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.
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.
