National Day of Prayer

The 2012 National Day of Prayer Gathering for Southern New England will take place on Thursday, May 3rd at 7:00 pm at Barrington Baptist Church in Barrington, RI.

Approximately twenty evangelical pastors and congregations are already committed to participating.  This will be a special night of worship and interceding on behalf of families, churches, communities, state, and country.  Refreshments will be served afterwards to allow for a time of fellowship.

For more information on the nature of this gathering, go to www.nationaldayofprayer.org.

For more information or to RSVP for this event, please contact Barrington Baptist Church.

Register Now: Evangelism from the Inside Out

The gospel in our hearts overflows in the praise of Jesus among those we live around, so that they hear about the grace of God.

This will be the theme of our Evangelism from the Inside Out Conference, May 12, 2012.  The conference will be a time to think in fresh ways about how the gospel transforms our hearts, our relationships and our sense of mission, and what that means for our non-Christian family and friends.  Our time together will be full of God’s Word, discussion, common sense and a dependence on our Savior who calls us to participate with him in calling people to himself.

This one-day conference, jointly sponsored with The Ministry Training Network, and hosted by The Philip Center, will meet at Renaissance Church in Providence, RI from 9 to 3:30 on May 12, 2012.  We invite you to join us and bring your friends so you can take back to your church a new sense of God’s desire to use you in his work of seeking out spiritually lost people.

A light breakfast and a full lunch are included in your $35 registration fee.

Register now and bring others from your church.

Save the Date: Evangelism from the Inside Out

Mark your calendars for Saturday, May 12th!  The Philip Center, in partnership with LoveRI and MTN, invites you to “Evangelism from the Inside Out.”  This one-day workshop will help us in developing the “share” part of our prayer, care, share strategy.  The workshop will be full of discussion, God’s Word and fresh thoughts you may not have considered before.  Don’t miss this!

• Saturday, May 12
• 9 am – 3:30 pm
• Renaissance Church, Providence
• $35 includes breakfast and lunch

Please plan now to join us… and to invite as many from  your church as you can get there.

Stay tuned for more information.

Seek God for the City

Volunteer intercessors from all across RI,  will join together with others from multiple congregations around our region to pray daily for a spiritual breakthrough and the advance of Jesus’ kingdom!

Seek God for the City will help us to mobilize people to pray with united, sustained vision for the people of our community. The prayers are profoundly biblical and easy to pray.  The daily schedule will begin on February 22 and continue for 40 days, to Palm Sunday.

Order your books by February 8th and receive a “LoveRI Edition” to be used by churches THIS YEAR. 

Because LoveRI is a Mission America Coalition “Loving our Communities for Christ” (LC2C) “city/state”, a special arrangement has been forged between Waymakers (publishers of Seek God for the City) and the LC2C movements to provide all the guides for the lowest possible price: $1.10.

To learn more, see samples, view promotional aids, etc. visit:

http://www.waymakers.org/mobilizing-your-church.html

CONTACT US with a preliminary order and we will combine the numbers  and order in quantity for delivery to your church by February 17 so that you could distribute them to your prayer volunteers in time to begin on February 22 (“Ash Wednesday”).

Pastors’ Prayer Summit 2012

In April of 2005, 33 pastors gathered for an extended time of Spirit-led worship and prayer in the first Rhode Island-Area Pastors’ Prayer Summit. Since then, more than 65 pastors, pastoral staff, and ministry heads have participated in seven of these annual meetings with God. The positive effect of this experience of prayer, rest, and fellowship with others has been dramatic.

Out of this process has flowed a new openness and hunger for greater Spirit-empowered impact on our region through an awakened and unified Church. New, trusting, and supportive relationships have developed among leaders, and in many cases this has led to increased cooperative ministry. One example of this has been LoveRI, a partnership of thirty churches that are committed to changing the culture of their churches to that of externally focused, community-engaging ministry.

This year’s Summit will seek God’s face in worship and prayer for a deepening of our relationship with the Lord, an ever-increasing circle of trusting relationships between God’s leaders in this area, and the renewal of churches so that they can pray for, care for, and share the gospel with the lost of our communities.

Won’t you join us?

Click Here for More Information or to Register for the Summit.

