This seminar will explore ways your church can connect with the community by praying for area schools. 

GC Session 2015: Prayer Seminars

<p>This seminar will explore ways your church can connect with the community by praying for area schools. </p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Sasha Ross

Prayer for Area Schools

My name is Sasha, as Dawn kindly introduced me.

It's kind of neat for me to be able to look back on this project.

As she said, we worked on this in 2013 and 14, and since then I've moved on to other things in Southern California.

So it's interesting to look back 2 years and think about what we did.

What's particularly important about this project to me is that it was taking something that's vital to each of us, our prayer life, and putting it in action.

And we put a lot of effort into thinking about how to do that.

This was the first time the church hadn't necessarily done this type of activity, although we had done a lot of other outreach and engagement projects, and actually that was 1 of the risks that we talked about at the beginning of this.

We've talked about engaging with the community and people get really involved and then they kind of peter out after a while.

And how can we do it differently this time so that maybe it's more sustainable, people stay engaged, it brings in new members and it doesn't just disappear and we end up redoing, recreating the wheel every couple of years.

So that's a little bit of the context in which we started this conversation.

Our pastor Charles Tapp, if any of you know him, came up from Oakwood I think before he came to Sligo.

He had an initiative called Raising the Roof.

And it was by any means necessary, not only to bring the people into the church, but also to re-engage church members and to truly be a part of bringing the Lord back a second time to herald the second coming today and not think about it as maybe some days, what if, but what can we do right now to make a difference in people's lives, to change the way they think, and to have an impact on the church today, a sustainable long-term impact.

So that raising the roof initiative gave us a starting point for the project, but as all of you know, particularly those of you who are here in the U.S., Adventists aren't always very well known in the community.

It was the largest church that was affiliated with the General Conference before the GEC moved maybe 10 or 15 years ago.

And so it, Takoma Park used to be full of Adventists and now it's about maybe a quarter Adventists And those that are there are largely secular, not as engaged as they used to be.

But even outside of those that did know about Avenis, you have a large community in the Washington, DC area that simply don't know who Avenis are.

And we have a lot of research that shows that this is consistent nationally.

The Barna Group, how many of you have heard of the Barna Group?

They do some excellent research, pastors often use them, to kind of give an idea.

Last week we were up in Austin with the North America Division Pastors and we were looking at their research in terms of youth mobilization and the difference of views between Adventist youth and youth in other Christian traditions or kind of secular national statistics across the board.

And the Barna Group has found this research that only 5% of adults in the US have a favorable, a very favorable, strong view of the Adventist church.

About 1 in 4 have a somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable view of Adventists, particularly among non-Christians, and more than half just don't even know who we are.

So this is the background of how we started this project, trying to educate a little bit at least so that we could mitigate some of the problems of misunderstanding or assumptions maybe that the project was trying to proselytize in public schools, which if you know about separation of church and state here in the US, that's a serious no-no.

Administrations and superintendents are not gonna be favorable for that.

So to have Christians do, or Adventists, do an outreach project that intentionally engages public schools is a little bit problematic.

And even some church members might be like, we're gonna do what?

And it's been an area that has been contested in the courts for many years.

So we wanted to think about this in terms of how do we both educate the community, target or reach out to the most vulnerable, the group of people, children, age-wise that are really the most effective in terms of evangelism and outreach, and yet do it in a way that's sensitive to our history and to the political context in which we live.

Another contextual factor that we had to consider is that, and this is really a motivation for the project as a whole, people who are disconnected from church, even those self-identifying as Christian, are less likely to engage in other faith activities, such as Bible reading, prayer, volunteering, and charitable giving.

So this is part of the motivation for this type of project where the pastor said, what can we do not only to engage externally, but also to re-engage internally.

Sligo has gone from being a church, it's a very large church, more than 2, 000 members, where we had most of our members living in the Tacoma Park area to being this commuter church where the vast majority of the membership drives in and after church they go home and they don't come back during the week.

So you have a very small group that's engaged in Tuesday night prayer meetings and Wednesday night activities and so on.

But the vast majority are largely unengaged.

And the pastors know that that's not just unengaged in activities, but possibly also in their own devotional life and discipleship and so on.

So this project, this type of outreach, it's important not just to engage and educate the public about who we are, it's also important to the spiritual lives of your own church members.

Last slide I want to, or statistic I want to share with you is the importance of doing this type of outreach for the development of children.

And this is something that's very close to my heart.

I worked in child protection when I was with World Vision.

I work on a university campus now, reaching out not only to college-age students, but also adolescents.

And we know from research, this is also Barna research, that two-thirds of those who accept Christ will do it before they turn 18.

So if you want to have an impact on someone's life long term, we really have to be thinking about young people and not just look at outreach and evangelism as something for adults.

