Connect09

How can I be involved in Connect09?

It is as easy as Pray, Connect, Expect!

1. Prayer

The easiest way to make a Christian feel guilty is to talk about prayer.  We all struggle with it.  Indeed, ‘struggle’ is how the Apostle Paul described his own prayer life - what a relief that is to hear.  But rather than feel guilty (or worse, avoid the subject of prayer to avoid feeling guilty!), let’s encourage one another.  Let’s remind one another.  Let’s teach and coach one another to be a generation of pray-ers.  Not because any of us are perfect; rather, because we are all not.

Connect09 starts with prayer.  It is a call to prayer: prayer for our cities, our regions and our towns.  Prayer for our whole community (our communities - some of us live within several).  How can you be involved in Connect09?  By praying for the people God has placed around you that you might be light and salt to them.  If you are praying for unbelievers you know, you are already involved in Connect09!

Ideas:
- Register to receive Connect09 prayer points here
- Join a prayer network (or start a new one!) here

2. Connection

The researchers say that many people in our society feel disconnected. Yet we don’t want to be disconnected: we want to belong.  Christians are blessed with a connectedness, a community built around Christ.  Of course we are fallen, and it isn’t always what it should or could be, but it is there. 

Our disconnect - sometimes as individuals, and perhaps more so as a local church - seems to be from the society of which we are part.  It can be just so easy, in the hustle bustle of life to rely on our church relationships, and become rather cut off from the rest of the world.  We know it is not right. It is certainly not the example Jesus sets for us.  It just kind of… happens.

We need to work at connecting.  Connecting won’t just happen.  We need to make conscious decisions - both large and small - to connect.  In fact, I suspect it starts with prayer (see point 1).  It actually involves opening our hearts and homes and sharing our lives.  This is both dead simple (anyone can do it) and very hard: it is costly, it involves risk of rejection, and it involves putting concern for others ahead of concern for self.  But we follow a Saviour who has been there and done that, don’t we?

Ideas:
- Check out what others are doing to connect here
- Talk with your minister and others at church about plans for 2009

3. Expectation

Expectation goes hand-in hand with prayer.  We pray to a God who hears, a Saviour who loves, a Father who responds.  We pray to a God who has told us his will and asked us to pray according to it, that he may work out his purposes through our very prayers.  Do we expect things to happen when we pray?  If we don’t, hasn’t something gone amiss?

Expectation also goes hand in hand with the Word of God.  When God speaks, it is so.  His Word is the most powerful force in the universe - in fact it both created and sustains the universe.  And God’s Word does not go out without achieving its purpose.  It is that Word with which we have been entrusted; a living word.  A two-edged word: of mercy and judgement; of grace and justice; of life and death.  It will bring either forgiveness or condemnation, but it will not rest idle or return empty.

Ideas:
- Consider what ways you might be able to share God’s Word in relationship
- Pray that God will give you opportunities to do so

Prayer and the Word of God will bring profound changes - of that we can be confident.  And God will do it through relationships; through connections; through us!

How can you be involved?  Well, I suspect you already are! If not, it is never too late.  Pray. Connect. Expect.

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