LoveRI: Visioneering!

Pastors allied with the LoveRI movement launched by 30 churches in April of 2010 will convene next month for a “Visioneering Session”.  Since the formation of the partnership, which aims to foster a “prayer-care-share” culture in RI-area churches, 32 congregations have participated in one or more of the LoveRI-sponsored initiatives.

United by a common commitment to the simple idea of “loving our communities to Christ”, pastors and churches around Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts have shared in a variety of new initiatives.  These have included the 2010 flood clean up in collaboration with Samaritan’s Purse; the Bucklin Park Festival outreach in Providence’s Elmwood neighborhood in partnership with congregations there; a variety of local church initiated “May I Serve You” community impact outreaches around the state; a series of “People’s Prayer Summits” bringing intercessors together from multiple churches to pray for kingdom advance; and a conference called “Engage!” co-sponsored by the MTN and the Philip Center to equip church leaders to mobilize church members to Pray for the lost, to Care for them in meaningful ways, and to Share the good news with them.

The “Visioneering Session” will aim to deepen the ties within the partnership, to assess progress in reaching the region, and to clarify our vision for state-wide spiritual transformation.

“Joining Hands, Loving People, Changing Lives” is the movement’s slogan and sums up its principle values of unified engagement across denominational lines; personal and congregational commitment to demonstrating the love of Christ in practical ways; and a passionate confidence in the message of the gospel, shared with lovingly and compellingly, to transform people and communities.  Please email us for more information.

Going to the Wall: Or Not?

LoveRI is a network of leaders and individuals seeking to follow God’s call in the mission of loving people to Christ by praying for them, caring for them, and sharing the good news with them.  We are not an organization with mandated activities and procedures.  The ideas we share with one another — ideas like “prayer, care, share” and the wall — are designed to make us more fruitful in outreach.  And fruitful outreach resulting in transformed lives for the glory of God, is what we’re about, not just all doing the same thing.

To foster a “prayer-care-share” lifestyle, nine of our churches recently distributed prayer bookmarks, followed by a “go to the wall Sunday” on which worshippers wrote the names of people they are praying for on a prominent display in their worship services as a sign of solidarity and as an encouragement for all to continue praying and caring.  Other churches will do this during the month of January, and still others are planning for a spring-time “go to the wall” Sunday.

Some have used the LoveRI bookmarks; others have created their own.  Some have a lighthouse theme, others do not.  And some, like Godspeed Church, are caring for the lost by NOT going to the wall.  Here is Tim Zulker’s story:

 Seriously?  I’m on the LoveRI lead team and I’m going to encourage our elders NOT to go to the wall?  

When Larry DeWitt spoke in October, I was jazzed by his vision, his passionate heart for the lost and by the idea of bookmarks and the wall.  The conference was a boost for many of us who work hard to reach out.  The thought of doing more of that together among all our churches was all the more invigorating. And there was a lot of buzz among those from our church at the Engage! Conference about all of this.

But there was something not right about this for me.  Some of the non-Christians who are very much a part of our church family are still sore from bad church experiences.  Some are de-churched and sensitive to being a target for opportunists — notch-in-the-belt and money-in-the-coffer types — who soured their taste for church and Christ.  Would they feel like we are painting another target on their back with a Go to the Wall Sunday? I was pretty sure they would.

We had taken a long time to nurture some of these relationships.  They serve alongside of us, share their struggles and trust us.  I simply didn’t want to jeopardize these valuable relationships by separating our church between the “named” and the “namers.”  Sure, they already know they aren’t Christ followers, but the love they are beginning to feel from Christians is a delicate treasure

The wall wasn’t the right thing for us.  In an attempt to stick with the group — writing the names on a wall — we would have sacrificed the reason for the wall: to see people experience the love and grace of Christ.  

So, yes, I recommended that our church not go to the wall.  And I share this to highlight the fact that each of us needs to balance our unified outreach efforts with sensitivity to our particular church.

It’s often great to join together in common activities, but we also need to evaluate the activity in light of the people God has given us to care for. 

What are YOU doing to transform the culture of your church so that every believer is praying for lost people in their lives, caring for them in meaningful, sacrificial ways, and looking for opportunities to share the good news with sensitivity and effectiveness?

