YWAM has always been committed to prayer and seeking God. We do this as individuals, as bases, as nations, and at many other levels. YWAM’s Founders’ Circle and many of YWAM’s elders believe that now is the time for YWAM everywhere to come together in prayer in an even more unified manner.
The Founders’ Circle and elders invite you to pray with them on a monthly basis, one month for local concerns, the next month for areas where YWAM does not yet have a presence, and the next month for global issues. It’s called The Invitation. Our elders are inviting us to pray throughout YWAM as a community seeking God together. May God shape us and lead us, flowing with the Holy Spirit, as we seek His priorities for new parts of the world!
The Invitation
Will be launched . . .
October 8, 2015 (second Thursday of the month)
First Topic: Eradicating Bible Poverty
Followed by . . .
November 11, 2015 – Praying for Local Concerns (Location and Community)
December 10, 2015 – Praying for Areas Where YWAM Is Not
More details on this prayer invitation will soon follow. We invite you to pray for God to shape and empower these global prayer times. If you sense God giving you a word or a direction for YWAM’s prayer, please contact us.
As we prepare ourselves for this united prayer, we will send a few messages from leaders in YWAM that tell about the central role of prayer in their own lives, as well as in YWAM communities. We want to build our faith together and prepare our hearts to seek the Lord in unison across our YWAM family.
The second message comes from Michael Berg of YWAM Orlando in an inspiring video. The transcript follows.
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“Hi, I’m Michael Berg. Here at Youth With A Mission Orlando we are committed to prayer and seeking God. Like all of us in YWAM, we have our times of intercession, worship and seeking the Lord. But then, several years back, about ten years ago now, we began to pursue this particular campus that I’m standing on right now, 185 acres. God led us into two stints of 24/7 prayer: a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week prayer relay. One stint was 7 months long and the other was 8 months long.
Those were key times but to be honest with you, we thought, “we’ll pray 24/7 for a period of time and God will release the property to us.” Well, neither time did the property get released to us. But God used those times to shape us and to really develop in us a lifestyle of repentance and a greater understanding of His nature, character and ways. That was a rich time but a hard time. We discovered that 24/7 prayer is hard work. And we’re not doing that currently and I don’t necessarily think that everybody has to do that, but we do need to have a commitment to prayer and seeking the Lord.
That brings us to this last summer. In August, we had our annual staff training time and staff retreat. During our training time, as we were preparing for that as leaders, we just had a sense that our typical weekly schedule did not reflect God’s priorities for us as a community any longer. And so in that time of training our staff, I wrote on one of those big white “post-it” board- type of papers “CURRENT SCHEDULE.” And I said what I just told you to our staff: “Our current schedule does not reflect our priorities.” So I tore the words “CURRENT SCHEDULE” off of the board and crumpled it up and threw it away. And I said “What I’ve thrown away are not our priorities, not our values, and not our vision, but I’ve thrown away the framework of the current schedule. Because we really need to get before the Lord and seek Him for clarification about His priorities for us and then have our typical weekly schedules reflect that.”
Well, that led to a process of prayer in groups, intercession groups, and seeking the Lord, and debriefing and processing all that. But one key component that came out of that time was that we needed to have in a greater way, times of seeking the Lord together as a community. And so out of that time and process, we ended up starting every day at 8:00 a.m. with an hour of merely seeking the Lord. It’s not our intercessory prayer times, although sometimes we intercede then, and it’s not necessarily just a worship time. But we start in a place of worship, with the intent of saying, “God, what’s your agenda? We are merely here to seek you and to stir up in our hearts a hunger and thirst for you and your righteousness.” It’s a time of prayer and worship.
It’s been amazing. We’ve started that last fall and have continued it through the winter and spring quarters. And God has been using that in a tremendous way to shape us as a community. In fact, for our staff and students, there’s an open mic, and God speaks through anybody in our community. We’re moving together as one body in this community as we seek God together. We never know exactly who is going to speak and what God’s going to do. We created a little circle of elders that facilitate that process and that changes up. It’s made of different people throughout the community. And God is using that to train us how to facilitate a move of God and how to flow with the Holy Spirit in those moments. He’s training our worship teams. We’ve seen all sorts of worship teams just develop in our midst and those worship teams are learning how to flow with God’s Spirit in that process of a move of God. They’re learning how to flow and integrate with an eldership body as they lead the facilitation of the process.
But, in all of it, God is showing up and touching our hearts and lives and shaping us as a community. Many of us as staff have felt, “how in the world have we ever functioned without this?” And, we never want to go back! This preeminence of giving God place, first place, in our lives is something we believe and teach in YWAM. But as a community, to give first place every day of just seeking God, in the place of worship and prayer, has marked us and made a tremendous difference.
I really believe that if we are going to be ready for this wave of missionaries God is sending to us, we as a mission have got to stir up ourselves in a place of hunger and thirst for the Lord and a place of prayer and worship and seeking God like never before. This will help us be ready for the release of what God is going to do on the planet.
I know you are like me. We all want to be a part of all that God is doing and getting ready to do on the planet. So, for us, a part of that has been, being certain that we’re seeking God first and foremost for His marching orders, but also for that place of intimacy, that place of revelation, that place of understanding of His nature, character and ways, that we might embrace His destiny for the future.”
Michael Berg
YWAM Orlando, Florida
Also see the prayer message by Shirley Brownhill of YWAM Perth, “Expecting God to do the Miraculous.”