Mobilizing Missionary Prayer (Part 3)
Jesus is still in the rescue business.
He cares about people … lost, hurting, isolated, and marginalized people.
And He commissions His followers to go and care, too. Then He sends us out to be like Him as we incarnate the Gospel, living it out in everyday rhythms.
The struggle is many who are part of His church have lost touch with the missionary heart needed to successfully navigate the paths into a secularized world, and we need all the important information this unique approach to life brings us.
The problem only escalates when we realize our churches have somehow misplaced the neighborhood calling they so effectively once walked in. Before the regionalized way of church came, we knew everyone around us (whether they came for worship or not) and understood their needs along with the best way to share the Good News with them.
It comes down to the reality that we do not know how to rescue those who are raised with a secular worldview because we do not know them.
On top of all this sits our lack in effective approaches to praying for these people. The connections, derived from the neighborhood church and missionary heart, fueled effective and informed ways of praying in the past. We prayed what we knew, and it made our prayers more effective and powerful.
The disconnection leaves us vulnerable as we try to work through the same methods used for our internal needs, but we somehow fall short when evangelism concerns are at the forefront. It just doesn’t produce the same results. Something is lacking.
In the midst of our deficiency, Jesus continues to give the responsibility of reaching these people to the Church. It lies with each one of us who are followers in the way of Jesus, and our first line of attack comes through prayer. Fosner and Davis write, “There must be a time when we focus our prayers on the lost, the broken, and the people who cannot pray for themselves.”
Think about it. It’s hard enough to get people out to pray for practical needs they have and for God’s intervention in their own lives. Getting this consumer-guided mind and heart to come together and intercede for lost people is another whole level to attain. We have lost touch with the rescue business Jesus handed off to His church, and we desperately need to find it again.
It’s rather practical. There are a number of good reasons to commit ourselves to such forms of intercession. It really isn’t that difficult to learn how to do; we can all pray for the lost.
The solution is to understand what Fosner and Davis have written in their book, A Trowel and A Sword: “The Scriptures have called us to be a people of prayer, not because it is a spiritual thing to do, but because God waits for His people to call for His interventions to come to earth and push back the plans of the prince of the air.”
Incredible!
God waits for us to intervene in the lives of people He sends us to. All we need to do is call on Him to come into the situation and push back on whatever the devil is trying to do. Pretty simple. Very doable.
The strategies we use to connect with a particular people group, combined with the discovery of the best way to do this thing we call church, are the very ways we find effective in producing the fruit of lost souls coming to Christ. The missionary approach to life and ministry fuels the fire, as we discover the best way to share the Gospel, so this group understands and takes their place at the family table.
“Similarly, the prayers that are focused on particular people groups and neighborhoods and pray for people by name are the prayer-forms that pair well with the evangelism that is gaining traction today.” We need neighborhood-minded churches to raise up missionary people to go out to the people groups around them and pray in a harvest to apprentice into the faith. Then we need to do it all over again and again.