Monday, June 09, 2008

A Little About "One Prayer" -- Churches Unite

Do you think Christians are united? Do you think churches do a better job working together or competing against each other?

A unique attempt to unite the church, and various Christian believers is going on this June with something called One Prayer.

Craig Groeschel of LifeChurch.tv announced earlier this year a vision for many churches to come together through a sermon series called One Prayer where various churches and preachers would preach sermons on the topic of "If you could have one prayer for the church what would at be?" The idea is that the pastor of their own church preaches one message, while video preaching is used to teach the other three messages.

Through many partnerships with other churches, such as Fellowship Church of Dallas, Texas and NewSpring Church in South Carolina. The word began to spread, and last Sunday over 1300 churches with attendance numbers over half a million began the One Prayer series, either with a sermon by their own pastor or video preaching from other participating pastors.

This past weekend I had the chance to participate in one of these services, and it was really neat to know how many different churches were participating with us. In fact below is a video that shows the list of churches involved.

One Prayer Churches from LifeChurch.tv on Vimeo.

It's incredible, if you think of how hard it is to get organizations to work together, let alone Churches.

On the third week of the series, each of these churches is going to take a special offering with the hopes of planting 500 churches in the Sudan, China, India, and Cambodia! That's pretty incredible to.

I would encourage you if you're interested to think about checking out OnePrayer.com which has a daily blog as well as more information about the project.

What are your thoughts?

Below are some thoughts I found in the blog-o-sphere. What's most exciting to me is seeing people from all different churches, in various geographic locations, different church cultures and denominations talking about the same church experience.

- BlackGlasses talks about major technology issues, and yet people still encountering God.
- Chuck Bridges prays that the Church would be relevant.
- Leonce at Zao Community things this is "the beginning of such initiatives in my generation to see the church rise and stand together"
- RadiantFirst talks about OnePrayer as examples of how online communities are changing and adapting bigger purposes.
- daveingland is pretty excited about OnePrayer as they used the series to launch their new church in Sacramento, CA.
- Pastor Martin Hunchinson of Community of Joy talks about the Lord Making us Peacemakers, which to him is active and even includes recycling and eating tomatoes.
- Ed Young shares a little of excitement after week 1 and sharing and seeing people come to Christ.
- Chazzdaddy a Ohio Pastor takes the OnePrayer concept local hoping to involve churches in his area to do a combined service this July.
- Callie at Elevation church looks like she had a rough Sunday, but is also supercharged by the unstoppability of God when believers come together.
- Sean spoke at his church in Knoxville about God making the church authentic and will have Steven Furtik from Elevation teaching next week (oh, look, that's Kelly's church above)
- Matt Ames with a passion for unity of the Body of Christ prays that God will answer this prayers.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good Commentary; this series is going to be amazing!

Michael Parsons said...

I used to go to church all the time (was een an alter boy!). The word of God...love, was preached high and low and I believed until I notice there was not a lot of love when it can to religion. Just a lot of angry men and woman, waving their bibles and preaching hate.

So now-a-days I celebrate the glory that is mother nature. Makes things so much simpler

Magnus said...

And I have to wonder where the Non-Evangelicals are in all of this? Were they approached at all? I'm all for an echumenical initiative within Christendom, but sometimes those initiatves fall quite short.

nate said...

I agree with Magnus. It's a good idea, the early church had a similar idea called "the lords prayer," but I too feel those outside the circle of pop evangelicalism are missing this. But I am hard pressed to say who is at fault in the communication breach.