10 Hundred Hours of Prayer

After the powerful response to December’s 5(hundred) Hours of Prayer, this coming Monday (February 1st) New Life Church will begin a new season of prayer focused on the upcoming (Fall 2010) Wilsonville Church Plant. As the logo indicates, this time around we’ll be aiming at reaching a cumulative total of 1,000 hours of prayer—i.e., “10 Hundred Hours.” This period of prayer will stretch from the beginning of February to Easter Sunday (April 4th). This will be the first of our prayer efforts for Wilsonville, but it won’t be the last.

Why Spend 10 Hundred Hours in Prayer?

Matthew 16:18
“. . . on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

At its core, church planting is a strategic and offensive engagement in the advancement of God’s kingdom. The ground we seek to take is far from neutral. It is hostile, enemy territory dominated by the powerful and gospel-blinding “god of this age ” (2 Cor. 4:4). Our aim is not to simply open a new or renovated building in which to sing songs, preach sermons, host events and invite the lost. Our aim is to see, as Jesus put it, the “ruler of this world cast out” (Jn. 12:31), to see the “strong man bound” and “to plunder his house” (Matt. 12:29).

In line with that aim we are beginning 10 Hundred Hours of Prayer with a focus on spiritual warfare. This Sunday you’ll find an insert in your bulletin (that will also appear on the blog) containing a scripted prayer to help guide you through Week 1. Most of that prayer will be taken from Ephesians 6:10-20 which begins by commanding its reader to “be strong in the Lord” and to “put on the whole armor of God.”

We hope you will join with us in this exciting and dangerous endeavor.