thanks for your prayers

This is earthbound, checking in, thanking you for your prayers.

Your prayers are for seven soldiers, still suiting up.

Your prayers are for students, stuck between the streets and the system.

Your prayers are for Silicon Valley souls, staring into spiritual silence.

Your prayers are for the sick, the sullen, the lever-pullin', the pencil pushin', the ill, the static, the enigmatic, the searching, the lurching, the never-been-churching

Your prayers are for seven soldiers, still suiting up.

Getting Started: The Challenges of an At-Home Mission

Thank you so much for being a prayer supporter!

There are some weird things about being on a mission team at home: (1.) Home isn’t normally where we think of “missions.” So it’s a constant challenge to break out of our comfortable habits and mindsets and to think and live missionally. (2.) We don’t have any specific projects to work on yet, a “local pastor” that we’re supporting who knows the ropes, or a mission organization that’s giving us guidance. Things are still very vague and open-ended. We don’t really know what to expect yet. (3.) We don’t live together, see each other everyday, have to all squish into a tiny van with no A/C for 8 hours in order to reach our village, or any other group experiences to gel us together as a team. Even though it’s been a month, we’re still getting to know each other. But the mission has begun, and like any other mission near or far, it’s requiring faith. That’s why we’re grateful for your prayers.

So what’s been happening so far?

1. We’ve been asking people like you to commit to praying for us and this mission. This has been so important for us because we need the spiritual support and also because we hope that the same fire that inspired our mission might do the same for people in other churches. Our goal is 70 prayer supporters.
2. We’ve started identifying the various social circles that we’re each connected to and started to think about our non-Christian friends within those circles. Some of us were ashamed to find out how few non-Christian friends we now have! Others of us are in constant contact with non-Christian on a daily basis. (We decided to identify social circles/networks instead of only focusing on the church neighborhood because we realize that people in our context are connected more through complex social networks than through geography. E.g., it’s more about who they work with, play basketball with, and meet at parties than who they live next to.)
3. We’ve started praying for our friends/acquaintances and their needs. We’re praying that God will allow us to be bridges to Jesus. We’re also trying to figure out a way to learn more about them while being true in our friendships. E.g., we recently looked into doing a survey, but a lot of us felt surveying our friends would be awkward for them and for us. We’re still trying to figure out how to learn about people and be observant without offending the relationship—after all, our first calling is love. We’re open to suggestions. This is central to our mission because this knowledge will help us to be a more comprehensible and compelling church.
4. We’ve met three times now. Every meeting we share a meal together, share about ourselves, worship God, learn how to be missional disciples, work on the mission, send each other off in prayer, and have dessert. Every single one of us contributes to the meeting and we have a blast. But things are still new and we’re still getting to know each other.
5. One of the great things about our meetings is that we get to share about how we try to live out God’s mission in our own lives. We have some stories to share but we’ll save that for the blog updates and the next newsletter. This is getting long!

Thanks again for praying for us at least every week. Please pray:

• That we will be faithful in our personal devotional life with God. This is the source of everything we do.
• That we will bond together as a team. We want that subjective “sense” of community. But we also want to be practical in our love for one another—encouraging, sharing, bearing burdens, helping, etc.
• That God will help us to really understand the Gospel of Jesus more clearly and deeply for ourselves.
• That we will get to know our non-Christian friends/acquaintances better. We want to glean demographic info. But more importantly, we want to learn about their values, worldview, spiritual background, what makes them tick, etc. But how do we do it?
• That God will enlarge our circles of non-Christian friends.
• That we will be true and compelling disciples of Jesus at work, school, gym, mall, internet, neighborhood, etc.
• That we will “live our faith, share our life” regardless who we are with.

Asking for Your Prayer Support

We believe God’s called our church to reach our generation so that they might become disciples of Jesus. But like in many mission fields, many of our friends, coworkers, and other social contacts have little interest in church, let alone Christianity or Jesus. Much of church as we know it feels foreign or irrelevant to them. It’s in the midst of this dilemma that God’s given us a mission.

What’s our mission? In short, to radically reshape our church into a ministry that’s truly relevant to our generation—a ministry that speaks the Gospel in their ‘language’, addresses their needs and struggles, and invites them into a community that’s attractive and meaningful to them. Just as God lovingly took on human flesh in order to save humankind, God’s calling us to lovingly bring the Gospel of Jesus to our generation in the ‘flesh’ of their culture.

This process, which will run from September ’07 thru June ’08, will challenge us to set aside our assumptions and traditional ways of doing church. All this in order to truly open ourselves to learn about our generation and to reshape our church in a way that helps them see the real relevance and necessity of Jesus in their lives. Because this is such a challenge and will only succeed with God’s help, we want to ask if you’d commit to supporting our team in prayer.