At UniteBoston, we look forward to seeing churches throughout greater Boston praying for one another and collaborating in meaningful ways.  This week I’d like to share one of the many ways one church is putting that into action.  

Thank you to Curtis Cook, Pastor at Hope Fellowship Church in Cambridge for allowing us to share this note that he sent out to his congregation:  

I think that probably many of us pray and yet rarely take the time to slow down, look back and give thanks for the way that God often answers our prayers. Today, I’d like to point out and praise God for a prayer that is being answered. One of the things we pray for each week in our worship gatherings is for a specific church or church plant in our community. As we pray for this we often are also praying that God would plant more churches in greater Boston, that existing churches would be invigorated and have a desire to play a part in church planting and that church plants would reproduce as well.   

As I look around our city, it’s obvious that those prayers are being answered.  New churches are being planted all over the city in neighborhoods and communities like: Medford, Melrose, Brookline, South End, Roslindale, West Roxbury, Watertown and the list goes on. Churches are also being planted among a number of people groups: Nepalese, Chinese, Korean, Haitian, and beyond. Friends, God is at work in our city! New churches that are proclaiming the gospel are being established. God is answering these prayers.
 

Of course, even with these new churches our city needs many more churches. So, let us give thanks to God for what He is doing and let us pray that He will do even more. Will you pray with us that more churches will be planted in our city to the glory of God?

By Peng Shi

On the evening of Feb. 6—MIT’s registration day for the spring semester—MIT’s campus Christian groups united together in praise to kickoff the semester.

Remarkably, almost all campus groups helped to plan and put together the event: the worship, setup, and prayer teams included members of nine different fellowships—MIT Intervarsity (MIT-IV), Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC), Greek Intervarsity (GreekIV), Asian Christian Fellowship (ACF), Asian Baptist Student Koinonia (ABSK), Graduate Christian Fellowship (GCF), Chinese Evangelical Fellowship (CEF), Gospel Choir, and Cross Products. Professor Cullen Buie from MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department preached from Matthews 7 on building our house on the rock by putting Christ’s words into practice, so we can withstand whatever storm the new semester heaps on us. The evening ended with a time dedicated to confessing our sins to one another and reconciling relationships. 

As I was a part of the intercessory team, much of the event for me took place away from the actual worship, as our team prayed before the event during the practices and the setup and during the event at a separate location. As a first year graduate student, this was my first time as part of such a prayer team, and it was for me a great encouragement to get to know brothers and sisters from different fellowships, different backgrounds and with slightly different ways of relating to God, yet praying with one spirit for the event, as we together lifted up each member of the worship and setup teams by name and asked the Lord to do a mighty work of unity, healing, and personal revival among all who attend. It turned out that many others were praying for us as well: a sister in Singapore joined our prayer team during the event by Skype; Justice House of Prayer (JHOP) dedicated much of an evening service to pray for this event; a church in Vancouver somehow heard about us through a friend of an organizer and was praying for us. The amount of prayer dedicated to this event was eye-opening for me. Praying with the team also made me feel a lot more connected with the Body of Christ at MIT.

What made the event most meaningful for me was the focus on reconciliation. As a requirement of being on the prayer team, I had to make sure to confess my sins before the event and reconcile my relationships. As I searched my heart the weekend before, I found that tucked away in a corner is some amorphous bitterness toward a brother, a vague but real sense of tension hard to define exactly. I realized that I had some minor grievances which I stored up and allowed to fester, and which mixed with some of my jealousies and past hurts in similar situations had grown into a much bigger bitterness. Before this I made excuses for myself that it was not so big that I need to deal with it, or that the original grievances were so small that talking about it would be awkward; but this requirement to reconcile gave me increased conviction, and thankfully I got the chance to talk with this brother and by God’s grace experienced this wonderful reconciliation. I felt such a burden lifted; it was so freeing. This by itself would have made the whole thing worthwhile.

Beside my personal reconciliation, I also had the privilege to see reconciliation taking place among the bigger Body. At the event, it was awesome to see that once an organizer called for confession and reconciliation, despite this being a new concept and many would probably feel very uncomfortable about this, people in the room gradually all started moving, many to find specific people to apologize to and reconcile with. To me this was the most beautiful music that night—more poignant than when we united our voices earlier in singing praise. For in this blended-together chatter of reconciling relationships, I saw the most genuine and undeniable testimony of “one body and one Spirit… one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

Another great encouragement for me related to the event was participating in and witnessing the unity of the worship team. Although the team came from many different fellowships which usually seldom meet together, and although almost half the team were freshmen undergrads who probably had little experience as part of any worship team before, by the end of only three practice sessions they had bonded much as a team. The worship leader especially focused on building up the team rather than on the actual performance, so that above all each group member can grow through this experience and better worship God with their lives. As part of the prayer team I was included in the worship team’s email list, and it was a wonderful surprise that even after the event was over, someone on the worship team still emailed the list to share personal burdens, and immediately people responded to arrange a time to meet up and pray. I also had the privilege to take part in a gathering of the worship team 3 weeks after the event, in which I heard many powerful testimonies of how this experience made bigger impacts on their lives, in some cases being a key catalyst to a commitment to return to seriously follow Jesus, to read the Bible more seriously and to keep God as the center despite the many conflicting demands at MIT.

In light of these experiences, I look forward to seeing what God would continue to do at MIT, as he works powerfully to unite the Body, reconcile relationships, and reinvigorate the life of every Christian to be a better vessel of His glory, so that God’s light may shine bright in this place and many souls may come to know Jesus and grow in relationship with God.

