Seek God for the City 2007

Current order as of Feb 9, 2007:

New Hope Church 75

Green Mile Ministries 100

True Worshipers COGIC 20

Community Baptist 150

Fresh Fire 40

First Church of the Nazarene 300

Live Oak Community Church 100

LakeRidge Methodist Church 150

Trinity Church 500

Monterey Church of Christ 300

Lubbock Christian University 20

Quaker Avenue Church of Christ 20

Welch Church 20

City View 24

Peoples Fellowship Church of the Nazarene 25

Indiana Avenue 50

(If you have placed an order with Steve, but do not see it here, contact: steve@praylubbock.com)

Pray God's highest hopes for your city's deepest needs.
 

We are currently compiling orders from churches in Lubbock to take advantage of their quantity discount.  So far, we have orders for over 1500 copies so the discounted price is $1.20.   (Single copy price is $3.) If you would like to place an order with us, email your request to steve@praylubbockcom.   Payment, (including a small shipping amount), will be due when books are delivered.  Please contact me on or before noon on February 12, 2007.  After that date, orders can still be placed, but time will be short for getting them distributed.

A note from Steve Hawthorne,

Director of WayMakers:

New prayers, different scriptures with a fresh look.  Now more than ever, it is time to pray with solid biblical hope

Lead your people to step into a forty-day adventure of praying the desires of God with vivid, relevant prayers from the promises of scripture. This 64-page booklet is a proven tool that unites and guides whole churches in persistent prayer for spiritual awakening throughout their communities. Many say Seek God brings them to a greater maturity in their praying. Designed to guide prayer through the forty days leading to Palm Sunday, February 21 through April 1, 2007. A children's companion version and a Spanish translation are available free online. High hope, low hype, and centered on Christ's glory.

We are able to offer a complimentary review copy to anyone in a recognized position of pastoral or prayer leadership. Call our office at 800-264-5214.

It's affordable. For as little as $1.20 each, the significant quantity discounts make it possible to equip many in your church and community. ($3 single copy price.)

It is very convenient to view a sample page on line. For more information please visit us: <http://www.waymakers.org>
or click here to place an order: <http://www.waymakers.org/index.php?p=sgftc>

A children's companion version and a Spanish translation will be available online January 2007. These are both available in a PDF format designed to be printed and photocopied.

Take a look at your calendar. Seek God for the City comes earlier next year.  It is not too soon to order copies now.

Invite others to join in. Please feel free to forward to anyone you think might be interested.


Steve Hawthorne, Director
WayMakers
P O Box 203131
Austin, TX 78720
512-419-7729

N ational P astors' P rayer

N etwork
 

Connecting Leaders for Prayer and City Transformation
 

NPPN interviewed Steve Hawthorne . . .
 

NPPN ~ Thousands of churches use Seek God For The City in any given year. And many of them use it repeatedly. Why is it so widely used? 
Seek God For The City is a proven tool that helps people pray beyond themselves with clarity and hope. It's a way to invite busy people to unite in prayer in a substantial way. I think most pastors and prayer leaders recognize that in order for their churches to grow in prayer, it's not a matter of merely urging people to pray more. We are going to have to help people to pray differently. Standard issue devotional prayer with a little bit of slick "request management" in occasionally prayer meetings is just not going to help us become the life-giving, gospel-demonstrating, community-transforming people that we know we're called to be. Seek God For The City helps people pray on a scale that is city-size, and even with a global dimension, but with clarity and connectedness for right-now needs and next-door neighbors. Instead of praying quick fix-it prayers for their own concerns or vague sanctimonious platitudes, people learn to pray with confidence and hope-focused compassion. Instead of praying for bad circumstances to improve slightly, we're praying for entire cities to be changed in significant ways by the power of the Gospel. 
 

NPPN ~ Say more about "praying differently." What do you mean by that?
Apple Computer had a slogan in recent years that was legendary for it's effectiveness: "Think different." I think we're going to have to "Pray different." And by that I don't mean finding clever ways to get people to attend prayer meetings that don't approach prayer in fresh ways. Many leaders are realizing that we are spinning in circles merely renaming our existing prayer programs with catchy slogans. It doesn't really change very much if you rename the Wednesday night prayer meeting as a "lighthouse" meeting. Churches don't change by merely calling them "houses of prayer." Our culture needs to change. The corporate culture of many churches tends to focus on meeting immediate felt needs instead of fulfilling God's ancient global purposes. As long as that continues, we'll pray about our own problems. But I think it's clear that people are hungry and yearning for lives of significance in God's purpose. Seek God For The City gives us a way to pray our way into what God is doing in particular people's lives as well as citywide transformation. 

