Daily Prayer Begins Before Summit

The Christian Reformed Church’s office in Grand Rapids, Mich., has launched a daily work-day prayer meeting to be held over the next six weeks leading up to a first-of-its-kind, denomination-wide Prayer Summit in California.

The purpose of the meetings will be to pray for the success of the CRC Prayer Summit that is set for April 16-18 at All Nations Church in Lake View Terrace, Calif. But the focus is also much broader: To pray, among other things, for the CRC, its congregations and its ministries.

Monday through Thursday, the meeting will mainly be for those who work in or near the Grand Rapids office. On Fridays, people from the West Michigan area will be invited to join together to pray, especially for the Prayer Summit.

The Prayer Summit was proposed late last year by the Korean Council of Christian Reformed Churches as a way to show appreciation, especially through prayer, for all that the CRC has done and meant to Korean congregations.

The Summit’s goal is for participants “to pray together for the movement of God’s Spirit and Christ’s leading in our lives, our families, our churches, our ministries, our cities, our nations, and the world,” according to the Prayer Summit website.

About 30 people gathered in a conference room at 7 a.m. on Friday, March 2 to pray for the Summit and the wider church. Many came from outside of the building, some driving from as far away as 50 miles, to participate in the session, led by Rev. Joel Boot, executive director of the CRC, and Moses Chung, director of Christian Reformed Home Missions.

Chung gave a few opening remarks, especially thanking people for being willing to show such solidarity for prayer and for the Summit, and led people in the singing of two simple worship songs.

Reading from the book Living in Community: Disciples: Year 2, Joel Boot then related the story of 19th Century lay missionary Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier that illustrates the hopes and dreams that he and other organizers have for the Summit.

Lanphier, a member of the North Dutch Reformed Church, Boot read, began a noon prayer meeting inSeptember 1857 in a building on Fulton Street, located in what is now New York City’s Lower Manhattan.

At first only a few people attended. But over the next few weeks, more and more people started to come, and soon meetings were being held all over the city.

It wasn’t long after that, read Boot, before the Fulton Street Prayer Meeting expanded into a full-fledged revival of prayer in communities across the country, lasting well into the 20th Century.

Published by Faith Aive Christian Resources, the publishing ministry of the CRC, Living in Community: Disciples: Year 2 is one of several titles in the Disciples Program, a series on prayer and other topics and contains, among other features, inspirational stories.

After Boot finished reading, Moses Chung said he had read the story the night before and it started him “dreaming of what if something like the Fulton Street revival began to happen at 2850 Kalamazoo this morning?

“There is a special power in agreeing to come together for prayer. Jesus’ power and presence are there even when two or three people are gathered,” said Chung, who is finishing his first year as CRHM’s director.

“When we fix our eyes on Jesus and we learn how to pray together, there is great unity in the group,” said Chung.

Participants talked on Friday about how they felt to be at the early-morning meeting. They then knelt, stood or sat and prayed out loud, asking God to plant the desire in peoples’ hearts to attend the Prayer Summit.

They also asked God to break down all of the practical barriers, such as getting time off work, finding child care, and having the airfare, so people can attend the Prayer Summit.

Another person asked God to make the Summit a success, especially allowing the Spirit to pour from California, touching and impacting other churches and communities in North America and abroad.

People also prayed for the CRC and its leaders and for the many ministries of the church.

After the meeting, Chung invited CRC congregations and other groups to consider holding similar meetings wherever they are to pray in agreement and in the same spirit for the CRC and its ministries.

“Our hope and dream is that prayer meetings will begin all across North America in our congregations from the grassroots levels. That the Prayer Summit will be an encouraging, catalytic and ground-breaking event to spark such local movements,” he says.

“By starting at the denominational headquarters, we want to lead by example. We are not just praying for the Summit, but as we did on last Friday, we will pray for CRC congregations and ministries everyday.”