We just received this report from Steve Buss and the One Hope network in Lane County Oregon. Here's an excerpt from their newsletter.
For two years, more than 40 churches + hundreds of people have prayed around-the-clock for our community. With specific insight from Christ-honoring leaders in every sphere, we’re praying. God is giving us eyes to see our community, teaching us to seek its “peace and prosperity,” and bringing glory to Jesus. There is more to come! Praise the Lord!
Steve's team introduces the strategy on their website with:
One Church - One Day provides a simple way for churches to pray together for our community in strategic and relevant ways. Each church takes one day every month to pray for 24 hours. This creates a church-led, year round, strategic prayer covering for our community. In other words, that's prayer on behalf of our community 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year! Click here to go to One Hope's website.
For two years, more than 40 churches + hundreds of people have prayed around-the-clock for our community. With specific insight from Christ-honoring leaders in every sphere, we’re praying. God is giving us eyes to see our community, teaching us to seek its “peace and prosperity,” and bringing glory to Jesus. There is more to come! Praise the Lord!
Steve's team introduces the strategy on their website with:
One Church - One Day provides a simple way for churches to pray together for our community in strategic and relevant ways. Each church takes one day every month to pray for 24 hours. This creates a church-led, year round, strategic prayer covering for our community. In other words, that's prayer on behalf of our community 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year! Click here to go to One Hope's website.
In the read more section below I'll provide a link to this PDF report and you can visit their site for more of their personal testimonies click here. Let's rejoice with them and remember that the testimony of Jesus, is the spirit of prophecy (Rev. 19:10). If Christ did it here, He can do it in your community to. Catch a vision!
One Hope's Two Year report of their employment of 1Church1Day (One Church One Day).
I love this report because it illustrates the "long term impact" of God's presence invited into a community. Click here to download One Hopes 2 Year Report in PDF. Now while we start by emphasizing the 7 spheres or 7 mountains the truth is, you can have as many or as few councils as you desire. In Lane County they choose 10 areas to focus their prayer on and as of today, there are actually 42 churches working together each month.
What's so cool is that One Hope did this "old school."
What do I mean by old school? They had to do the work and due due diligence to put the communication infrastructure in place in order to facilitate the prayer, praise, requests, reports, and serve the councils. My friends, this system works! The beauty of the app and the associated 1Church1Day Community Transformation System is that we are helping automate the process for you. We are going to offer two kinds of leagues.
Lessons Learned
I love this report because it illustrates the "long term impact" of God's presence invited into a community. Click here to download One Hopes 2 Year Report in PDF. Now while we start by emphasizing the 7 spheres or 7 mountains the truth is, you can have as many or as few councils as you desire. In Lane County they choose 10 areas to focus their prayer on and as of today, there are actually 42 churches working together each month.
What's so cool is that One Hope did this "old school."
What do I mean by old school? They had to do the work and due due diligence to put the communication infrastructure in place in order to facilitate the prayer, praise, requests, reports, and serve the councils. My friends, this system works! The beauty of the app and the associated 1Church1Day Community Transformation System is that we are helping automate the process for you. We are going to offer two kinds of leagues.
- Ambassador League - An ambassador league (you name your league) will incorporate the best of "old school" with new technology. They'll have access to all of the "old school" tried and true tools that have been used by ministries in over 38 nations for the last 12 years. Plus, we've found a way to offer the 1Church1Day app to your league and use it for directing your decrees, prayer targets and sharing your testimonies through the app. You'll use some of our old school systems and processes to handle your watchman reports, prayer requests, praise reports and council reports. This league is where everyone starts with a very low financial threshold to set this up. Watch for this to be rolled out in our app the first week of June.
- Kingdom League - A kingdom league is for a church/ministry/city/network of churches who desire to utilize the full automated 1Church1Day Community Transformation System. It automates all of the old school systems and the beauty of it. It empowers the Church overseeing it to mobilize strategic prayer and action within 5 minutes. It provides a level of security and confidentiality which is key to serving high profile leaders in the 7 mountains and in your council teams. It offers calendars so every person can manage their watch schedule and there are ways for everyone to report what the see and hear. I love this because this system offers leaders a "virtual strategic command center" which we call a Leadership Dashboard for your league. This will also have your very own 1Church1Day apps associated with your league for your people. There is a significant cost to customize which we will discover what that is over the next several months. I'll share more about this soon.
Lessons Learned
- This Kingdom Strategy Is Cross Cultural - While many are familiar with the Whatcom Story who began using this strategy in 2008 (ORT) or Lane County who began in 2015 there are a large number of communities who've employed with strategy who do not have websites and support like these two ministries do. We've seen churches impact communities and regions from Gainesville Florida, to Yakima Washington, to Kalamyo Myanmar, to Andra Pradesh India, to Lahore Pakistan, Kenya, Liberia, England, Romania, etc.
- What is Needed to Start? - Leaders from the Church in a city, region, county, etc. who have responsibility because Christ called them. Leaders who are motivated by a kingdom heart. What do I mean by this? Leaders who recognize the Church is bigger than their ministry and they need to work with the other parts in that area. They often cry and pray for unity or that the Church would be one as Jesus prayed in John 17. People who are captured by a vision for building our Father's house of prayer continually. The most important element is the fire that burns within their heart we call love. Love for God, love for God's people, love for the lost and a desire to see Christ's love impact and transform their community. Bottom line, you supply the love and the territory and through 1Church1Day we can help you apply the wisdom of God to your passion to increase your effectiveness.
- Honor - 1 Peter 2:17 says to "Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God and honor the king." It requires honoring God's word. In Acts 15:16 it says in the latter days that God would restore the tabernacle of David so the Gentiles might be saved. The tabernacle of David was marked by a system of teams who offered up 24/7 prayer all year long. It requires us to honor God's word when it comes to loving our brother and loving the lost. 1 Corinthians 12 makes is clear that there are many parts but one body and we need each other. It also requires that we honor jurisdictions. For example, our prayers are much more impactful when a leader with authority such as a mayor, police chief, fire chief, business man, pastor or bishop invite us in to pray. Finally we need to honor God's word when it comes to "doing" what His word says such as recording dreams, visions and words (Habakkuk 2:2), judging those words (1 Corinthians 14:29) and doing good strategic spiritual warfare through God's word (Psalm 68:11, 2 Corinthians 10:3-4 and 1 Timothy 1:18). It also requires honoring roles and gifts. God designed and gave certain gifts to perform certain functions. In every community where you see "long term results" you will also find a team or ministry who do what no typical church or pastor can do. They are uniquely gifted and called to mobilize and connect the body of Christ on a larger scale.
- Faith in Action - James 2:17 says "Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead." You can talk, dream, envision, strategize, pray, prophesy etc. but the bottom line it requires a leader or a handful of leaders with a gift of wisdom to begin to put their faith in action. 1Church1Day provides wisdom to start ..... but it requires a leaders motivated by the love of Christ to push through the pain, disappointment and challenges that arise. Candidly, the steps are simple. 1. Build the wall of prayer as one church takes one day 2. Set a watch 3. Form councils 4. The spiritual intelligence gleaned through prayer and these councils are shared with the leaders who then do just like King Hezekiah did in Ezekiel 37 when he laid the report from Isaiah and the enemy before the Lord and asked God what to do. It's simple! But simple does not mean easy. But the fruit is worth it.
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