Make Your City a House of Prayer: Moving Toward Unity Among the Churches

By Lynn Ferder

This book explores the pastor-intercessor relationship in making our city a house of prayer by suggesting ways to rethink how we can interact with cross-denominational leadership, opening the way for unity to flourish.

Additionally, we provide guidelines for appropriate altar ministry and corporate prayer settings, prayers for youth and children, and tools for writing your own prayers addressing the mission and vision statement of your own, or other, ministries. We also address the business aspect of starting a ministry and walk the reader through the process of taking a small prayer group from the home into the community and making your city a house of prayer.

Any book with a title like Make Your City a House of Prayer begs to be read! We in the USA are such an independent, individualistic bunch and often suffer from not praying and working together to advance His Kingdom in our cities and nation. Such heart unity, my colleagues and I have observed in many national prayer initiatives, is what facilitates the breakthroughs and transformations of the Lord even in impossible, discouraging, oppressive situations. We do need the kind of paradigm that Lynn Ferder shares in her book. She has much experience in personally living out this paradigm and in training many others to do so. Her guidelines for corporate, united prayer and the place of children and youth will also be extremely valuable. I heartily endorse this book and its wonderful theme. May it catch on across our nation and in other nations as well!

John Robb, chairman, International Prayer Connect

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781512705249

Lynn Ferder

Lynn Ferder is the director for the House of Prayer, in Roseburg, Oregon. Lynn is a Bible teacher and speaker, with a prophetic calling. She offers practical understanding and training on how to apply biblical truth to everyday life. With a heart for prayer, it is her desire to teach others how to have a meaningful prayer life and a rich relationship with God.

Book preview

MAKE YOUR

CITY A

House of Prayer

MOVING TOWARD UNITY

AMONG THE CHURCHES

LYNN FERDER

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Copyright © 2015 Lynn Ferder.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

The book cover and the author photo were taken by Michelle Barton.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-0525-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-0526-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-0524-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015911936

WestBow Press rev. date: 07/29/2015

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Part One

Moving Toward Unity: A New Paradigm

Chapter 1 Why Do We Need Another Prayer Group?

Chapter 2 Start Somewhere

Chapter 3 Identify What You Are Trying to Build

Chapter 4 Your Guiding Statements

Chapter 5 Set Precedent Early

Chapter 6 Intentional Relationship

Chapter 7 Let Everything Be Done with Honor

Chapter 8 If You Want to be Heard, Speak Less

Chapter 9 The Art of Community

Chapter 10 Behave Yourself Wisely

Chapter 11 When God says, Halt

Chapter 12 Do we need a building?

Chapter 13 Smart Faith Practices

Chapter 14 Courage to Risk

Chapter 15 Warfare by Praise

Chapter 16 Making Disciples

Chapter 17 Accountability and the Team Approach

Part Two

Give Them the Tools

Chapter 18 Corporate Prayer Etiquette

Chapter 19 Altar Ministry Etiquette

Chapter 20 Praying into Your Mission and Vision

Chapter 21 Prayer for Youth and Children

Chapter 22Praying for Freedom

Chapter 23 Conferences and Prayer Retreats

About The Author

FOREWORD

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The reader will note that when the author says she visited all the churches in the area she is referring only to those churches that believe Jesus is God.

The reader may notice that quotations from the Bible have had the pronouns of God changed from capital letters to lowercase letters. This is to provide for consistency and ease for the reader throughout this book. Words in small caps and italics in Bible verses have also been changed to regular text type to avoid placing emphasis where none is intended. In some quotations, this author has paraphrased the Bible verse. Paraphrasing is noted following the verses involved. It is the intent of this author to reverence, honor, and glorify God with this writing.

The Roseburg House of Prayer is not affiliated with the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri, although we respect their ministry outreach to encourage and teach prayer.

INTRODUCTION

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Most likely, all pastors desire to see a strong prayer group in their church and community. They want a prayer group that is active, efficient, and effective, but most importantly, possesses a humility to stay true to the written Word of God. This is the mission of the local body and the heart of the pastors. The purpose of this book is to assist each church and community in fulfilling that goal. We will consider questions such as, how can we cross denominational lines with a heart of unity and humility? How can we reach community when we all have such various flavors of understanding? How can our churches pray together and avoid offending each other? This book is designed to address some of the challenges we face in the Christian community as we struggle our way toward unity in heart, purpose and prayer.

