IVLI/Awakening/NYC

Ah time for my super, duper awesome, long, updated post about my past 6 weeks!

Just kidding, I don't want to spend forever on my laptop so I'm gonna just churn out the thoughts as they come.

I'll talk specifically about prayer in all three of these places.

IVLI:
At IVLI, we had DPMs everyday. They would start at 5:30PM and go until 6:00PM. Dun Dun Dun...sounds like...our new prayer structure! The DPMs at IVLI merely modeled a little bit of what I liked to see in prayer meetings. More on why I chose this structure later.

Family groups (basically small groups) at IVLI would eventually lead two DPMs each. These DPMs were pretty structured; normally the meetings would include a person going up talking about praying for one thing which usually pertained to the morning and past evening session's topic. The people tried different styles of prayer such as conversational prayer within your family group, with your chapter, or with just random people you sat next to. They did FLOOD THE GATES, which is just "korean style" prayer. They did ACTS prayer. They did this one prayer which I forget what they called, but they gave everyone a notecard and pencil and they told everyone to just pray and whenever a distraction came to their mind, to just write it down. The purpose of it, I guess, was to help you see how many distractions come in a short amount of prayer and to help you think about how to focus during prayer.

So I asked around for how different campuses did prayer. Out of the entire camp of 90 campers....can you believe that I was only one of three prayer leaders? There were people who were anticipating how they would do prayer on their respective campuses, but there were only 3 official prayer coordinators. Crazy. Anyway, a lot of other campuses also do DPMs. U of I has a huge campus and separates their ministry into dorm groups. Each dorm group has a dorm group prayer meeting every sunday so that was the biggest corporate gathering of prayer that I found there. The most interesting prayer structure came from the College of Wooster. They called it Flash Prayer. The idea comes from a Flash Mob, where people get together online and schedule to do something collective usually through dance or just freezing in place in a public area for like 5 minutes together (UofM did one last year on the Diag). Basically, there was no set prayer meeting during the week. At the beginning of week, the leadership team would select one individual to lead a prayer meeting and during the week, that selected individual would text out to everyone, "Flash Prayer meeting at the Diag in an hour!" So you wouldn't know the date, time, or location until you get that text or get an invite on facebook the night before. The idea was to enforce the idea that prayer is spontaneous and you should be always ready to pray because of 1 Thessalonians 5:17. Wooster also had a DPM structure the year before but had a very low attendance. The girl told me that when they changed to Flash Prayer, the meetings would have several individuals show up, sometimes up to 20 (their chapter isn't really big, too). What she thought was awesome was that individuals not on leadership, even freshmen!, approached her later in the year to ask if they could lead a Flash Prayer meeting.

Several things about the prayer meeting I liked:
-spontanuity - continuously spontaneous (yeah I made that up). Yeah feed the 'P's! I'm not a P, but I enjoy doing things P :)
-Because they were so random during the week, they were kept short (they usually lasted around 20 minutes) so that people were actually able to make it out to them.
-Prayer in public because you would show up at the Diag and be praying outside and you could pray as a group for all the people walking through the area. It really feels like you're a part of the campus and that God is moving as you pray.

What I didn't like:
-I asked her if they started doing more than one Flash Prayer meeting a week and she said no. That's kinda disappointing because one twenty minute prayer meeting doesn't seem to encourage that we should actually be praying a lot more than just twenty minutes.
-Twenty minutes is a really short prayer meeting, especially if there's only one a week. Twenty minutes is definitely more doable one on one.

So yeah...that's my experience with prayer at IVLI...
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Chicago - Jesus Culture Awakening '11

So I didn't know that Jesus Culture from Bethel Church in Redding, California was part of the charismatic movement. The first day we went in for evangelism, they started talking about prophetic evangelism, word of knowledge and the alarm went off in my head hahahaha. I haven't looked too deeply into Scripture about spiritual gifts, but I am extremely weary since we have so many cessationists in our fellowship, I feel like I am just trying to find the Truth.

