A Church Growing in Prayer

WELCOME
Pastor Chris Paavola:
In Acts chapter one, we just heard how the church came together to pray. And this is just this common pattern that they had. They’re described as people who devoted themselves to prayer. They would meet constantly to pray with one another, and they would call prayer meetings like the one that you heard about after Peter and the disciples are released from prison, they go and there’s a prayer meeting going on and they pray and the whole house is shaking and they’re filled with the Holy Spirit. A little bit later on, Peter is freed from prison miraculously because the church calls a prayer meeting and prays that God would free him. And there are miracles all throughout the Book of Acts, healings, storms, and overcoming persecution.

But the remarkable stories and acts cannot be told apart from the remarkable prayer that preceded them. God does great things when his people come together to pray. In 1857, a man named Jeremiah Lanphier was at his church in Manhattan and just distraught with how few people were there. And so he said, well, we’re going to have a prayer meeting. And so on Wednesday afternoon, morning, he put out a sign for a prayer service. At the lunch hour, he had this idea he wanted to pray at the lunch hour with businessmen and workers in New York. And so noon came, but no one else did. And so distraught but resolute, Jeremiah decided he was going to pray, and so he prayed. And about 20, so minutes later, he heard the sound of footsteps and one person walked into the room with him and then four more joined. And he was like, oh, okay. And after they were done with their prayer hour, they decided they’re going to pray again next Wednesday and have this prayer lunch meeting kind of thing. The next week, 23 people came. The week after that, 40 people came. The week after that, the stock market crashed big time and soon they had to move from the small space where they were praying into a larger sanctuary because over 3000 people gathered together to pray.

Bankers, bakers, bricklayers, praying stories, newspapers ran with a story and inspired other churches to do the same. Soon there were 5,000 people gathering to pray at a church in Philadelphia, 3000 in Boston, 2000 in Chicago. And historians estimate at the height of what is now referred to as the second Great Awakening, 20,000 people a day were saved. But the remarkable stories of the second Great awakening cannot be told apart from the remarkable prayer that preceded it. God does great things when his people come together to pray. In 1957, Congressman Adam Powell in Illinois heard about the events happening in Montgomery with the bus boycott. And so he called a National Deliverance Day of Prayer, and 28,000 people in Chicago showed up to pray.

Then Dr. King and the SCLC heard about this, and so a little bit later on when they were also fighting for voting rights, they organized a prayer pilgrimage for freedom and thousands of people from all across the country took buses and hitchhiked and took trains to go pray in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. And long before his, I have a dream speech. At that same location, over 40,000 people gather to pray for the ballot. And then what followed also throughout the Civil Rights movement is kind of organic, informal prayer as well. It’s thousands of people, 4,000 people on Easter morning kneeling on the streets of Birmingham to pray. It’s 600 people kneeling on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to pray. It’s hundreds of people kneeling outside of the jailhouse where Dr. King was kept in Bessemer, Alabama to pray. And the remarkable events of the Civil Rights era cannot be told apart from the remarkable prayer that preceded it.

God does great things when his people come together to pray, and that’s exactly what we’re going to be talking about because if it’s true in Jerusalem and it’s true in Manhattan and it’s true in Birmingham, why would it be any different for us in Battle Creek? And so we’re kicking off today a called the next 50 years where we are asking God to do great things, but we’ve got to start with prayer. And this is more than a series. This is a capital campaign and we are so excited to be announcing it this morning. By the way, my name is Chris Paola. I get the honor of being the pastor here at St. Mark and we get the honor of being a part of really what I consider a historic moment, a kind of a landmark watershed moment for St. Mark as we move forward.

And what we’re going to now, if you’re just kind of joining us today, this is one of your first times here. You’re just watching online. You’re going, oh boy, we’re talking about Money Capital Campaign. I’m out. And before you click exit, okay, hold on, because we’re not just talking about money. In fact, there’s so much more to this. What we’re going to be doing is we’re looking at the six vision statements that we have at St. Mark. These are six vision statements we’ve prayed over and crafted together, and these are the things that drive us forward. So today, if you’re just checking us out, checking us out, you get to hear what we’re about. You get to hear the white hot passion, the thing that makes us tick and to go, oh wow, this is what these people care about today in the weeks to come, and each week we’re going to talk about one of these different vision statements and what it means for the next 50 years.

And today we’re specifically talking about the vision statement to be a church growing in prayer. I love this vision statement. It comes to us from a biography of Jesus written by a first century follower named Luke, who describes this time when the disciples are with Jesus and take a look at what he says. One day Jesus was praying in a certain place and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, say it with me. Teach us to pray very good. Just as John taught his disciples, Lord teach us to pray. And what I love about that, when they’re talking to Jesus, they’re saying, Lord, teach us to pray is that that’s the heartbeat behind our vision statement, to be a church growing in prayer because we’re saying, Lord, teach us to pray. We want to grow and pray like you did.

