This is a great song from Zach Williams filled with great truth! We are so excited to have Zach joining us at this years Worship In The Adirondacks 2018. For details and tickets go to www.worshipintheadirondacks.com.
10 Days Boston Praise Report
With Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, and Taize services, the denominations of host churches for this year’s 10 Days Boston evening gatherings was more diverse than ever before. There were 19 different churches present the first night in Cambridge! Additionally, the Indian gathering brought together five different Indian people groups for the first time!
18 churches represented at the first night in Cambridge
With this diversity, though, comes the difficulty of defining the unity we share in Christ. The 10 Days theme that we chose this year was “One Heart” – When Jesus prays that we would be one as He is one, what does that mean? Who is involved in this oneness?
At one of the evening gatherings, I was sitting down for a time of fellowship, and one of the women asked me what my home church was. I told her that it was an evangelical church called Journey Church in Harvard Square. She turned to another lady at the table and asked, “Is she a Christian?” and then they spoke in five minutes in another language before determining that yes, I was.
This was an external example of the question that I believe we all are wrestling with. Is this denomination really following Jesus? Is this person really “saved?” Who is “in” and who is “out?”
But perhaps this is the wrong question for us to be asking. In engaging with brothers and sisters of different Christian streams, I believe our approach towards one another should be filled with grace and love rather than suspicion or judgement. We should seek to learn and understand, by asking “Who have you put your trust in?” and “What is your relationship with Jesus like?”
The bible describes that the unity we share in Christ as a unity not of doctrine but of Spirit (Eph. 4:3, 1 Cor 12:7, Phil 1:27). When I started to think about it, I’ve discovered that any two individuals don’t agree completely due to the nuances of theological understandings.
As Rev. JP Robins and the Northern Suburbs team grappled with the question: “What unites us and who do we unite with?” they determined that “We are one with whoever confesses ‘Jesus as Lord.’”
Yes, what makes us one is our revelation of Christ – our acknowledgement that before Him we are all desperate for His redeeming grace.
We must never lose the centrality of Jesus in our quest for unity because He is the only one who unites us.
Other testimonies
There’s truly nothing like getting to spend time with God, and one man who was able to join us for the majority of the daytime gatherings, remarked, “That was the best week of my life.”
A young couple was so inspired by the 10 Days vision after the first night in Cambridge that they traveled around the city every evening, making it to eight of the 10 Days gatherings with their young one-year-old son.
Here is a video clip from one of our morning worship sessions out in front of Harvard University. As you can see, God really released His joy over us and many students came to join in the dance!
At the last gathering of 10 Days Boston, we stood in front of a wall of windows overlooking Boston to make declarations over the city. We also divided into groups and shared about how God was working among our various communities.
Worshipping and praying over the city of Boston
Night 2 – Pastors in the Northern Suburbs uniting in prayer
Night 4 – Praising God at the Indian gathering in Natick
Night 5 – UniteBoston friends coming together for the Taize prayer gathering at Trinity Church
Many were blessed to engage in the contemplative Taize prayer for the first time
Connecting with God at the Fenway gathering on Night 7
Night 9 – Father Dimitri explains about the history of the Orthodox Church
Daytime prayer at Harvard University
We praise God for the work that He has done to unite followers of Jesus during 10 Days Boston this year. We also celebrate the many other unity-minded initiatives that are bringing together the body of Christ in Greater Boston.
May God continue to bind us together to proclaim that Jesus is Lord over Boston!
What If A City Stopped and Prayed? Join us for 10 Days Boston
Ten Days is an opportunity to set apart a season of seeking God together as the wider Body of Christ, and doing so in a way that moves us beyond the walls of our own local churches, our own denominations, and our own ethnic groups.
What if a city stopped and prayed?
Learn more about the vision behind 10 Days in the video playlist below with 10 Days founder Jonathan Friz
Get involved!
There are many ways for you to get involved with 10 Days Boston:
1. Join Christians throughout the city for the nighttime gatherings.
Attending the evening gatherings is a great way to put your “foot in the door” and see what the ten days is all about.
2. Join us for worship and prayer during the daytime prayer sets Prayer and worship is happening at various times and locations throughout the city, so there is plenty of opportunity to get involved! Whether you work during the day or at night, whether you live in Cambridge or Roxbury, the ten days is taking place in your neighborhood.
3. Tell your friends!
Download the promotional materials to print and distribute to your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ
Acts 4:32 says “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul.” Yes, Lord, let it be so!
Until we are one,
—
Kelly Steinhaus
Team Leader, UniteBoston
www.uniteboston.com
The UniteBoston Unity Challenge: Win A Free Starbucks Gift Card!
Boston Fellows: The Difference They Made
Today, Father Kelly Madden shares a testimony from the recent cohort of Boston Fellows that just spent a year in intentional Christian community and spiritual formation.
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Measuring progress in a spiritual program can be tricky and the Boston Fellows is, at base, a program of spiritual formation. We help recent college graduates start well in the working world, beginning with habits of the heart. One measure is their time daily in God’s Word, in prayer, in listening, following. Each of them cultivated this daily practice as a habit of the heart over the course of the year. We look for other signs of growth.
But it may surprise you to know how much we emphasize and measure their work at their jobs as a measure of growth. Their workplace is the laboratory of the program. Their service and witness to Christ depends on their doing good work for an employer.
What’s that look like?
Well, if Jesus is our Lord and model, how did he work? Can there be any question that Jesus was an excellent carpenter? A few years ago The Passion of the Christ illustrated this. Jesus is seen innovating in the design of a fine set of table and chairs he is making.
The Boston Fellows ’14 cohort have excelled at their work.
Amanda’s employer publicly and spontaneously praised her at a businessmen’s breakfast I attended, for her admin work in financial services. She was also the primary administrator of a benefit gala for Bethel Institute for Justice in Boston. Some 600 people attended, including Mayor Tom Menino and the Boston Police Commissioner. They raised $700,000 in one evening to help at-risk youth and families in Boston in the name of Christ. Amanda excelled here.
Yet to excel is, literally, to “go beyond.” So the Fellows not only work proficiently at whatever tasks they have been hired to do. We have them design, propose, and carry out an above-and-beyond project for their host organization as well. Amanda initiated a project that redesigned her employer’s website, for example.
Paul, for another example, works for Biobase-International, a pharmacogenomics company that indexes the latest research on how genetic variations change the effects of pharmaceutical medicines. Paul wrote a program in the computer language Python. (Which, by the way, he taught himself.) The program alters the raw data into a format that allows clients to incorporate the database into their own software systems rather than using an online version of the database. Big advantage for the clients, increased revenue for the company. And you then take prescription drugs that heal you, not kill you.
Meredith works for the 1,400-employee publishing giant, EBSCO. She proposed and developed a database to keep track of subscriptions and log-in information for the thousands of journals that they digitize used by the main organization and its two daughter companies.
In addition to their paid work, the Fellows also excel—go beyond—by doing community service, and serving in the church where they are based.
So while Pieter, as his workplace project, developed a way to connect people seeking help for sexual brokenness with godly therapists, he also took the lead both in a Bible study for the church youth group and in another outreach for twenty-something’s in the area.
And while Jim significantly improved the way documents are processed at the healthcare IT company athenahealth, and was several times named best worker on his team there, he also completely redesigned our website, www.BostonFellows.com (no comment necessary!), led musical worship from the piano as part of the church’s worship team, and… and….
They did all this, remember, while each was working at their first job since graduating from college.
How’s it going?
They are excelling, praise God!