There was a lot of stuff on the Holy Spirit here 'cause that's basically what the charismatic movement is. I went with Jerry, Sam, and a friend from IVLI who also lives in Chicago. He brought a friend (her name is Santine) and they stayed over at Jerry's also. Both of them have gone to IHOP for the One Thing conference, but I also feel that they are in the same boat with me: both very weary, but also pursuing Jesus' heart and open for the Truth. They had been taught something called prophetic prayer from one of their mentors. The purpose of prophetic prayer is to pray over an individual and to let the Holy Spirit speak and to have you, their friend or random stranger, encourage them through what the Lord has to say to that individual. So it's to really build up and encourage each other because you are speaking words from God into their lives. This was extremely interesting because I wasn't sure if this was Biblical (which I still haven't found in the Bible after coming back), but they had some amazing testimonies about how encouraged they've felt in the past through prophetic prayer (I trust these two; the other 15,000 people in the stadium not so much). Many times, their friends would bring up something that they were struggling with in their life that they hadn't even shared with each other and their friends would speak encouragement for that struggle. They really felt that it took the connection with God to a new level because it really shows that God really, truly does know them and He loves them and wants to encourage them. They wanted to show me and Jerry so they prayed over us and they had us pray over them afterwards. Here's what they taught us:

-Empty your mind and invite the Holy Spirit in.
-Pray against distractions from Satan and pray that they Holy Spirit would speak uplifting words into the individual's life.
-Sit in silence. Whatever image crosses your mind, hold tight onto that image. Whatever shows up is usually good because it's usually things that you don't think of, even though they are probably every day things (race car, baseball, a seagull, etc.)
-Ask the Holy Spirit for interpretation
-When everyone has something, open your eyes and one person can describe what they saw and the interpretation they thought the Holy Spirit was impressing on them.

They said sometimes that the Holy Spirit would speak through all the individuals that were praying over the friend because there would be a theme in all the images that people got. Sometimes people would just get their own impressions of the person and they wouldn't be connected. Sometimes they got stuff and it just didn't make senese for the person. Here are my notes that I wrote down for their prayer over me:

-i'm a bear

God is the river

The current is the world

The fish are people

i'm clawing at the people but i'm unsuccessful

i need to dive head in, all-in, to catch the people

as i get more confident i move upstream

the current gets faster (maybe harder?) as i move upstream, but there's more fish where the current is faster

-i saw a river and that the river was God's love and I needed to dive all-in into God's love.

-jerry saw chinese characeters, maybe affirming a calling to go to China and stick with majoring in Chinese?

-Vince saw a plane lifting off and thinking of the fear of first riding on the plane for the first time; think of taking risks in the future. maybe pre-med? maybe following the Holy Spirit? 

all-in-all dive into God's love and when the time comes, take a risk with the Holy Spirit. 

-Vince saw a rocket ship going to the moon and thought of the word pioneering and paving the way for others

-Jerry affirmed that the chinese characters that he saw translated into the words "rocket ship"

*end notes

This was kind of a cool experience to try out. After we share all the images we have, we pray over that person to encourage them through what God had to say to them. That prayer was extremely significant; it really took encouragement to another level. I'm not saying this is right, especially since I have no Biblical evidence for this, but I'm saying we should be really open to hear some teachings on the Holy Spirit because we talk about it so little (especially in our fellowship). I understand our chapter doesn't want to take stances on such issues, but the Holy Spirit is what Jesus left us with (John 14, John 16) and to deny anything that comes from it is denying a huge part of our faith, I feel like.

But I think all in all, the fact was that we were praying for each other and I had just met these people, too. I don't think we, in our fellowship, pray for each other that often while we're together. I can only think of my DPMs because it was just me and Danielle. Praying together, for each other, is so encouraging and my hope is that we would have this prayer culture built up this year. 

So yeah...that was Chicago...

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NYC!

So I went to the Brooklyn Tabernacle! The pastor, Jim Cymbala, wrote a book called "Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire" and it's about how the Brooklyn Tabernacle started off with around 15 people in the church and how the church exploded through prayer and grew to it's current size of 10,000 people! I went to a Tuesday night prayer meeting, just like the ones described in his book that he wrote 15 years ago. It was a really structured meeting and I even took notes!

