When casting around for ideas for a new mission undertaking, the first place to start is prayer. As Psalm 127: 1 reminds us, “unless the Lord builds a house, the work of the builders is wasted.” The purpose of prayer is not to ask God’s blessing on something that we have decided to do. Rather it is to seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance, to ask the Holy Spirit to draw our attention to what God wants us to do, to an unreached, unengaged people group that God wants us to reach and engage, a need that God wants us to meet.
This may prove challenging since we may have all kinds of ideas about new mission activities which we may like or prefer to do or to begin doing, activities that are worthwhile but are nonetheless not what God wants us to undertake. The time may not be right. We may not be the right people. God has other things that he wants us to do or begin doing. As the apostle Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:10, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”
Discerning God’s will in a particular undertaking at the outset is critical to its success.
At the same time, we should be mindful of the temptation to not undertake something that God wants us to do or begin doing, saying to ourselves that God could not possibly want us to undertake it. “We are too small a church. We don’t have the resources. They are not our kind of people.”
God may want us to undertake something to give us an opportunity to show our faithfulness. We may not succeed. What matters to God is that we took advantage of the opportunity that he gave us and sought to do his will.
Among the advantages of having a sense that the new mission undertaking on which we are about to embark is what God wants us to do or begin doing is that it will give us greater confidence.
A number of things God wants every church and every Christian to do or begin doing. God makes his will known in these matters through sacred Scripture, through Jesus’ teaching and example, through his explanation of the Old Testament, and through the apostles’ reiteration of Jesus’ teaching. Having revealed his will in these matters in this way, God expects us to carry out his wishes. God gives us leeway in how we carryout them. At the same time God expects our obedience in these matters.
While we are apt to think of worship in terms of what we do on Sundays, obeying God in our everyday lives is the primary way that we worship him. Loving God with every atom of our being as Jesus commands us to do entails showing great respect for God in every thought, feeling, word, and action. What we think, what we feel, what we do, what say, all should honor God.
Our prayer in such instances is that our will be aligned more perfectly with God’s will. We ask God’s help in this regard as a church and as individual Christians.
Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father in heaven…May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10 NLT). In the garden of Gethsemane, he himself prayed that God’s will, not his own be done.
We may not always eagerly approach what God desires that we undertake. For example, we may shrink from the prospect of having spiritual conversations with people who are not believers and disciples like ourselves and sharing with them the gospel. As Methodists we believe that God comes alongside us in the person of the Holy Spirit and will lend us a helping hand in these situations. God will provide us with an infinite supply of grace to achieve his will if we open our hearts and minds to his grace and make full use of it. So, we are not going it alone. God is there with us.
Praying in these situations, we recognize our dependence upon God. It is God, not our own power of persuasion, that will bring them to a living faith in Jesus. We ask God to calm any anxiety or fear that we may be experiencing. We ask God for the ability to listen attentively to the other person, to hear and understand what they are saying. We ask God to give us the right words to say and to let us know the right time in the conversation to say them.
We are not in a hurry to rattle off the good news and are sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s leading. We may have several conversations with a particular individual before we share the gospel with them. During that time, we build our relationship with them. Even if they are not immediately responsive as we might hope, we continue to build our relationship with them.
We may be sowing a seed. We may be watering a seed that someone else planted. It is God who causes the seed to germinate and to grow. Whatever happens, we should pray for them daily and whenever the Holy Spirit prompts us to pray for them.
We should persevere in our prayer for them, taking our cue from Jesus’ parable of the Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge, as well as his story of the man who knocked on his neighbor’s door, asking for bread to feed an unexpected guest. We need to keep knocking on heaven’s door on their behalf.
If God does bring them to a living faith in Jesus, we should maintain an ongoing relationship with them. This entails not only praying for them but also praying with them. What role that we may play in discipling them will depend upon our particular church. Ideally we should be equipped and trained to disciple them ourselves. Even if someone else takes on that role, we should continue to be to them what the Celtic Christians called an “anamchara,” a “soul friend.” We should also invite them to join our Covenant Discipleship Group or other small group if we are involved in one.
A major reason that new believers drift away from a church is that once they have professed faith in Jesus, they do not receive follow-up. We are called not only to point others to Jesus but also to disciple them when God does quicken their faith so that they become disciples as well as believers.
However, we participate in God’s mission to the world, we should saturate our mission activities in prayer. If we are a part of a team, we should pray for the other members of the team. We should pray for those whom we are seeking to serve or to reach and engage. We should pray for the pastor and staff of our church; for the members and attendees of our church for the cable TV and online viewers of our church services; for the other churches in our community; for the unchurched population of the community; for the community, for all whom God has placed in our lives—those who are known to us, those with whom we may have an impaired relationship, and those with whom we are not acquainted; for our families, relations, and friends, and for ourselves.
On Sundays the church’s general intercession—the Morning Prayer, the Pastoral Prayer, or the Prayers of the People, whatever our church calls them, should include a petition for those in the community and in the larger world who do not yet know Jesus. Sunday school classes, and Covenant Discipleship Groups and other small groups should pray for the spiritually-disconnected and the unchurched. Depending upon the level of interest we may wish to start a monthly prayer meeting. Praying for those who do not yet know Jesus is one of the ways that we not only express our love for them but also we keep ourselves outward-looking. God will use our prayers to transform us and make us better followers of Jesus.
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