National Day of Prayer is next Thursday May 3.  Where will you pray? Post on our facebook wall so others from your school, work, or neighborhood can join and make May 3, 2012 a historic day of prayer in Boston!  There is also a special opportunity for the public to pray at the State House from 12-1pm. 

This is a once-a-year opportunity to support Christian unity, make new friends, and share your faith by example!  We hope that prayer gatherings of 2 or more will sprout up in every neighborhood throughout greater Boston and that all 1,700 UniteBoston readers will attend a prayer meetup.  

Help us make it happen! Post your neighborhood or workplace with a specific time and location to meet for prayer.

DISCLAIMER: Prayer is LEGAL at the following locations: everywhere in the United States, at coffee houses, on the sidewalk, in your school, in your office, in the parking lot, in the park, and at the State House (see below).  

Thank you to Pastor Dave Hill of Abundant Grace Church in Brighton for sharing this inspiring opportunity for National Day of Prayer.  

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I wanted to let you know about a special opportunity we all have to pray for our leaders.

Thanks to the favor of God, Room 222 in the State House has been opened for prayer on Thurs, May 3 from Noon-1:00 pm for the National Day of Prayer.  The theme this year is Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD." 

A dynamic Christian woman who became a state representative last fall, Keiko Orrall, asked for a room for the National Day of Prayer and secured this room which is usually used only for Senate meetings.

I think we should take advantage of this opportunity to come and pray at the State House on May 3. I Timothy 2:1 urges us to pray for those in authority, yet most of us do not make this a priority.  Since the National Day of Prayer is an annual nationwide event, this is a worthwhile time to act on this Scripture and pray.

Another dynamic believer, Representative Vinny deMacedo, will be inviting legislators to the event and welcoming all who attend.  There will be time in the schedule to both recognize and pray for any legislators who respond and attend.  This is a wonderful chance for the church in Boston to honor and bless those who rule over us irrespective of party or politics.  The legislators usually only come for 5-10 minutes and then get back to work, but it is a significant opportunity for us.

Grace be with us all,

Dave Hill

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