-Started off with praise and worship

-Shake hands and greet people (gender specific)

-Pastor Cymbala's talk on gossip

-Hold hands with person next to you to pray against gossip in the Church

-Hug people (gender specific)

-Pray specifically for one person (girl from Uganda here for heart surgery). One person prayed out loud while entire congregation shouted out amens and agreement

-Praise and worship (handed out prayer request cards for people; anonymous; dated; every card is different)

-Cards come from people submitting the requests themselves. 

Brooklyn Tabernacle is predominantly black so the worship was all Christian Contemporary Music (Chris Tomlin, Hillsong), but sang in a gospel version. The prayer was also very passionate. You'll notice that in my notes I talked about gender specificity. The pastor is very intentional that guys and girls do not undermine each other through their small interactions; he believes that prayer is a way into a person's heart and that praying together fuels a deep bond which is why we pray in gender specific groups. 

I stayed only for an hour; the meeting normally goes three hours I believe. As you can see, we got a lot done within only just an hour. All in all, it was a really great experience. It's awesome to see how structured how a prayer meeting can be at the large scale level (the theater seats around 3,200 people) so it's encouraging to know that structure is so much more manageable at our small scale level. 

Whew I guess it was a lot. 

Thankful that we can gather as we wish

Being home again reminds me of how lucky we are in Ann Arbor to be able to gather as we wish, sit down and begin praying out loud to God. The freedom that we have is a far cry from the oppression faced by the prophets and the church fathers we read so often in the Bible. So let's continuously thank God for letting us carry out all our AIV and Church activities freely. That is such a great gift and overshadows the structure and plans that we make to carry out those activities. We have surely invested alot of time thorough out the years until we have such a group called AIV, meetings called SG, DPM, LG, people appointed as leaders, events for NSO and so on. That all wouldn't have been possible if the society, government and school took an oppressive stance against what we believe in, Jesus our Lord and Savior.

Summer Outreach

Last week we conducted operation: freeze pop.

what is this you ask!?! WELL, LET ME TELL YOU! (reagan and andrew voice :)

it started with Lloyd and I going out on conversational evangelism (my first time!) and realizing that we need more ppl to do this...it's summer and people, for the most part, arent' cold outside or rushing to class. It's much more relaxing and easier to chat! So, bringing it up at the next prayer meeting...we realized we could give out freeze pops with flyers about BTB, especially to incoming freshman on orientation. What better way than to start the publicity NOW! We got alot of good conversations and people around campus for the summer etc..

Please be praying that we can continue this! Borrowing space for the freeze pops, finding materials/coolers, and the best pairing/plan of attack to effectively spread the word on campus!

Off to IVLI

Hey everyone,

I'm shippin' out to IVLI in the morning. Just wanted to leave a quick note before I left. I'm glad that this blog kept up with what it did and that everyone was keeping up with it. I hope you guys will continue to use it as an avenue to communicate with each other while I'm gone. I wish Jason Paul (if you stay) and Kelli Strong good luck for all the prayer meetings that they will lead in July. And for all of you, continue to intercede for our chapter and for our campus. Let us never be stagnant in our prayer and let us allow God to continue to work in our hearts as we pray for these things. K I hope everyone's time is well spent in July! Write to me, you shoulda got an email from me with an address in there. If you write, I will write back :) Peace.

-Mark

Korean(?) Style Prayer

Firstly, I don't really identify with the term 'Korean' style because I'm not from America and I've never heard of this term until Caleb mentioned it during the meeting. But I guess this is what a communal prayer where everyone is praying on their own at the same time is called here.

I believe the first time I experience this was sometime while I was attending the Assemblies of God Church back in Malaysia. I'm not sure if the AOG here is the same but I would presume so. I remember one event very clearly. My sister injured her knee or something and the people that ran the Sunday School decided to pray for her. That's the first time I saw what laying hands but I don't think I quite understood it then. I was about 10 at this time. So Ruth, a slim lady about 22-23 years old sat down with my sister on the floor and started praying and everyone started joining in and praying. Some out loud, some in their hears. The sight of this was somewhat amazing. Ruth you see, was kind of frail looking, always pale and never without her blue cardigan despite the hot weather in Malaysia. I sometimes wondered if she would just fall really sick and die. Not being in such a good shape herself I wondered how she could pray for others too, really believing that God can heal and with that, bringing others into prayer.