That’s what captured the disciples. When the disciples watched Jesus pray, they knew there was something different. These are guys who had watched rabbis pray and synagogues every Saturday, all their lives, but when Jesus prayed something was different, it wasn’t tiresome, it wasn’t a chore, it wasn’t predictable. It was this dynamic, powerful, unpredictable, intimate relationship that Jesus had with his heavenly Father. And they’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We want to pray like that. Teach us to pray like that. And that’s the heartbeat behind our vision statement to a church growing in prayer is, Lord, teach us to pray just like you taught your disciples. And what I love about this vision statement is regardless of where you are in your faith walk, whether you’ve never followed Jesus before or you’ve just started following him, or you’ve been following Jesus for years, this is an invitational vision statement.

This is something we can all do because you never arrive. You’ve never just arrived at your prayer life. We can all take a simple step forward to grow in prayer together. This couldn’t be more inclusive. And so we are a church growing in prayer. Now, the way we’re going to do this each week is I think instead of just me waxing on for a long time about why this matters and telling what it could look like, I think we have to talk about what happens if we stay here. So each week for this series, when we’re looking at these vision statements, we’re going to ask two questions. One, what happens in the next 50 years if we don’t live out this vision statement, if we don’t do this? And then what will happen in 50 years if we do live out this vision statement? And so we hold up those two questions every week, and we’re going to start this week.

We’ll start with the first question here. What happens if we don’t grow in prayer, if we plateau, if there is stasis stagnant, if we just stay where we are, if we are average common ordinary prayer in this church, well, I’ll tell you what will happen. The average, the common and the ordinary, look around the country and we’ll be just like that. Take a look at this graph. 30 years ago, 73% of people had some type of regular attendance in a church. That’s membership. It’s not the only metric and it’s a hard metric, but this is basically church attendance, right? 50 years ago, 73% of Americans were an active. Two thirds of America, three fourths of America was an active part of a church. Now that number is below 50%. For the first time in our country’s history, 47%, it’s falling off a cliff. And I got to be honest with you, I’m terrified of what happens when the boomer generation passes because they make up a large chunk of that 47%. Last year in 2023, 4,500 Protestant churches in our country closed. Wow.

Over half of millennials today have what they would describe for their faith affiliation as nun, NONE, not like nuns, nuns as in nun, I have nothing. No, it’s a staggering number. And the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, which is the church denomination that we’re a part of half of the churches and there’s like thousands in our country, but half of them have attendance of 50 or fewer people. You want ordinary, you want average, you want common. That’s it. If we stay the same in our prayer life, if we don’t grow, that’s our future. But I refuse to accept that as a given.

When I open my Bible and I read it, I see Jesus promising I will build my church. And in the last two and a half years, St. Mark has more than tripled in growth because of the uncommon, extraordinary, and above average prayer that you have committed yourselves to. We have been a church growing in prayer, prayer nights, prayer vigils, prayer walks. You have taken that step forward to grow. And if you love what’s happening at St. Mark, I say this all the time, if you love what’s happening at St. Mark, come be a part of what’s making it happen. These prayer nights, it is the thing that is moving this church forward because we’ve been desperate and pleading with God and depending on God and prayer and growing in prayer, God has done remarkable things he has for me. It’s just simple. Churches growing in prayer are churches that are growing.

That’s it. It’s like the common metric when you look across the country growing in prayer, refusing to settle for the way we always pray and taking a step forward and saying with the disciples, Lord, teach us to pray. And I believe. So that brings us then to the next question. What will happen in the next 50 years if we do live out this vision to be a church growing in prayer, if we just take a 1% growth? I heard the stat, if you do a 1% growth every day, you’ll be 23 times different by the end of the year in terms of goal setting and resolutions and all that stuff. Just 1% growth, just 1% change over a long period of time has remarkable effects. Ask anybody who exercises over a long period, you exercise once and you look in the mirror and you’re like, it’s not working, then I dunno why I looked my, can we cut that from the last stream please?

But no, but you go once and it doesn’t work. But then you exercise for a year and people go, Hey, you look great. Or anybody who works in finance, they’ll tell you the power of compounding interest. It’s a small percentage, but man, it starts to build. And it’s just like that with prayer. Guys, if we just take one step forward, 1% change, grow in our prayer life to pray more this year than we did last year, and we do that for 50 years, we’re going to blow the doors off this place. If we are church growing in prayer in the next 50 years, we will have a thousand people on our campus every weekend, no question. In the next 50 years, we will see 5,000 baptisms easy. In the next 50 years, we will be a church that’s sending missionaries overseas. We’ll be a church that’s planting churches all around the area to start new churches because we can’t keep everybody here.