Stephanie Acker, of Vineyard Boston shares about the vision gathering of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) on February 16.  CCDA is a national network of Christians who are committed to seeing urban neighborhoods thrive.  CCDA traces it’s roots to a man named John Perkins.  If you don’t know who he is, you should. You can read about him here.  In sum, he has been instrumental in calling the church to take an active role in addressing society’s deepest hurts.  From his leadership, he has created a movement of individuals who have devoted their lives to addressing urban decay, youth violence, homelessness, racial injustice and a whole slew of other things. 

Rev. Wayne S. Daley, Community Relations Director for the Boston TenPoint Coalition shares his first person account of the miracles that can occur when Christians unite around the gospel.  The Boston TenPoint Coalition is an ecumenical group of Christian clergy and lay leaders working to mobilize the community around issues affecting Black and Latino youth.

 In 1992 the Boston TenPoint Coalition was birthed due to some violence that spilled over into a funeral service at Morning Star Baptist Church. What was supposed to be a Celebration of Life, turned into an unfavorable act of hatred amongst our young people, and against the church!  Because on that day, the Devil was at work within the spiritual realm of a spiritual battle, and the Devil brought it into the church which then opened the eye’s of every believer to come together and fight this demonic presence that everyone was preaching about as quoted by the Apostle Paul to the church in Ephesus, “For we are not fighting against flesh and blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.” 

When this horrific act of violence took place I was not living like a child of God, I was stuck in a deceitful relationship with Satan who often kept me blinded from the doors of the church because the streets appeared to be the place where I could become the man. The only reason I was not at the funeral service to say goodbye to a friend, was because the word on the street was there would be some get back so we decided not to go just for this very reason. When the news came, we were thankful that we were not there and we were hurt that this took place at our friends’ service and in the church!

Even though I was involved in the streets, I always maintained a relationship with the Lord, often praying for Him to help me get out of this struggle.  Finally, one morning He did and sent me back to Greenwood Memorial United Methodist Church where I began to teach Sunday school. After my Pastor Rev. John retired, I started to visit Charles Street A.M.E. Church, where I became active in the church and then received my calling to the ministry under the spiritual leadership of Rev. Dr. Gregory G. Groover, Sr.

I was not sure what my calling was, or where the Lord was leading me to do ministry until a young preacher named Rev. B. Christopher Sumner came to Charles Street to invite us to participate in Neighborhood Walks in and around the Grove Hall community. I knew Rev. Sumner who was the Executive Director for the Boston TenPoint Coalition, because we used to play basketball on the same court, Ronan Park court, where my friend Rob, often played. Once I heard how TenPoint came to be, I was immediately committed to their ministry, because I felt a connection to their mission which started because of an act of violence at a Celebration of Life service for a friend who was murdered because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Twenty years later, the Boston TenPoint Coalition is continuing the crusade against gang and youth violence. Still to this day, TenPoint continues to reach out to bring believers of the faith, believers of the Almighty God, clergy, pastors, ministers, lay leaders, faith-based, non-profits, companies, organizations, and communities to stand together, and to fight together against this spiritual attack on our city, through our young people. Everyone is a piece of the puzzle that can and will propel our young people, back to their God-given potential. That’s why we must continue to hold each other up in prayer, support and encourage the efforts of each other so that no one will get discouraged because we know that at the proper time, we will reap a harvest of blessings if we don’t give up.

To learn more about the Boston TenPoint Coalition and their Seasons of Peace initiatives for 2012 visit www.bostontenpoint.org

Thank you to Reverend Ralph Kee of Greater Boston Church Planting Cooperative for sharing this message about how he sees God at work in Boston as we begin 2012

I write this prayer letter on New Year’s Day. I just returned from Cambridge and today’s Sunday worship, a service that brought together 16 Cambridge churches in Cambridge’s Central Square. About 800 people in attendance, standing all around the edges of the main floor and balcony and even jamming the foyer. I could hardly contain my emotions; the many components of today’s service displayed hopes being fulfilled that I’ve had for Cambridge (and all of Greater Boston) for 40 years.

In my mind, my wife Joanne possibly gave her life for Cambridge: when we were invited by a tiny church remnant to start a new church in Cambridge in 1982, she said, “Ralph, yes, we should start a church there,” even though church planting there would put even further emotional stress upon her while she was fighting her ovarian cancer. Cambridge desperately needed expanded gospel ministry and gospel-preaching churches, so we need to accept the invitation, Joanne said. As you probably know, Joanne died in 1984. So Cambridge, just over the Charles River from Boston, has long been dear to my heart. My father, in fact, grew up in Cambridge, so I used to come down from NH as a child to visit relatives.

So this first day of 2012, this New Year’s Day, dominated by the incredible forwardlookingness of this morning’s experience, is a day for me filled with great optimism that 2012 will be unusually fruitful as to gospel ministry in Greater Boston and beyond.

So, as I say, this is the moment! When Monet started painting, six others were also painting in “Monet’s” style, I heard Steve Martin say in a TV interview last evening. The painters didn’t know each other (I guess), and each thought he by himself had come up with the new style. That’s the way history works. Several parties, independently and at the same time, innovate and enact similar things, and history chooses one as the originator. It’s only “Monet’s style” because history calls it that, not that it was his alone initially. History is not so much the originator as is “the moment” that is the originator.  

The moment has come! 2012 is here and God’s moment for Boston has come. But God’s moment historically always requires human agency. When the moment comes, it doesn’t matter who originates. What matters is that the moment has been grasped and historical change happens. Several, perhaps lots, of ministry folk have rather independently been thinking new things ministry-wise as far as Greater Boston is concerned, and now the moment has come for Greater Boston to surge ahead.

2012 is the moment. Please pray that Greater Boston won’t miss the moment, but that 12 months from now we will all be astounded at all that He has done in this spiritually needy metropolis. A year from today, I want to praise God that 2012 has been the most productive year, Gospel-wise, of our lifetimes.