Households of Prayer

HOP “home groups” will begin again week of Sunday January 17th.  New HOP DVDs should be available for HOP leaders in the lobby next weekend.  Sign-ups also will be in lobby for newcomers.

Bible study theme will be on the Holy Scriptures themselves.

Come and join your church family in fun, fellowship and faith, as we gather together in each other’s  homes to worship, pray, and learn to love God and our neighbor.

The first potuck dinner for Households of Prayer will be Wednesday Dec. 10th 7:30pm in parish hall.  I invite you to bring a friend if you’d like.

It should be a jouful and relaxing time with each other and we rejoice and reflect upon what God has done in our midst, even as we look forward to our future gathering in His name.

Come on out fro some great home cooked food, fellowship, and an encouraging “word” from Bishop Craig

Just click below to webpage where you can sign up for free wordpress account.

http://wordpress.com/signup/

This will allow you to join this web-blog and add your own HOP posts and related articles.

HOP groups have starting meeting.  Thanks to the Koryckas and Jim Miegel for their hard work in preparing for tke kickoff!  We hope to hear some great testimonies about the groups and what the Lord has done and is doing!

You can write a testimony about your HOP group after you have signed up to participate with a free WordPress account.   When you write your testimony or other post, just scroll down and check the category box you want the post to appear in.  By default posts will go into the HOP for ALL category.  If you want it to appear in as a HOP Testimony, just click that category box.

Sign ups for HOPs continues tomorrow, Sunday, in the Cathedral lobby.  I encourage you to commit to gather  with your brother, sisters, mothers and fathers in Christ – in order to grow together in the Lord, lerarn and pray in unity in the power of the Spirit in accordance with His will for our congregation.  As a house of prayer for all nations, we will continue to respond to the Lord’s leading for our lives as a Church family and encourage others to do so as well.  As the Lord is clearly leading us to a renewed life of fellowship and prayer, the Households of Prayer ministry will be a major component of how we respond to that leading, and a vehicle through which God communicates to us and uses us to minister to each other as we minister unto Him.  The first step of that relationship is to gather together as members of His body.

So I encourage you to get involved in a Household of Prayer this fall.

Fr. Stephen Maloney

OK – the plans are in motion !  HOP is being refocused and revamped to include some teaching and bible studies to go along with prayer and should be ready to rock mid-October.  Each HOP “home group” will be driven by an all inclusive DVD which will contain, worship music and words, recorded teachings, bible discussion questions, and prayer time – everything needed to run the HOP, except for the coffee and snacks!

This refocus on HOP (combined with the home bible study format) is really about fulfilling part of the vision at Intercessor, that is to follow an Acts 2:42 model, where believers met together from house to house on a regular basis.   It is exciting to think about what God will do among us as we gather together in our neighborhood homes.

Fr. Stephen

In Acts chapter 2, the Church would meet in two places, first in the temple, but then also in the home.  We don’t know if this was because they were kicked out of the temple or whether the home was the only place where they could “break bread” sacramentally as the Eucharist under the command of Christ Jesus, or safely profess their faith and find fellowship with one another.  Being Jewish followers of Christ, they were likely not openly welcomed into the temple areas and synagogues.  

Nonetheless, we do know they went from house to house breaking bread.  One thing I can certainly envision is the joy and intimacy of the believers, the great blessing of hospitality the homeowners must have known, having opened their homes for such joyous occasions.

Today, we live in a culture that is extremely isolated as well as relationally challenged. People do not know their neighbors let alone their greater community only one block or more away from where they live.  Those who may be believers, if they do live close by, are likely denominationally uninterested in gathering together with believers from “another Church”, and besides, isn’t “Church” something you do on Sunday in a Church.  Who are these Christian fanatics anyway?

The call to gather and assemble together in the Christ is something written on the hearts and minds of Christians, but now I must ask, is gathering on Sunday in the Church building enough to satisfy the thirst for fellowship with God and his people, or even intimate enough to draw people not only into loving God, but one another.  If the days are lived out working and traveling to and from work, and the nights are spent either online or in front of a flat screen, how ar we evergoing to get down to loving one another.  There needs to be interaction, relationship, and the sharing and caring of one’s needs.  A corporate-only model of Church can only take you so far towards filling the expansion of one’s needs, which can and will only be met in close proximity to other believers.  This proximity has to be the sharing of one another’s lives.  The problem is that while this may sound exciting and desireable, it doesn’t take long to find out how difficult and troublesome it is.  But, if it was easy to really love one another, Jesus would not have had to command it. 

If we are going to love one another in a way the world can see in the isolated and self-interested culture we live in, the only solution is to break down the isolation and confront the self-interest we are drowning in, and do something different.

As we close into summertime, where we will bake in the heat or cool off in the pool, plan our trips and take our breaks from work or school, I ask that you begin to consider what will it take to for you to begin to think differently from the world; that is, to recognize the importance of gathering with other believers in your home or theirs, on a regular basis, in order to get to the point where we face the issues involved in loving one another the way Christ would have us do so.   I ask you to consider these things and prepare your self for the fall, when we will reimbark on the call to gather together into homes during the week as even we gather together at church on Sundays.   You may even want to consider how you might ask a friend, a co-worker or neighbor, to join with you in meeting together as you meet with other beleivers… and the world will know we are His disciples by how much we love one another.

I’ve added a link to Capitol Hill Prayer Partners in right column “blogroll”.  While our primary concentration of prayer is on our local neighborhoods, families amd Church, we as Christians are called in God’s word to prayer four our government, nation and the world.  CHPP is a good source for such issues to pray for.  If interested you can sign up for email updates from their website.