If we are a church growing in prayer, we will see we will adopt entire city blocks and renovate them and make a difference in our community. If we’re a church growing in prayer, we’ll see addictions broken in this place. We will see remarkable healings at healing services. Our monthly prayer nights will become weekly prayer nights packed to the rafters with people crying out to God. Our prayer walks won’t just be like one prayer walk in the summer with one team. We’ll have multiple teams walking all over the city on prayer walks. In the next 50 years, we’ll have a dedicated space, a room just for prayer 24 7.

(16:35):

But to do all of that and to do that, we got to address some of the things in front of us in order to get there, some construction that we need to talk about. And that brings us to this campaign. The next 50 years. We made a video that’s kind of an overview video, and then I’ll kind of speak about it a little bit later on. So, take a look at this and then we’ll wrap up our service because my kids need a place to find hope because my kids need a place to experience Jesus because my kids need a place to learn God’s word.

CAMPAIGN DETAILS
One year ago, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the construction of this sanctuary and the faith of those who made it all possible because of their generosity. You and I and countless others have experienced Jesus here at St. Mark, but as we enter the next 50 years, it’s time for us to honor their legacy with a campaign called the Next 50 Years. So there are two purposes to the next 50 years Capital campaign, one to update our campus, and then two, to make room to grow. So with regards to updating our campus, if you look around, the needs are obvious. It’s hard to convince a young family that we are a dynamic and relevant ministry when our facilities haven’t been updated for 30 to 40 years in some spaces or like in our cafe and lobby. We need to make this space look fresh and modern or making our bathrooms a DA compliant. And then if you go further down the hallway to our multipurpose room, that’s a space that our world for children is using every day for school. And then our youth and kids ministry are using that every weekend, and most of that space hasn’t been updated in the last 50 years. And the time is now to create a space that’s fun and safe where kids can grow in their faith.

Now, our facilities have served as well and we’re grateful for them, but I actually think it shows honor to those who gave us this gift by making these improvements and caring for our facilities like this. And then that brings us to the second aspect of the next 50 years to make Room to Grow. St. Mark is almost at 400 people on a weekend at three different services, and we praise God for that. But if we wait until our sanctuary is full before we add new seats, we’ve waited too long and the time is now to add seats so that we can continue to reach as many as possible. That’s why we’ve worked with our architect and he’s talked about and identified that we can add 50 seats and kind of a terrorist seating style up here in the balcony so we can continue to grow.

I believe two things, my friends, one, the best days of St. Mark are in front of us, and two, the God is calling you to be a part of them and to help tell the next generation the praise worthy deeds of the Lord To accomplish all of these goals, we’re asking the people of St. Mark to make a three year pledge above and beyond the regular tithe and offerings to the next 50 years. And we have three goals for this campaign. Our first goal is to raise 1.5 million. Our stretch goal is to raise $1.75 million, and our faith goal is to raise $2 million. It’s a big number, but isn’t that what faith is for? How much should you give? Well, that brings me to your next step. Actually. I’m asking you to get into a quiet place with Jesus and to pray. God, what do you want me to give to the next 50 years?

And then listen, whatever he tells you to do, be faithful to that. Nothing more, nothing less. God will honor that gift and just trust that God’s going to provide for you when times get a little bit tighter in the future. And you’re wondering if you’ve got enough money to pay all the bills. I promise you he’s going to provide for you because that’s what his work says. And I can’t wait to celebrate your gift with you on Celebration Sunday. So Mark, your calendars is coming up on Sunday, October 6th at all of our services. And thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for your gift to the next 50 years.

It’s pretty exciting, man. It’s pretty exciting. So you see that’s the external rendering right there of what the facilities will look like in the outside, and you saw the internal rendering of what an expanded cafe and lobby will look like to provide more fellowship space for us. It’s awesome stuff. We know there’s going to be a lot of questions about this. And so this week we’re just kicking everything off and giving a big picture view of this. Next week we’ll start to look a little bit more at the blueprints together and some of the renderings and get into the details of that. And then the week after that, we’ll get into some of the costs and why things cost the way they do and the breakdown and all that kind stuff and whatnot. But we know you guys are going to have a lot of questions about this.