If we really want to see our cities transformed and have unity in the body of Christ then we need to practice honor and humility to a greater degree. There are some critical areas of understanding we need to have to facilitate the process of ushering in a heart of one accord. You may have a whole plate full of great ideas and plans on transforming your city. I know I did. I was visiting with the Lord in prayer about this and showing him my plate full of plans. One by one God asked me to give each item to him. After a while I had nothing left on my plate. As I complained to God about this, he asked me to also surrender the plate! Now I had nothing at all. That is when he said, Now you are ready to go talk to the pastors. Ask them what their hope for unity is and help them to fulfill it. We need a new paradigm on what we are doing if we really want to see unity among the churches and make our city a house of prayer.

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The Roseburg House of Prayer began in 2003 with a small prayer group that met in my backyard. After three years it became apparent that we were to reach out into our community by forming a community-wide prayer group called, Roseburg House of Prayer. This was to be a prayer group that would be made up of people from any or all of the churches that profess Jesus is God.

As I sensed the transition time approaching from praying in my backyard to taking the group into the community, I spent six months in prayer asking God what the specific strategy for this would look like. The challenges faced by stepping into the community were many and varied. The initial strategy used was to take about two years to work through it by winning the favor of the community. It is my hope that you will find this information useful and revolutionary in transforming your community and making your city a house of prayer.

You have heard it said…but I say to you …

Something new, radical, contrary and revolutionary.

Matthew 5:21, 22

PART ONE

Moving Toward Unity: A New Paradigm

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CHAPTER 1

Why Do We Need Another Prayer Group?

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I was attending a pastors’ luncheon in early 2006 when someone asked me this question: There are already prayer groups in the church, so why do we need another one? Why do we need a citywide prayer group? I thought these were great questions and actually demonstrated the point of why we do need a citywide group. We pray for unity and want unity among the churches, but what practical steps are we actually taking to unite them? There are churches that work together and do community projects together, and this is fantastic. But, if we could pray together on a regular basis, it would invite a whole new dimension of church unity. Praying together, versus merely serving together, will hit us in the uniqueness of our individual church flavors and require a greater humility. We need both of these in our outreach practices: service and prayer.

Let’s talk about church flavors for a moment. By this I am referring to all the different denominations of churches that profess Jesus is God. In 1 Corinthians 12, we read about the need we have for each other and for the entire body of believers. We all need each other. There is not one church that can do everything. Each church has its own unique responsibility to fulfill. One may focus on the homeless. One may have its focus on world missions, another may focus on orphans, another may focus on the youth, and another may focus on business and marketplace ministry. Within each focus there are countless varied expressions. This makes up the body of Christ. We cannot say to one church that we have no need of it. Every church has its function, focus, and mission. This is why there are so many different churches. And within each church there are praying people. What if we brought those praying people together on a regular basis? It would be like a beautiful orchestra arising before God. All the different sounds and flavors of expression would come together, and believers would pour out their prayers to God creating a symphony of worship and prayer. Would God be delighted and honored by something like that? I think so.

When we talk about praying together, we do not mean that we are always in the same room praying. We mean our hearts are in concert with each other. We are in agreement with our brothers and sisters as they express their prayers to God. Just because we are in the same room praying does not mean we are in unity. To be in unity means we care about the concerns and issues the other person cares about, and we give our attention and focus to them. It takes humility to recognize them in honor before the presence of God. When we can recognize honor in other people, we are starting to walk in humility. Then, we join our prayers, with their prayers, before God, and ask God to answer their prayers as well as ours.

When we bring several churches together to pray, this is a starting place of unity. Before we arrive at the prayer time, we need to ask God to explore our own heart to see if there is anything in us that is resistant to the humility and honor of our brethren. We approach the meeting with the heart attitude that the needs of everyone else are more important than our own preferences. We make our preferences the sacrifice so unity can have its expression. This is the place of coming to serve rather than to