 

NPPN ~ Steve, I've heard you say that you've designed Seek God For The City for everyday believers, and not necessarily for intercessors. Who is this for and what did you design it to do?
I find that most of our church attenders think of prayer as a procedure which will produce desired results if it is properly performed. I think we've taught them to think that way, usually presenting prayer as a procurement process or a problem solving method that mysteriously "works" part of the time. Most everyday church attenders feel left out of that kind of spiritual power play.  
 

Three things about this felt ineptitude in prayer: First, we don't pray because we don't know what to say. Secondly, even if we figure out what to say, usually by copying someone else's fervent religious vocabulary, we are usually very uncertain about what to ask. And thirdly, if we ever screw up enough courage to pray beyond petty problem-solving, or emergency-worrying kinds of prayers, we are usually uncertain if we have the right spiritual stuff to get through to God and make it all happen. These three things - not knowing the right words, not knowing what to ask, and not feeling worthy or powerful enough to make the mysterious procedure work - each of these are false inadequacies.  

Seek God For The City tries to help everyday believers learn that they can find their own words to express what's on God's heart. That's the first thing: contemporary vocabulary. The theology isn't dumbed down in the slightest. We avoid ponderous prose, trying to employ vivid imagery and metaphors to help people pray with clarity. The thoughts are profound without seeming removed from reality.  
 

Concerning the second issue, about what to pray, Seek God For The City provides simple prayers based on scripture - someone called them "expository prayers" - people get a feel for how they can align their highest desires with what God has promised to bring about. By learning to pray in scripture-based hope, people feel the excitement of praying with confidence and even with a sense of passion.
 

And third, regarding the lack of worthiness or required expertise, Seek God For The City helps everyone to pray. For too long, prayer has been something like an emergency procedure which requires specialists. Sort of an "In case of emergency, break glass" kind of thing. If things are really bad, then sound the alarm to call for the pastor or an appropriately anointed prayer expert. And in this way, prayer is left to the specialized professionals, the intercessory elite, for which we have developed special titles and sometimes special rooms. We call them prayer warriors or intercessors and even talk about those who have the spiritual gift of prayer (which is not on the lists of gifts in scripture). While I am quite sure that there are people with special callings and maturity in prayer, intercession is for every child of God. History may belong to the intercessors, but intercession certainly does not.
 

Seek God for the City is designed to help entire churches pray together, certainly along with the intercessors and prayer warriors. We really do need these people with special callings. But more than ever we need everyone to pray, and if at all possible, to pray together. To actually see a genuinely functional priesthood of all believers.  
 

That's part of the reason why I think so many churches, perhaps around three to four thousand, use Seek God For The City in any given year, with most of them repeating again and again. It helps ordinary believers to pray differently, not just more.  
 

NPPN ~ How does hope shape the tone of the written prayers of Seek God For The City? 
We worked quite a while on the opening pages, which tell part of my story, how I learned to pray in hope. And then we have a few paragraphs of fairly radical, but practical stuff that is getting some good response. Check it out on the sample pages at www.waymakers.org/wmpreview/. 
 

Seek God For The City helps people learn to do the act of hope. Faith is something you do. Love is something you do. So it follows that hope is not merely a feeling or a virtue. Hope is in fact an action that you do. And it's a relational act. If you hope at all in the biblical meaning of the word, you hope in a person: "He upon whom we have fixed our hope." Seek God For The City trains people to live in increasing expectancy that Christ Himself, the Risen One, is even now fulfilling all the purposes of the Father on the earth. He will fail in nothing that God has entrusted to Him. This we know, but have somehow sagged into a blithe acceptance of the present situation and have learned to carve out a comfort zone in it all.  
 

Praying through eighty different scriptures can change almost anyone. Each of the passages is chosen to describe a bit of how God has, is, and will be visiting the communities of earth with the transforming power of the gospel. Hope is formed by envisioning God fulfilling His promise. Hope is activated when people rivet their expectation and yearning on the living Christ, recognizing that He is not just willing to do good things, He is indeed already doing great things, and better still, He is eager to fulfill everything He's begun. That sense of being on the verge of visitation of the living Christ in reviving, transforming power is the beating heart of genuine hoping. I don't think anyone can live in biblical hope without praying toward the fulfillment of biblical promises.  

NPPN ~ How can pastors or prayer leaders see a copy? 
We gladly provide complimentary review copies to pastors and positioned prayer leaders. Just call us at 800-264-5214 and we'll send pastors a copy right away. Check out some sample pages on line at www.waymakers.org/wmpreview/. We've published and priced it so that churches can easily afford to distribute it throughout their congregations. Go for it soon. This year it starts on February 21..