And in particular, by age 13, a child has already established his or her worldview.

So while that might change, and hopefully it does, it is refined and honed and influenced by the experience of going to college and education and starting out as an adult, by age 13, 12 or 13, kids kind of know how they see the world.

And so we want that to be influenced by our value system, by what we believe.

And so, again, another reason why when you're doing outreach and evangelism, not only to select or target, we say in international development, target the young people, but to engage them.

And so 1 of the great aspects of this project is that not only is it approaching schools, from elementary and middle school all the way up to community colleges.

Finally, the project has ended with about 20 schools, so we've grown from 16, and I'll talk about that in a second, but really targeting young people who are doing it themselves, so using a peer-to-peer approach, where it's not adults telling the kids what to do, it's the kids coming up with their own ideas and their own initiative and adults facilitating that.

So providing supplies, providing a room, a context, a structure, But the kids really being able to make it whatever they want and they're talking to other young people, it's far more effective than adults trying to tell children what to think, which we know doesn't work as well.

Okay, really quickly I just wanted to go through, because again, this is our own prayer life, our own spiritual journey in action that is motivating each of us and that we're aiming to deepen through involvement in these types of projects.

These are some of the scriptures that were influential to us.

When we announced them in the bulletin, we put some of these scriptures in the announcement that was on the bulletin.

We've put them in the letters that we write to school principals.

We've put them in the letters that we've sent for other projects.

The prayer initiative has, it is a little bit flexible.

It's not only reaching out to schools, and I'll tell you, I'll go through a little bit about what exactly we did, but we also reached out to pastors and churches that were affected by a tornado in Oklahoma in 2013.

Today we're going to do a project, if some of you have heard, in Tennessee there was an African-American Adventist church, 1 of the first churches that was burned after the terrible slaughter in a Baptist church.

The backlash has been very significant and so we're going to reach out and today we're going to do a project writing letters of support to that pastor and that church to say, hey, we know what happened.

We're thinking about and praying for you.

That's what this type of initiative does.

It wraps and envelops communities or schools or individuals in prayer and support.

It's putting your life into, or your prayer life into action through loving and supporting and caring others through difficult times.

Therefore confess your sins to 1 another and pray for 1 another that you may be healed.

The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

And for I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you the future and a hope.

First of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all people.

Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the father may be glorified in the son.

And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought to always pray and not lose heart.

We intentionally selected verses that were inclusive, that were empowering in terms of how we were reaching out to others, rather than judgmental.

We wanted the verses and the motivation, we were looking for inspiration that really helped us bring together.

I mean, Flagler has a very diverse membership.

It's 1 of the most diverse and historically active churches in the Washington, D.C.

Area, if not the United States as a whole.

And so the verses and our involvement in the project and the members who were on the committee, we wanted to embrace that diversity and see that as a positive aspect of our unity in Christ.

Some other verses, exhort 1 another daily while it is called today lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

Let us consider 1 another in order to stir up love and good works, exhorting 1 another and so much the more as you see the day approaching.

Therefore comfort each other and edify 1 another.

Most importantly, train up a child in the way he should go and when he's old he will not depart from it.

Verse I'm sure many of you are very familiar with.

Okay so just looking now at what exactly this prayer initiative did.

When we initially advertised it, this is what we asked church members to do.

Sign up literally for a prayer time slot.

So a certain time during the week, once a week I think it was, that church members would pray.

It could be every Tuesday night, so that the Tuesday evening prayer group got involved with a whole team that was dedicated every Tuesday night to pray for these schools, or you could do it individually and over your lunch break, or when you're driving home from work or to work, you could do it individually.

But basically you adopt a school, a school or all of the schools as you like, and then put your prayer into action in some tangible ways.

And so we suggested some ways such as, not just praying once a week or at this set time, signing up for the school newspaper, sending a card or a gift of encouragement to the principal or the teachers, donating classroom learning materials, going to the school.

We had some of our elders on the committee who had already been very active in the community and had already been supporting and wanted to continue supporting school inspections, that that was something that they could contribute to those schools.

Another aspect that has been very popular is after school tutoring and coaching.

So again, as an unaffiliated, you're not a parent, but just a member of the community that is engaged and wants to invest in that school, spending your time, not necessarily your money, spending your time is also extremely effective, particularly in low income schools.

I didn't mention it, but some of the challenges, at least here in the US, and I know this is exacerbated around the world, but even here in the US, some of the challenges that these public schools that we were working with, not just public schools, we also were working with the Adventist schools, But schools across the board are facing issues about classroom size, insufficient resources, problematic attitudes on the part of both students as well as some of their parents, chronic poverty, hunger, abuse.

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Prayer for Area Schools

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