investing in the Green Timbers Community?  How have you served in the past?  How are you serving now? How invested are you in Sunday worship?  Have you noticed others doing more than their share?  Is that noticing of this a nudge for you to get involved?
• What would be helpful for you right now? What do you need to do to open yourself up to spiritual growth and spiritual formation?  What would help you to grow?
• Who are you investing in now?  Who are you sharing your life with so that they can see Jesus in you?

Prayer Part Three: Build Relational Bridges Building relational bridges is an active way of living. It is taking the faith, the nurture, the community of the people of God and brining it out into the world. Bringing our faith into our world is how we live out the call of Jesus on our lives.  We know that, but somehow, we still find a way to sever that call from our day to day living; we spiritualize it, compartmentalize it, ignore it.  God invites you to bring the love, hope, faith, and joy of Christian life out into the world.  When you do this, you bring Jesus into your world, and you might just be brining someone into the church and into Kingdom living.  Here are some questions to ask in prayerful reflection:

• When you leave church on a Sunday, where do you sense God is calling you to go?  What is God calling you to be?  To whom are you called to serve/love/build a bridge?  I specifically say Sunday because that is when you are “sent out” as a community and hopefully that is when you are most determined to go!
• Are there places in the community where you believe that GTCC should explore building relational bridges?
• Are you connected to people who are serving the poor, hungry, lost?  Are you connected to the poor, hungry and lost?
• Who are you praying for someone who needs to meet Jesus or recommit their life to Jesus?   How can you be a bridge of love and grace to that person?
• As Doug reminded us on Sunday we are called to love, and that love is the core of how we build bridges.  Is there somewhere/someone that you know needs love and you experience anxiety or discouragement when you think of how you/we can share that love?

Please take the time to pray through these questions as we lean into the annual meeting and prepare to live out our mission in 2023.

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