Go to the Wall

On Sunday, November 6, ten churches introduced bookmarks to everyone in attendance. We invited each person to consider non-Christians in their lives and write down their names on the bookmark. These were names of people we committed to praying for — that God would open a door of opportunity for caring and for sharing the good news of Jesus.

Two weeks later, nearly all of those churches also held a “Go to the Wall” Sunday. This involved taking the names from the bookmarks, and writing them on a wall, so that the entire church could then be praying together for these names. The experience galvanized a corporate commitment to being Prayer-Care-Share churches, and lit a fire in many hearts.

Check out our ‘Stories‘ page for two testimonies from Exeter Chapel & Heritage Christian Fellowship on their experiences with these two events.

We thank God for what Larry DeWitt brought to us all at the Engage! Conference: vision for warm-hearted outreach and the nuts-and-bolts plan for bookmarks and the wall. Stay tuned for more information about the next wave of bookmarks and Go to the Wall Sundays that more churches are planning.

Engage! Conference in Rear View Mirror

Report from Dave Gadoury:

Over seventy leaders representing nineteen churches from Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts met on October 15 for a five hour conference to foster a prayer-care-share lifestyle in their churches.  As a result, seventeen pastors committed themselves to living and modeling that lifestyle and to a united initiative that will call their people to ministry to people in need outside of their churches.

The “LoveRI” partnership of churches is an LC2C-related movement launched in 2010 with thirty churches participating in service projects, united prayer gatherings, and training events like October’s ENGAGE! conference.  Larry DeWitt, a Mission American Coalition resource speaker and the main presenter for the conference, provided methods and inspiration for helping ordinary Christians have an impact on their world by praying for lost people, caring for them in practical ways, and naturally sharing the good news with them.

At the conclusion, pastors wrote their names and church name on a map of the state, symbolizing their desire to make their churches a lighthouse to the region and its one million people.

“I feel excited about praying for my friends who don’t know Christ.  Excellent information and ideas,“ one of the leaders commented afterwards.

Another said, “I am excited and thankful for the practical ‘how to’ tools to be transformed personally and as the body of Christ.  I can’t wait to see what Almighty God is going to do in our area.”

At least eight of the churches represented are eager to begin implementing some of the ideas, and have agreed to distribute prayer bookmarks in November and to challenge their churches to have a “go to the wall”  Sunday before the holiday season.  Going “to the wall”, they learned from DeWitt, inspires people to write the first names of people who need Jesus on a wall area near the front of a church’s worship place.  This provides accountability, encouragement, a visual reminder, and a means of “keeping the vision alive” in each church.

Engage! Conference October 15

LoveRI, The Ministry Training Network and The Philip Center are teaming up to present a don’t-miss conference October 15, 2011.

This evangelism equipping conference is for pastors, ministry leaders and all who want to be a part of helping your church engage with others through a lifestyle of “prayer, care and share.” Our communities are full of needs — material needs and spiritual needs — and God has sent his church to follow Christ into the world to address those needs. This conference will encourage us to see those needs and to be practical about reaching out with humble but bold solutions.

Consider this powerful reminder from Paul W. Powell: “The church that loses its sense of mission is in peril of its life. The church exists by mission as a fire exists by burning.  Let a fire cease to burn and it becomes ashes.  Let the church cease to be missionary and evangelistic and it ceases to be a church — and the coldness and dullness of death sets in.”  The Engage! Conference is designed to challenge us all to stay active in obedience to Christ who has called us not only apart from the world in holiness, but also into the world for mission.  The health of our churches and our people depends on it.

Our speaker, Larry DeWitt, founded and pastored Calvary Community Church in Thousand Oaks, CA. Since retiring, Larry has led Cornerstone Network, a ministry with a passion for connecting people with Jesus. Larry speaks with a deep heart for both the pastor and for those outside the church who need to know Jesus. And his life is a living model of what he believes.

The conference will be held at the newly renovated Sheraton Airport Hotel in Warwick, RI.  Check-in begins at 9:00 and the conference will end by 2:30.  The cost is $50 or $45 for groups of two or more.  Lunch is included.