Our Monday Night Prayer Gathering has been standing room only for months now & we’ve been praying about where to go next.  Recently we approached the Sportsplex owner and asked if we could use the rink on Monday nights (without paying additional rent) and he said YES!  We were very surprised but thrilled with the favor that the Lord had given us.  So, last night was our 1st Prayer Gathering in the rink & 208 people came. We usually have about 150 and so this was a HUGE jump for us.  The area of the rink that we met in was packed and we were having to pull our more chairs at the last minute.  It was awesome!

Berry, our Prayer Pastor, gave me the opportunity to share eLife’s vision for prayer and here’s what I said:

Jim Cymbala, author of Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, said, “You can tell how popular a church is by who comes on Sunday morning.  You can tell how popular a preacher is by who comes back to hear him on Sunday night.  And you can tell how popular Jesus is by who comes to the weekly Prayer Gathering.”  For that reason, we’ve always prayed that our Prayer Gathering attendance would be greater than the attendance at any of our other gatherings.  We aren’t quite there yet, but we hope to be one day.

A friend of mine in seminary was from Egypt and he told me that his church back home would have 20,000 people worship with them each weekend.  I was impressed.  Then he said, but our Prayer Gathering on Tuesday nights has 50,000 people that come regularly.  I couldn’t believe it. They had more people going to their Prayer Gathering than to their Worship Gathering.

I think the reason was that believers in Egypt understood this principle found in Scripture:  Closet prayer changes lives, but corporate prayer changes cities (2 Chronicles 7:14).  I think they realized that if they wanted to see revival & spiritual awakening in their community, then they needed to gather together regularly to pray.

This principle is the reason we started a Prayer Gathering at eLife before we ever launched a LifeHouse or started a Worship Gathering.  We wanted to be a part of a movement of God and make an impact on the world, and we knew our only shot at that would be if we regularly gathered people together to pray.

We started out in my home back in 2007 with 10 people praying.  Then we moved to the front kids area at the Sportsplex and we grew to 20.  Then we moved to the back room at the Sportsplex and we grew to 150.  Now we are meeting in the rink with room for 1,000 & a goal to have over 300 people regularly attending by the end of 2010.

Long-term, our goal is to bring the city together in Jones stadium for the largest Prayer & Worship Gathering that our city has ever seen! We are praying that God gives us the ability to see this happen on April 1, 2018!

So…
Vision 2010 = 300+ praying reguarly
Vision 2018 = 58,000+ praying at Jones stadium

God continues to remind us that we need to expect the impossible!

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