That was one event of the usual Charismatic flair that would occur at Church. When I'm praying with others, there are time when I really feel like praying outloud too. Praying outloud is something new to me because I never had the courage to do so until I joined small group last fall. Opening and closing a prayer is different, I mean praying outloud as in saying out all the things I'm saying to God in my heart at that moment of time. Here in AA, I had a couple, maybe 3 experience with a small prayer group where everyone was just praying outloud. Sometimes when I has things to say I'd join in, and when I had nothing to say, I'd listen to another person's prayer. I believe simply coming together to pray is something God really loves and I don't want to restrict anybody when they are compelled to pray. I pray that we're led by the Holy Spirit everytime we have a prayer meeting and if someone feels the Spirit is urging them to pray out I want them to be comfortable doing do. I also don't want them to feel awkward if we start going around in a circle and it comes to their turn. They shouldn't be praying because it's 'their turn'. I don't want them to be focused on coming up with a prayer either. I hope they can be relaxed and pray at their own pace and listen to prayers with a clear mind if they want to.

So I hope to lead my next and hopefully every prayer meeting this way. It doesn't matter if people pray outloud or not. I want to give everyone the freedom pray what their heart is calling out for. They can pray in their hearts if that is what they're comfortable with. And I will pray that they will have the courage to pray outloud if that is what the Spirit wants. I will just be praying and throwing out things I want to pray for as the meeting goes along. If there is someone who want to shout out praises that's great and if someone can play a worship song that's great too. I felt conversational prayer was awesome during small group but for the past week, the idea of something freer during a prayer meeting is just stuck in my head. All I need is for God to use me to gather people together in prayer and worship and I hope that God uses me to compel others to pray while I'm praying.

From Kelli: Finally

my first question is-where is jodi? did i miss something.. cuz i know she's in spain, but she has internet and such, no? and jimmy?

Sorry I've been MIA guys. my computer has so many downs since school got out and it's been a while for me to get it sorted out. Been trying to read all your guyses lovely posts, but that's been keeping me busy as it is!

just a little info on me: I'm staying in ann arbor this summer working at the hospital as a nurses' aid, solely by God's grace did I get this super de dooper job. So many great encounters with God and with the patients, though conflicted because the patient may say they believe, but then act horribly to the nurses. I know we are not perfect, but, for lack of a better way to put it, it looks bad on Christians. That's just the most recent story, there are many more good ones too :D

With work schedule, it's been a real time balance (having 3 12 hours days/week). I can honestly say I've been to every small group bible study! however, still need prayer/discipline for my own time with God. I've been making small steps such as downloading daily devotions apps on my itouch (since i'm on it so much as it is -.-) and journaling. Thanks guys for all the time you've already put into this blog! It's weird, but it makes me feel that we are all connected and thinking together, to an extent.

one point I'd like to make is the importance of sabbath. We read Hebrews 4 at sg this past week and It really struck me. I know all our sabbath's (-es?) are different, but what would a whole day of just listening to god and separating from the technology and distractions of people do for my spiritual life? This is especially do-able for me at least. Sadly I haven't put it into practice yet, but WHEN i do, y'all will be the firsts to know :D:D:D I really encourage you guys to do the same. we need to ENTER his presence and make every effort for Him.

AWESOME UPDATE. lloyd and I went and did contact evangelism on saturday. after lots of rejections, we met some really cool people and lloyd got a name to contact on fb with follow up and we met a phd student who just moved to aa from boston, hopefully he will be coming to some events over this summer etc. ps his name is jorge (hor-hey) pray for him!!! :]

ps- were we supposed to read a book/do fasting or something this summer? also, does everyone have oovoo? maybe we could attempt a group chat/prayer sometime! mainly with diane and caleb since idk about jodi. ESP before Mark leaves?! :D

Harvest Prayer Meeting

I just came back from Harvest's Prayer meeting. Wasn't planning on going initially even though Mark asked earlier in the Morning. Last minute God gave me some extra time and first thing I thought of was to go to the prayer meeting.