For this conversation, Pastors Brady Boyd, Andrew Arndt, and Dr. Glenn Packiam talk about the importance of prayer, and how we are called to lead ministries with prayer at their core, at their essence.
When was the last time that you were surprised? I ask myself often, “When was the last time I was surprised by God’s breaking forth into my world?”
It is possible for us to become church programming experts who can do this without the surprise of the empowering presence of the Spirit…
The Creed says that the Spirit is the GIVER of life, not that he GAVE life… there is a sense in which welcoming the Spirit’s work means recognizing that we don’t just need him for startup but for making the whole thing run…
I think there have to be moments in every church’s life where you linger together in prayer… we need regular times where we just wait together on the Lord…
Practically, for us, we’ve learned that we just need to schedule it… we need to schedule times to pray together and be together and wait on the Lord…
Of all the vocations in the world, pastoral work requires prophetic imagination… and the only way that can happen is to be together in those Spirit-led, Spirit-filled environments…
Many pastors take up the Moses model of leadership, but in the New Testament the model was people sitting in prayer meetings together in unity… that’s the model of leadership that the church was birthed in and should be brought back to…
It’s easy to tell ourselves that prayer is the warmup… from Paul’s letters we see that prayer is not the prelude but the premise…
Prayer meetings help me grow feet… they make my activity more focused and purposeful… a lot of times if I don’t pray, I wander around looking for God’s work in my life, but when I pray it seems like it’s right in front of me…
When the Spirit is at work within the way he’s made us, sometimes it will make our minds fire and our hearts burn and make our eyes weep and our bodies want to jump and shout… the different between this and emotionalism is when there is fruit: are we serving our neighbors better and loving Jesus better?
There’s a difference between a church that prays and a praying church… every church has some kind of prayer happening… [but] we are called to lead churches that have prayer at their core, at their essence…