Prayer Ministry Team

For some time I have had an inclination that God would like us to start a focused prayer-ministry team.  We have prayer time at the church on Wednesday afternoons at 1:00pm and Friday mornings at 10:00am.  These are wonderful times and we share prayer requests and pray for people’s needs as we are made aware of them.

This is something I envision differently.

Once a month the prayer team will gather at the church for about one hour.  I think it will be a Sunday evening.  We will make our own church family and the broader community aware that we are gathering to pray for people who feel a need to be prayed over.  Tom, this means that the person in need of prayer would come that evening, for whatever the need might be an we would pray with/for them after the pattern of James 3:16.

Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” (James 5:13–16, NIV84)

There most certainly will be nights when no one comes.  There will most certainly be prayers offered, seemingly unanswered. But we will most certainly not fail for having not asked.

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” (James 4:1–3, NIV84)

This verse reminds me of ho important it is to be aware of the impediments of answered prayer but the bolded phrase is my primary concern as it comes to this prayer ministry team.  In unconscious ways we may have forsaken something vital that people of faith need to be engaged in.  Every day without fail, I see the brokenness in lives around us.  We live in a beautiful place, beset with the kinds of destructive attitudes and behaviours that shipwreck families and set a course for future hopelessness and despair.  I have no idea how to adequately respond to this as a spiritual family (church).  If we are truly the people of God, we know that change can only come when God intervenes in people’s lives.  The more we try to force and coerce change, the greater the gap becomes between us and our community.

Prayer ought not to be the thing that we do when we can do nothing else.  It ought to be the thing we do before we do anything else … a first response rather than a last resort.

If you read this and are interested in more info, whether you attend Community Life Church or elsewhere, contact me by email, karl.ingersoll@gmail.com or call the church 662-8454.  We’ll talk about the picture in a more detailed manner.

Personally I am desperate to see God do His thing in a brand new way, on Grand Manan Island in 2018.

Blessings to you and yours …

Please Pray for Us …

Morning Lifers …

It’s Thursday morning and I am enjoying a quiet space in my office.  It is a busy time for us as a family with relatives and friends coming and going.  I feel a responsibility to be available for people who come to visit and at the same time be accessible to our dear church family.  There are no adequate words really, to express what I feel re: CLC.  I am first and foremost, grateful to God for His goodness in leading us here and then for the incredible love that you all have shown.

The reason for the post today is to ask you to pray for me and in the very same breath, to pray for our church.  I am feeling a flood tide of excitement about the prospects here, of opening our arms as wide as we possibly can to those hurting, broken and marginalized, within all of our reach.  I have this feeling that God would like to bless this ministry as He may never have done before.  I am not talking about the numbers game, finances or any of the other metrics that we are familiar with.

I am referencing a movement of God.

One of my oft-prayed prayers is that I could find myself in the middle of a movement of God that would be so much of Him that I would be unable and unwilling to make a church growth seminar out of it.  It would be simply sacred enough to bow our heads and say, “God did it all.”

That means many things …

It means that we seek the kind of growth that God does.  In the book of Acts I read “And the Lord added to the church , daily, those who were being saved.”  This is the sole numerical metric that God is interested in.  He is not interested in how many people gather for a given meeting.  I tend to be very interested in this and curiously enough, I get to thinking that I have something to do with it when the numbers are there.  That is pure, unadulterated pride and I am so weary of that.

It means that we are involved in that somehow.  I feel that there is an incredible grace dynamic at work in our church.  Never … NEVER, in my prior pastoral life, have I experienced the free flow of God’s grace in a church family.

I marvel at it every week.

There is a deep stirring within my heart for what God is doing even now.  What we see of an iceberg is nothing compared to what lies beneath.  The same is true when it comes to God.  We observe very little until it breaks loose.  What are you willing to do, to be a part of this?  That’s what faith is … to be involved in what God is doing … all in.

Bless you Lifers …

Please Pray

Last summer, Jim & Marion Harris visited our church.  They are two of the most godly, inspiring people that I have ever met.  They have self-funded missions trips to Ethiopia and Thailand for several years now without any denominational sanction or support.  On those trips they have lived in tents and shanties among the nationals, in some very rustic and primitive conditions rather than in missionary quarters or compounds.  

Much of the opposition they have encountered has come from the church.  

Yesterday, they were involved in a car accident on PEI.  Jim had several broken ribs and may be out of the hospital by the time you read this.  Marion had a broken collar bone, split diaphragm and some organ displacement.  She is now in Halifax for surgery. 

While their injuries don’t seem to be life threatening, I would ask you to join me in prayer for this wonderful couple and their families. Pray with all the heart you have, as though you were praying for your flesh and blood relatives.  This will bring them great encouragement and speed their healing.  

Thanks in advance,

Karl