Prayer initiative for Christ Anglican Mission

This past Sunday during my sermon, I announced the beginning of a new prayer initiative for our church.

As I read the OT and Gospel lessons for Sunday, the idea of us needing to pray for the city of Millville captured me. Our OT lesson was Genesis 18, Abraham pleads for Sodom, while the Gospel was from Luke 11, where Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray, through the Lord's Prayer, but also through constant, intentional repeated prayer, asking, seeking and knocking.

He led me to talk about our need to pray not just once, but to begin a campaign of prayer for the city as we ask Him what areas and people He would have us reach. In my devotional time the morning I sat down to write, I read Acts 18, where I came across the part that tied it all together. God told Paul that he would allow him to keep speaking in Corinth, even though people were trying to harm him, because He had many people in that city. He spared Paul so that his people could hear the word proclaimed.

And I thought, God has many in our city who are His, but they haven't heard the word proclaimed yet. He has many in this city who haven't heard the word because we haven't told them.

So we need to pray.

• For leaders in the fields of politics, business, education, religion, the arts, and media, for Godly wisdom and direction
• For God to break strongholds that hold back the movement of the word, including violence, drug use, poverty, violence, hopelessness, broken families, sexual immorality and depression.
• For open doors to communicate the Gospel message in word and deed.
• For God's will to be done.

I absolutely believe that God has his hands on this campaign, that He will lead us and this city into the place he wants us to go, as we seek his will first and continuously!

If you are visiting the blog from outside of our body, I invite you to join with us as we pray for our city!

Second Sunday Ministry

The Second Sunday event is one that I am excited to see the unfolding of over the coming months, because of the amazing potential of God.

What is Second Sunday? Well, on the second Sunday of every month, a group from Christ Anglican Mission heads over to Elwyn in Vineland where residents from several area group homes dealing with developmentally challenged adults come for what could best be described as a worship service.

As people come in early, we give out snacks and lead them in a craft relating to the message. Our message this type was "Jesus was a man just like us, only without sin". The leader of the event, our own Dr. Barbara West, helped to get everyone to identify with Jesus' humanity and with the reality that even though we sin, Jesus didn't.

We sung "Jesus Loves Me" and prayed the Lord's Prayer. It was amazing listening to the innocence in their voices as they sung and prayed, you could hear their heart coming out, the excitement of it all.

I really enjoyed helping with the craft, which reinforced lesson from the month before, "Jesus is God's gift to us". We took a square of cardboard and helped them paste a bit of wrapping paper to the front of it, and put "Jesus is God's gift to" and wrote their name on it, topping it off with a bow.

It was great to help the guys that I worked with put the glue on, or encourage them doing it and to explain the concept of Jesus being a gift to each of us.

We closed with a puppet show which they loved completely, then dismissed them with a passing of the peace.

It truly was an event where God was glorified through out, where the men and women who came were shown the love of Jesus in a real hands on way, through word and action, by receiving our love and our message. I'm excited to see what will happen in the coming months as we continue with this show of Christ's love!