Intimacy first...

We had a wonderful opening night last week and we hope many of you will join us for worship and intercession tomorrow night! We will be meeting every week from 7-9pm on Tuesdays at the City Light Café, across the street from First Assembly. Come, join us and invite anyone who might be interested! I think as I try to update this blog weekly about what is going on at BHOP-NY, I am going to take some time to explain a little bit about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and to describe our vision in a little more depth. So in this posting I want to describe one aspect of our prayer meetings that is so important to our vision. We use two prayer formats during our prayer meetings that are part of the Harp and Bowl model. The first one we do is Worship with the Word. During that set we pray and sing through a portion of scripture. It is a time for people to worship the Lord, dig deeper into a scripture by singing it and praying it back to Him, and a time for intimate communion with Jesus. The second prayer set we do is Intercession. During this set we pray for our city, our churches, and our nation. We also try to have times of small group prayer and prayer ministry for anyone in the room. At this time we are only having one prayer meeting a week and we split the time evenly between the two prayer sets. Our hope is that one day we will have many more prayer meetings going on so that much more prayer is being lifted up to the Lord. Sometimes after our prayer meetings it feels like the time has flown by and our prayers can seem so insignificant. And to some it might seem like a waste of time to spend half of the meeting praying and singing through a Scripture (Worship with the Word). But the reason we do it that way is that we are establishing something here. We are building a foundation that the Lord can build upon. I believe that if we are faithful in establishing intimacy first, keeping worship, praise and communion with Jesus in first place, then the Lord will grow the intercession into what He desires it to be so that we are partnering with Him to move in our land. One key aspect of our vision is to restore the First Commandment to first place in our lives. We want our intercession to come from a place of faith and our prayers to come from an overflow in our hearts. The only way to have an overflow of faith and love in our hearts is to encounter His heart as we commune with Him. And that is one reason why we start every prayer meeting with Worship with the Word! So our hope is that as more people come and catch the vision, more will begin serving with us, and we will be able to hold more meetings. But until that time, we will be faithful with the vision the Lord has given us, and though our prayers may feel small and weak, we are lifting them up to a Mighty God!