So, Jerry Porter, who’s an Elder here, and also the Director of the Capital Campaign is going to be in the conference room. So just down this little hallway here on your left, as you’re walking down the hallway, Jerry will be in there after the services to answer any questions you have. We want to make sure to hear your questions so that we address them in the weeks to come. And so please, if you have something in your brain that’s going, this doesn’t make sense, or whatever, or how come or when are we, then head down the hallway, talk to Jerry, and we’ll make sure we address that in weeks to come. And honestly, we know that there are questions out there. We sent out a trifold brochure last week. You should have got it. And in that brochure, it’s trying to take all of this and condense it down.

And sometimes when you condense things down, you use shorthand language. And so I want to be really clear because some folks asked what is meant by the term Next generation, and I just want to be really clear, the term Next Generation includes both our World four Children School and St. Mark. And so when we got together with the property committee and the elders and our board and the St Mark board, and we started talking through things, we created a long list of things that we know we would love to do, and you kind of go pie in the sky, right? Perfect world. And then you start to actually see the numbers and we go, okay, some of these things might be a little cost prohibitive right now. What do we need to focus on? And so our decision has been to focus on things that are shared spaces and updating current spaces and shared spaces.

And so two of the main shared spaces with our world are the multipurpose room that they use every day that hasn’t been touched in 40, 50 years and that we use every weekend. And so that’s a really important shared space with both ministries. And then obviously our parking lot that we have anywhere from two to 3000 cars every week coming through our parking lot. And so that’s another space that’s a shared space that we want to make sure. And so yes, both ministries are represented in this campaign, but it’s that word next generation. So yeah, thank you for the questions because we look at that, it’s like a forest for the trees thing. We’re so into this all the time that we sometimes miss the obvious questions. So thank you for that. And if you have more questions, please talk to Jerry and we’ll make sure we address them in weeks to come.

29-DAY PRAYER DEVOTIONAL
Now, next week or this week, actually, you should get in the mail a larger booklet that we have that kind of summarizes that video and lays things out and lets you look at the renderings and some of the timelines and stuff that booklet’s being mailed out this week. And maybe you’re thinking, why didn’t you hand it out in church today? Well, one, we know not everyone can be here on a Sunday morning. We want everyone to get it at the same time, so we’re mailing it out. But then two, today we wanted to hand out a different booklet. Actually, we’ve got a 29 day prayer devotional that we’ve made Jackie, come forward, you guys volunteers. You guys can come forward and hand these out. Everyone gets one of these. Everyone gets one of these. Everyone gets one of these. We have 29 days between now and commitment Sunday on October 6th.

And so we were like, wait, we could find 29 leaders. And it was funny, we started going through elders and council and people who are a part of the Capital campaign and we’re like, oh, there’s 29 people. We could totally do this. So every person in leadership for this campaign and leadership of the church, we asked to write a prayer one prayer per day leading up to commitment Sunday on October 6th. So it’s 29 different prayers. All you do is you flip to that particular day and you pray about this, and you pray about whatever it is, and it says, please pray aloud. That’s my quick tip. I think prayer is so much easier to focus when you speak out loud. And so wherever it might be for breakfast or at the end of your day or whatever it is, I’m asking you to join our voices together and pray and lift up this thing.

Because we saw what happened in Jerusalem. We saw what happened in Manhattan, and we saw what happened in Birmingham. When God’s people come together to pray, God does great things. And so we want to see that in our midst and actually to do that and to demonstrate that here’s what we’re going to do and how we’re going to end our time together. I always pray, and then we go on with the rest of our service. Today I want you all to turn to page one, day one, page one, super easy. Turn to page one. And this is a prayer. Miss Mary, our director of our world for children, wrote for us. And so this is also our theme verse for the day and for this entire series that we will tell the next generation that prays worthy the deeds of the Lord. So as we close our time together, what I’m asking you guys to do is to pray aloud with me, this prayer.

PRAYER
Together we pray. Dear heavenly Father, let it be said of me that I faithfully told the coming generation of the glorious deeds you have done and the wonders you have worked. May your word always be proclaimed here at St. Mark so that the generations to come will know you and worship you. May they keep your word in their heart and live their lives according to your ways. Raise up faithful volunteers and workers at our world for children and in our youth and family ministry who will help kids experience Jesus. Surround the next generation with mentors in the faith who will teach them your word, so they may know you and walk with you all the days of their lives. Lord, as St. Mark begins this capital campaign, give us eyes to see beyond today and to be mindful of the needs of the next generation. Help us to have a concern for them above a concern for ourselves or the things of this world. In Jesus’ name, amen.

So, every day you’ll see a different scripture that’s a prompt for the person who wrote this, and it’s a prayer based on that scripture as it relates to capital campaign. You guys keep praying this all for the next 29 days because we know that God does great things when God’s people come together to pray.