Let the just rejoice,
for their Justifier is born.

Let the sick and infirm rejoice,
for their Savior is born.

Let the captives rejoice,
for their Redeemer is born.

Let slaves rejoice,
for their Master is born.

Let free men rejoice,
for their Liberator is born.

Let all Christians rejoice,
for Jesus Christ is born.

- Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-440)

James 1:17 “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

“Most of us don’t pray. Most of us just rehearse our anxieties out loud.”

A couple of times every year our church turns our energy and focus towards extended times of prayer together. Prayer is central to much of what we do but we take special attention to bring it to the forefront a couple of times a year through what we call Pulse. Essentially, Pulse is a chance for us to slow down and again hear the heartbeat of God for our church, our region, our nation and the world.

Beginning tonight at 7:00 we are starting 24 hours of consecutive prayer for the ministry of our church. People have signed up for 15 minute blocks of time and we’ve sent them some prayer points that will help them pray. Of course they are welcome to pray for more than 15 minutes and we don’t have all of the time slots filled but in all we have about 80 people who will be praying for our church over the next 24 hours.

At the end of our 24 hours of prayer, we’ll be gathering together at our church to continue praying together. We’re planning a prayer event that will be more corporate and give our people a chance to pray for one another, the ministry of our church as well as some national and global needs that we are passionate about.

So if you are reading this sometime on Thursday evening or Friday, pray for us. Resistance can be strong when people come together to pray. Pray for your own church and the specific ministry God has called you to.

As a follow-up to this last post I thought it might be helpful to post a video from Bluetree (facebook|twitter) telling the story behind their song “God of this City” -

This headline on CNN.com grabbed my attention this week: “Christian band: We were spared death by Myanmar general” I’ve been a fan of Bluetree for a few years (if they are new to you, you may not know that they are the original writers of Chris Tomlin’s “God of this City” and their version is pretty incredible, too) and I was amazed to hear what they went through on a recent trip.

Bluetree’s lead singer, Aaron Boyd, added  a video to the band’s facebook page and you can watch it here – http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1337823690637

All in all, this is a pretty incredible story. It’s hard to believe that this news isn’t spreading through twitter/blogs/facebook a little faster than it has. Why not grab those two links and post them where people can find them?

Before I went on holidays I was hearing pieces of Kate McRae’s story and overwhelmed with what was happening. I don’t know the family personally but as the dad of three little girls, Kate’s story weighed heavy on my heart for days. If you haven’t heard about Kate McRae and the tough road ahead of her, you can get the whole story at www.prayforkate.com

I came home this week and heard that Audrey Assad (one of my favourite singers since hearing her at re:create this year) had written a song for Kate. I hadn’t had a chance to listen to it until today. Oh. My. Ohhh myyyy. Scroll down past the video to see the lyrics.

Pray for Kate. Pray for Kate’s family. Pray that Jesus would be lifted high.

Little Light
Audrey Assad

Look at all the angels watching you
They’re singing songs that we have never heard
Their voices ring like bells over the mountains
Oh, if only we could hear their words
God is near, little girl.

Your eyes are brilliant,deep sky blue.
Your quiet wisdom is an evening song.
The angels must be breathless at your beauty
Like the world catches its breath before the dawn.
God is near, little one.

And Jesus bends to hear you breathe;
His tender hands are holding you tonight.
His heart is ravished when you look at Him,
and oh, the endless mercy in His eyes;
God is here, little light.

There was lots of talk of Donald Miller’s prayer last week at the Democratic National Convention but thanks to Mark Waltz (the guru of First Impressions at Granger Community Church) I found out that Joel Hunter closed one of the sessions in prayer in a fairly unique way.

Check this video - 

So what do you think? Did he increase or decrease the “value” of the prayer by doing that? Thoughts?

There’s an interesting new site that’s come online this week and you may have heard about it or seen it action but I thought I’d give it a little promo here.

WeTheChurch.org is a very simple that was “created to unite the church in prayer.” Awesome. I love it.

The basic idea is that anyone can hit the site, leave a quick prayer request or praise report and have that prayer sent immediately to people all around the world who are following WeTheChurch either by Twitter or by RSS. It has been awesome to see these prayers become part of the Twitter conversation and to be given the opportunity to pray for needs and situations all around the world.

Big kudos to Chad Wright ( | ) and Scott Magdalein ( | ) for putting the work in to make this happen! Another example of a couple of guys taking a bright idea and doing something pretty cool with it.

Two of our core values at OBC are passionate worship and relentless prayer. Those happen on Sunday morning, they happen in individual ministries, they happen in peoples’ lives and we also put together specific events where we can give more attention and more focus to those two things. That’s the idea behind Pulse.

We started doing Pulse a couple of years ago and we’ve done it different every time – we’ve done 24 hours of prayer, we’ve done prayer stations in our building over the course of a week, we’ve done regional worship gatherings, we’ve done public readings of scripture, lots of different things. For Sunday night we decided to do a worship concert-type event with an extended time of prayer in the middle.

We brought in Dan Macaulay and his band to lead us in worship – we have very talented people in our church who are more than capable of leading events like this but it was nice to bring in someone “special” to lead us in worship. It gave a bit of a unique flavour to the evening and also allowed all of our worship ministry folks to participate.

Dan & his wife had just returned from Nashville where he was tracking some new songs with Nathan Nockels and it was very exciting to hear about the things that are in store for Dan and his ministry. Very exciting!

So last night looked like this -

7:00 Welcome/intro/explain the night
7:05 Dan & band lead us in worship
8:00 Pray
8:40 Dan & band close with worship
9:00 Done

Now I don’t know if you church is used to doing hour-long sections of worship or 40-minute sections of prayer but our folks are not! It was a great chance to do something different, push some boundaries and comfort zones and really communicate to people that these things are important.

Dan did a great job leading us in songs that were familiar to our church and also teaching us a couple of his originals. Doing an event like this usually draws people who are looking for an event like this (make sense?) so it didn’t take much to get people engaged in the worship.

For our time of prayer together, we did a few different things. We prayed corporately (I read a “pastoral prayer” and gave people a chance to pray on their own at different spots), we did some silent prayer of confession and for specific life needs and then I read a corporate prayer of confession. We then had people move into small groups and prayer for some needs in the life of our church, our region and our world. That went for about 20 minutes, I came back up to close in prayer and then threw back to the band for our closing worship.

It was a good night. We had a good opportunity to come together and pray collectively for things that are really on our hearts. We are confident that God heard our prayers and is acting on our behalf – so now we wait, we watch and we continue to pray.

I heard today that Catalyst Church in Greenville, SC will be closing at the end of April. They have expressed some financial struggles the past little while and it sounds like all of that just caught up with them. I’m not only sad to see a church close its doors but I’ve had the chance to email back and forth with a couple of their staff guys and I’m sure they must be heartbroken over this. I know that they love God, they love the people of Greenville and they love Catalyst and I can’t imagine what it must have taken to make that decision this week.

Three of the Catalyst staff guys blogged about telling the news to the church this morning – Casey Ross, Ryan Fitzgerald and Jake Miller. Head over to their blogs and let them know you’re praying for them.

If you’re interested, here’s the video of Casey making the announcement -